The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretations and Autobiographical Memory by Nicolas Berg (review)

When this book was originally published in Germany in 2003, it aroused considerable controversy. The English language edition has been shortened and edited, collecting all of the material about Joseph Wulf—an important Polish Jewish historian of the Holocaust—that was scattered throughout the original edition into the last, and longest, chapter of this version. The changes made to the American edition are explained in an editorial note and a special introduction.

The subject of the book is covered by a series of chapters about how individual West German historians handled, or more often ignored, the systematic persecution and killing of Jews during the Holocaust. The first historian that Berg examines is Friedrich Meinecke, whose book, The German Catastrophe (1946), attracted wide attention and raised the issue of what the German people knew, preferred not to know, and in many instances pretended afterward not to have known. It also raised the question of what people living under a dictatorship could and should do if they have knowledge of wrongdoing by the state. Meinecke, like many of his contemporaries, stressed the victimization of the Germans by the Nazis as a small band of criminals, as well as by the Allies. His views received a much warmer welcome than did Eugen Kogon’s drastically different book, The SS State: The System of German Concentration Camps (1946), which was condemned, or ignored, for pulling far fewer punches.

The historians Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels are the subjects of the second chapter, though they appear repeatedly throughout the book. Both of them earned a certain legitimization in postwar Germany: Ritter was arrested as an opponent of the Nazi regime. Rothfels, who was dismissed from his professorial position because of his Jewish ancestry, went first to England and then the United States (where this reviewer became his student). Ritter published an important biography of Carl Goerdeler, a central figure in the plot against Adolf Hitler of July 20, 1944, and Rothfels published an early and important survey of the German opposition to the Nazi regime in 1949. These two men represented the conservatives who depicted the Nazi system as alien and un-German, an aberration from the German culture that had been developing since the eighteenth century.

Meinecke viewed the advent of Hitler as a total break from German history. He, like many other West German historians, preferred to ignore any tendencies in the country that might have contributed to Hitler’s ascendance; the “Sonderweg” (separate path) theory that other scholars, especially in England and the United States, advanced after the war pays testimony to this perspective. Rothfels, who returned to Germany and became a founder of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and its periodical, Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, played a central role in focusing scholarly attention on the Nazi years in Germany, though he generally ignored the persecution of Jews.

The third chapter discusses three other German historians important in the 1950s and 1960s. Hermann Heimpel became the first leader of the German historical profession to initiate a serious engagement with the policy toward the Jews. Chapter 4 concentrates on the Institute for Contemporary History as a center with its own major library, archive, and an important role in studying the recent history of the Federal Republic, which German universities and other institutions had not yet systematically undertaken.

The chapter on Wulf details the role played by the volumes that he published with Leon Poliakov documenting the activities of numerous officials in the Third Reich. Although the initial German professional reaction to this documentation was strongly negative, it opened many people’s eyes at the time, serving as a forerunner to much of the German scholarship about the Holocaust that emerged in the years after his suicide in 1974. Similarly, Wulf’s plan to construct a Holocaust memorial on the site where, in early 1942, Nazi officials convened the Wannsee...