The truth about ordinary Germans and the Jews
This admirably even-handed history of the Holocaust does not let the mass of German citizens - or the Catholic Church - off the hook, says Andrew M Brown
30 May 2008

A man looks at an exhibit showing the Nazi flag during a tour of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem PA Photos

The Holocaust by Jeremy Black, Social Affairs Unit £10

Some British schools no longer teach the Holocaust for GCSE because they are worried about stirring up anti-Semitic sentiment among Muslim pupils, according to a briefing commissioned by the Government last year. Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, reports the finding in his useful, pithy introduction to the Holocaust but admits "it is difficult to know what to make of it", except to note the sad fact that Holocaust denial "is far from a fringe opinion in the Muslim community".

As a reminder of it, in 2006 there was the "myth of the Holocaust" conference presided over by Ahmadinejad in Tehran. Also that year, proving that pseudo-history appeals to non-Muslims as well, David Irving went to prison in Austria. Black's squashing of Irving conveys the tone of this book: staunch and anchored in scholarly values (although a model of clarity, it contains nearly 300 footnotes): "Irving is frequently described as a historian, but this is only in so far as he writes about the past. He has not been trained as a scholar and has not held an academic or other related post as a historian." Black doesn't shrink from making invigorating value judgments: the deniers "are mad, bad or both".

The author's economy with language in the chapters on the "slaughter" and his deployment of detail make for an affecting account. Race warfare, which meant obliterating anything Jewish in Europe, was central to Nazi policy. Why else would the slaughter have continued even when the war had clearly been lost? Black shines a light on evidence of the complicity or at least complaisance of the German army and not just the high command: ordinary Germans, Germany's allies, neutrals, especially Switzerland, and occupied Europe. He does not go along uncritically with the line taken by Daniel Goldhagen in his blockbuster that large numbers of ordinary Germans acted as Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). In fact he searches valiantly for evidence of resistance: the story of Schindler proves that a determined individual could subvert the Nazi plan. Any German who listened to radio broadcasts must have known that the Nazis considered themselves to be engaged in an existential struggle with the Jews, yet Black finds little popular opposition. And he pointedly contrasts German inertia with the post-war rebellions against Communist rule. The awful reality is that Jews suffered what Germans in varying degrees intended as "retribution for their Judaism". Causes include the German army's history of racial conflict, as well as social Darwinism and pernicious nationalism based on racist ideas. To bolster the racism there was plenty of Aryan pseudo-history floating around. How much was the so-called Final Solution helped by existing anti-Semitism? Mainly it was racist in motivation but it certainly included Christian anti-Semitism - that much is shown by the Christian emphasis of collaborationist regimes such as Vichy and the Slovak government. Considering Pius XII, Black faithfully reports claims that the Pope was more active on behalf of the Jews than is generally known, that he tried to influence Catholics in his radio messages. But the Church did little overall to oppose the Holocaust. The author is at a loss to explain, for example, why "the Church failed to pass on the knowledge of the Holocaust that it had from the winter of 1941-2". In retrospect, it might have been better for Pius XII's reputation if he had been detained as Pius VII was under Napoleon.

The Holocaust is published by the Social Affairs Unit, which has a reputation for bashing the liberal consensus. But there is nothing doctrinaire about this book. It is simply a gripping confutation of the relativism and denial of reality that post-modernism causes.

This self-obsessed relativism creates an atmosphere in which the specious equivalences of political diatribe can flourish - comparing the policy of the British in Kenya during the MauMau Uprising of 1952-7 to the Holocaust, or the Americans in Vietnam or the Israelis after 1967. Some mainstream Germans go as far as claiming that Allied bombing of Germany was a crime comparable to the Holocaust. Even Communism, though vile beyond belief, arguably started out with some idea of human progress. The Nazis wanted progress only for Germans.

Black is not against comparisons: he thinks the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 could be called a modern holocaust. So when he applies words like "absurd" and "unfounded" to misleading comparisons it seems only reasonable and necessary. The Nazis cloaked their crimes in a twisted double-talk: how vital, then, that our historians call things by their proper names.