The Historiography of the Holocaust

214 Jürgen Matthäus
by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld and S.P. Rosenfeld
(New York: Schocken Books, 1986).
28 P. Levi, ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, cited in L.L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 40, who also comments on the
publication of If this is a Man in America under the title Survival in Auschwitz: The
Nazi Assault on Humanity (ibid., p. 23).
29 Compare K.D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1979); M. Broszat,
National Socialism, 1918–1933 (Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Press, 1967); H. Mommsen,
‘The Realization of the Unthinkable: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”
in the Third Reich’, in The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in
Nazi Germany, ed. G. Hirschfeld (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 73–92. For
a good summary of the debate see C.R. Browning, ‘Beyond “Intentionalism” and
“Functionalism”: The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered’, in The Path to
Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), pp. 88–101. H. Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17 Juli 1942. Der Weg zur
europäischen ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ (Munich: dtv, 2002), presents a state-of-the-art
synthesis of Holocaust research from a functionalist perspective.
30 See most recently Paul, Täter, p. 20f, who sees the ‘functionalist image of the perpetrator’
as ‘the scholarly pendant to the judicial exculpation of the perpetrators via
the dogma of duress under orders’ (my translation).
31 Among the most influential monographs of this time period are H. Krausnick
and H.-H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der
Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1981); O. Bartov, The
Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1986); C. Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen
Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 1978).
32 For the police apparatus, see R. Gellately, The Gestapo and Modern Society. Enforcing
Racial Policy 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); U. Herbert, Best.
Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989
(Bonn: Dietz, 1996); R. Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die ‘Genesis der Endlösung’
(Berlin: Metropol, 1996). Outstanding among the growing number of regional case
studies published in Germany are C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschaftsund
Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
1999); and D. Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944.
Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1997); for an overview see U. Herbert, ed., Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik
1939–1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch,
1998); English version: National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German
Perspectives and Controversies (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000).
33 C.R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
34 Langer, Preempting, p. xiii. Similarly, Arendt pointed to ‘the abyss between the actuality
of what [Eichmann] did and the potentiality of what others might have done’
(Arendt, Eichmann, p. 278).
35 D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf, 1996). For a critical review, see R.B. Birn, ‘Revising the Holocaust’,
The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 195–215.
36 See G. Eley, ed., The ‘Goldhagen Effect’: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the German
Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).