The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Holocaust under Communism 421
World War and the Soviet struggle for survival pushed antisemitism to the
periphery. During the war, Stalin created a Jewish anti-fascist committee; after the
war he imprisoned and/or murdered most of its leaders. He also fostered antisemitic
campaigns and show trials in numerous Eastern Bloc states, imprisoned, in
a highly publicized move, six Soviet Jewish doctors for allegedly conspiring to
murder him and prepared plans for the mass deportation of Soviet Jews.
Whereas the Nazis, in their notorious ‘documentary’ film Der ewige Jude (The
Eternal Jew), had figured Jews simultaneously as communist agents and as
agents of international capitalism, the communists opted only for the second
stereotype. In the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s, Jews were seen as dangerous
‘cosmopolitans’ with international connections (especially with American
capitalism and imperialism) and dubious national loyalties. This demonization
of Jews demonstrated that it was not only capitalist societies that needed scapegoats
to divert the masses from their true oppressors. Although the worst
excesses subsided after the death of Stalin in 1953, the inhibitions and taboos
regarding ‘Jewish’ matters lingered for decades. With regard to the Holocaust,
people knew that Jews had died; they also knew that it had been, and could be,
dangerous to talk about it.
When Eastern Bloc historians did discuss the Nazi murder of Jews, they usually
viewed that catastrophe as part of a larger one occasioned by fascist racism and
also (one sometimes finds the word ‘primarily’) directed at Slavs. As opposed to
the West, which had its own Cold War blinkers, the Eastern Bloc never forgot,
in its historiography and its more popular forms of memory, the enormous
casualties suffered by gentile citizens in Poland and especially in the Soviet
Union. These numbers, which were unlike anything experienced in western
Europe during the war, dwarfed those of the Jewish dead. As opposed to the
West, the East furthermore emphasized the heroism of the Red Army and never
forgot the Nazi murder of Soviet prisoners of war in concentration camps or
the systematic execution of Soviet commissars by the Einsatzgruppen. Eastern Bloc
societies also emphasized the sacrifices of their domestic leftist resistance to
Hitler, especially that of the communist parties which were invariably
described as playing a leading role. In societies that were often only reluctantly
socialist, the emphasis on communist anti-fascism could often, especially for
the intelligentsia, provide an attractive, moral rallying ground. But it also
tended to create a hierarchy of victims, with ‘passive’ Jewish victims ranked
well below those martyrs active in the communist resistance.
According to the declaration of the Communist International in the 1930s,
a declaration that, with minor modifications, held sway in the Eastern Bloc
until 1989, fascism represented the final, most aggressive stage of capitalism in
crisis. This theory holds that German industrialists, fearing a triumph of an
increasingly organized German Communist Party, had financed the Nazis,
bringing Hitler to power. As a reward, Hitler crushed trade unions and terrorized