Letter to the Editor

When a friend, who is also one of the most important experts on the subject, such as John K. Roth, criticizes one of my basic arguments (in his review of my book Rethinking the Holocaust, vol. 17, no. 1), I must reexamine it. He says that my rationalist approach to the study of the Holocaust deceives me when I argue for the explicability of the event. My thesis is, as he points out, that because the Holocaust was a genocide committed by humans against other humans, it is as explicable as any other event in human history. The basic assumption is that anything human is, in principle, accessible to humans ñ I am not aware of any disagreement with this on John Roth's part. Admittedly no historical event is 'fully' explicable, because all consist of meetings of an infinite number of casual chains; as they are 'infinite,' they cannot be fully encompassed (hence my rejection of Marxian determinism).

Roth is right: I should not have to use the expression "perfectly explicable," and I am grateful to him for having pulled me up on that. But that is not the crux of the argument: Roth asks, "if no one can fully explain the Holocaust through historical analysis . . . then does it make sense to say that, in principle, the Holocaust is explicable historically?" He obviously thinks that it does not. I do. He then says that I would have been on firmer ground had I admitted that our comprehension has serious limits because of our own limitations as humans, and because the event itself entails questions beyond what mere historical analysis can address. Yes, of course; but Roth's formulation of this is, in my view, problematic.

First and foremost, I fail to see the differenceóagain, 'in principle'óbetween our comprehension of the genocide of the Jewish people and the genocide of any other group. It is precisely the brutality, the sadism, and the bureaucratic way the genocide was implemented that is not unprecedented in the Holocaust, as I tried to show in my book. The Holocaust's unprecedentedness lies elsewhere. Anyone who has been exposed to the history of the genocides of the past century will find little difference between the behavior of, say, the Ottoman Turks or Kurds in the Armenian genocide, or the parallel behaviors of the Khmer Rouge murderers on the one hand and that of the Nazis and their helpers on the other. The genocide of the Tutsi in 1994 was a prime example of bureaucratic planning, although Rwanda was of course technologically backward compared to Nazi Germany. Does John Roth argue that the Rwandan genocide (and other genocides not only in the twentieth century) is explicable whereas the Holocaust is not?

When I argue that something is historically explicable, I mean that the historical craft (history is no science) makes it possible to explain an event in general terms. If the historians are successful, then many, if not most, of its facets can be explained adequately. Yes, I agree with John Roth that our understanding has limits, because we cannot recreate the past, or even describe it in every detail. However, his argument could well lead one into a post-modernist stance that would deny factual objectivity and deny the possibility, ultimately, of any historical conclusions. It is not necessary to describe every detail, simply to amass factual knowledge, in order to arrive at an understanding of why things happened, not just how, where, or when. The Holocaust is explicable and we can arrive at such an understanding even if we have not necessarily done so yet.

When Roth says that historical analysis alone does not explain a historical event, what exactly does he mean? Historical analysis of the Holocaust assesses not only official documents, of courseómany documents produced by the Germans are unreliable, as they often were produced to mislead rather than informóbut also memoirs of the victims and the 'bystanders' (an inexact and misleading term).

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