The Historiography of the Holocaust

Historiography and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust 213
trends in dealing with the Holocaust, see W. Bergmann, ‘Starker Auftritt, schwacher
Abgang. Antisemitismusforschung in den Sozialwissenschaften’, in Antisemitismusforschung
in den Wissenschaften, ed. W. Bergmann and M. Körte (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, forthcoming).
12 G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945
(London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1953) (published in Germany in 1956 as Die
Endlösung – Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939–1945). The revised
second English edition (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968) contains few changes
over the original text, which was republished, with an introduction by Michael
Berenbaum, in 1987 (Northvale, NY: Jason Aronson).
13 J. Tenenbaum, Race and Reich. The Story of an Epoch (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1956), pp. 364f.
14 See e.g. N. Levin, The Holocaust. The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945 (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968); L.S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). For a highly critical assessment of
these still popular accounts, see R. Hilberg, The Politics of Memory. The Journey of
a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 142–7.
15 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edition (Cleveland, NY: Meridian,
1958), p. ix (preface to the first edition, 1950).
16 Ibid., pp. 465, 472.
17 R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, student edition (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1985), pp. 263–93.
18 R. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New
York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992), p. ix.
19 H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking
Press, 1963); German edition: Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des
Bösen (Munich: Piper, 1964).
20 Ibid., pp. 263, 276, 287f.
21 Arendt wanted the meaning of the phrase to be restricted to the ‘strictly factual
level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial’ (ibid.,
p. 287).
22 See H. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft. Studien zur nationalsozialistischen
Gewaltkriminalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), with a stimulating typology
of perpetrators; also Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen.
23 Lines of continuity in German pre- and post-war historiography have been investigated
only recently; see G. Aly, ‘Rückwärtsgewandte Propheten. Willige Historiker –
Bemerkungen in eigener Sache’, in Macht – Geist – Wahn. Kontinuitäten deutschen
Denkens (Berlin: Argon, 1997).
24 See the debate between historian Helmut Krausnick and public prosecutor Alfred
Streim on the origins of the Holocaust in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 6 (1989),
311–47. The career aspect in the history of Holocaust historiography has not yet
been thoroughly investigated; in general see Pohl, Thesen; Berg, Holocaust.
25 L. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the
Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 142.
26 P. Weiss, The Investigation (New York: Athenaeum, 1966); see also S. Gilman and
J. Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture
1096–1996 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 722–35.
27 J. Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten,
2nd edition (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977), p. 17, my translation (Foreword to the first
edition, Munich: Szczesny, 1966); English version: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations