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Implementing the Final Solution: The Ordinary Regulating of the Extraordinary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
The implementation of the Final Solution is discussed in terms of the divergent interpretations characteristic of the “functionalists” and the “intentionalists.” The routines of two sets of implementors are described: the mass liquidations perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen an the “barbaric-civil orderliness” of the bureaucrats carrying out the deportation of the German Jews. In the final section, Lifton's concept of the medicalization of the killings is introduced, with attention also to his thoughts on “doubling” and the extension of his concerns “beyond Auschwitz” to the sphere of nuclear catastrophe.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1988
References
1 There is ample literature on this subject, including Wyman, David S., The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)Google Scholar; Wasserstein, Bernard, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
2 The best coverage in English is Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, particularly the three-volume edition of 1985 (New York: Holmes & Meier).Google Scholar
3 Adler's magnum opus, with its emphasis on bureaucratic behavior in the deportation process, has not received sufficient attention since its publication in 1974. Uwe Adam's worthwhile but very differently focused analysis has been seen as the standard general coverage of the policies against the German Jews. See Adam, , Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich [Policy on Jewin the Third Reich] (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1979).Google Scholar
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11 ” Mason (fn. 5), 29; Mommsen (fn. 6), 70.
12 Mason (fn. 5), 30. Browning, the initiator of the debate, describes his own position as “moderate functionalist,” as opposed to Broszat's more extreme stand. (See Jackel and Rohwer, 185.) An elaboration of Browning's position appears in his Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 3–38Google Scholar. An excellent analysis of this debate is contained also in Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship; Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. 110–14. I volume edited by Hirschfeld, Gerhard, The Politics of Genocide (Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar, Lothar Kettenacker and Hans Mommsen contributed articles that focus on the debate between intentionalists and functionalists (73–96; 97–144, respectively). Both these authors, as well as Kershaw and Browning, recognize the danger of reducing the analysis of origins and implementation of the Final Solution to a debate between two contrasting positions; still, all of them find themselves considerably closer to the functionalist pole. So does Christian Streit, whose article in Hirschfeld's volume (pp. 1–14) describes the German army's relationship with the policies of genocide.
Tim Mason considers the functionalist position vulnerable in one respect: no full-length study along functionalist lines had as yet been undertaken. Such a study would require language capable of “conveying the complexity of its findings.” He finds the intentionalists' position easy to summarize because they have been “less explicit about their methods.” See Mason (fn. 5), 28, 35.
13 Chelmno, where the very first gassings of Jews took place, was even more primitive than the establishments of the Aktion Reinhard. As Wolfgang Scheffler put it, it was not a camp but merely a “station for gas trucks,” a transfer point. At the famed Chelmno castle, the victims were loaded into one of three available gas trucks, which then drove to a point in the nearby woods—the so-called forest camp—where the victims, gassed during the ride, were unloaded and burned. Chelmno preceded the killing centers; it was the link, in Browning's view, between the Einsatzgruppen and Treblinka (Jackel and Rohwer, 148, 152). The designing and building of the gas trucks is described by Browning (fn. 12), 57–67.
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The writer Jochen Klepper, an “Aryan” with a “non-Aryan” wife and stepdaughters, has left a moving account of the humiliations experienced by “starred” individuals. Klepper, a fervent “Prussian” and old-style nationalist, found the indifference of the German public to the fate of the Jews his most unbearable burden among the many horrors of the Nazi period. Officials, his colleagues at the publishing house where he worked (and later was dismissed), and many of his friends refused to acknowledge what was happening to the Jews, let alone worry about it—although very few seemed to consider themselves Nazis. Virtually none showed even the slightest spark of human kindness toward the Jews. The Kleppers committed suicide in December 1942. See Klepper, , Unter dem Schatten Deiner Fltigel; Aus den Tagebüchern der Jahre 1932–1942 [Beneath the shadow of your wings; from the diaries of the year1932–1942] (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1956).Google Scholar
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19 Broszat (fn. 4). Cf. the analysis of this issue in Mason, Henry L., “Imponderables of the Holocaust,” World Politics 34 (October 1981), 90–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 97–100.
20 In a recent article, Zdenek Zofka concludes that Dr. Joseph Mengele was “neither a sadist nor fanatical National Socialist”—which, Zofka thinks, made his crimes at Auschwitz even more serious. See Zofka, , “Der KZ–Arzt Joseph Mengele; zur Typologie eines NS-Verbrechers” [The concentration camp physician Joseph Mengele; aspects of the typology of a Nazi criminal], Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (April 1986), 243–67Google Scholar, at 266–67.
21 In a volume depicting the relations of the German medical profession with all kinds of aspects of the Nazi state, Fridolf Kudlieu concludes that it is impossible to determine the percentage of “real” Nazis among the physicians or the intensity of their commitment to Nazi doctrine. See Kudlieu, , ed., Arzteim Nationalsozialismus [Physicians under National Socialism] (Köln: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1985).Google Scholar
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23 Those on the side of “existential deterrence” proclaim their trust in the stability of nuclear deterrence because of our very knowledge of the inordinate, uncontrollable destructiveness of nuclear weapons; the “deterrence faithful” believe in the strategic status quo and are hostile to what they term apocalyptic visions. Those fearing “existential disaster” argue that the very existence of nuclear weapons renders disaster inevitable; no “social contrivance” of man, such as nuclear deterrence, can go on indefinitely without a breakdown—a breakdown likely to have apocalyptic dimensions. See Tucker, Robert W., The Nuclear Debate (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 8–10.Google Scholar
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26 Freedman, , The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), xv, 214, 392–400Google Scholar; Dyson, , Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)Google Scholar, throughout; Kaplan, , The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983)Google Scholar, throughout.
27 Bracken, , The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (Yale University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
28 The debate between the functionalists and the intentionalists was overshadowed in vehemence by the so-called Historiker-Streit (Historians' feud) of 1986. The key protagonists were Jurgen Habermas and Ernst Nolte, but a wide array of historians and other academics entered the fray. The feud was carried out at several academic conferences and produced a host of letters to the editors of such publications as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit. An article by Nolte in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 6, 1986, followed by a vehement response by Habermas in Die Zeit of July 11, 1986, set the stage. Habermas accused Nolte and some others of attempting to “trivialize” and “regularize” the Nazi period, particularly the Holocaust. Functionalists like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen and intendonalists like Klaus Hildebrand joined in the battle even though it did not really directly concern their disagreements.
An excellent coverage of the controversy, reflecting the intense concern of the West German academic world with the Bewdltigung (overcoming) of the Nazi past, is provided in Historiker-“Streit” (Munich: R. Piper, 1987)Google Scholar (no editor listed). Cf. also Kühnl, Reinhard, ed., Vergangenheit, die nicht vergeht [The past that does not pass away] (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987)Google Scholar; also Hoffmann, Hilmar, ed., Gegen den Versuch, Vergangenheit zu verbiegen [Againsattempt to distort the past] (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum Verlag, 1987)Google Scholar. Craig, Gordon has described the feud in “The Battle of the German Historians,” New York Review of 'Booths, January 15, 1987.Google Scholar