The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (review)

It is unlikely that many readers will read this densely packed volume from cover to cover, as I did in preparation for this review. Those who choose to do so will be impressed by the scope, depth, and analytical sophistication to be found within this relatively new area of research. Many of the contributing authors, scholars of distinction in their specific sub-fields, are well-known for their work on the Holocaust: Richard Levy, Eric Weitz, Doris Bergen, Christopher Browning, Debórah Dwork, Robert Ericksen, Martin Dean, Peter Fritzsche, Sara Horowitz, James Young, Deborah Lipstadt, Jeffrey Herf, Lenore Weitzman, Dan Michman, Henry Greenspan, and Rebecca Wittmann, to name just a few. To capture the current state of the field, the editors invited contributions from Holocaust scholars of the second and third generations—a decision that pays off handsomely. In addition, the Handbook successfully encompasses the wide range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of the Holocaust while moving beyond the analytical categories typically employed in works of this kind.

The chapters are grouped in five broadly thematic sections. The section on enablers, containing chapters on antisemitism, science, nationalism, colonialism, fascism, and the world wars, concentrates on "the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust" (p. 4). The chapters in the section on the protagonists disaggregate the perpetrator, victim, and bystander categories—notably so in the latter category, which includes representatives of religious and governmental institutions—and considers rescuers as well. The chapters on settings each cover a particular space or location in which persecution and murder occurred: Greater Germany, "Living Space" (Lebensraum), occupied and satellite states, ghettos, camps, and forced labor sites. The chapters in the section on representations address the challenges of how to apprehend the Holocaust; they reflect the reliance of Holocaust studies "on historical analysis, interpretations of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection to find the most adequate . . . ways to state what happened and what the meaning of the event(s) or lack of meaning may be" (p. 12). The section on aftereffects explores "the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights" (p. 15).

Each chapter includes several useful pages of references and "other suggested readings." The authors were tasked with presenting "the state of knowledge and debate about their respective topics and interpret[ing] the issues at hand and the challenges for research" (p. 3). While this directive generally has been followed, the chapters typically fall into two categories, each illustrated by an example in the following two paragraphs.

In the first category are those that rely on the relevant historiography to frame the key questions, issues, and interpretations for the topic under consideration. Thus, for example, in his chapter on "The Killers," Edward Westermann briefly reviews the broad range of institutional actors that made violence and murder their business, and summarizes the evidence of their crimes. Extensive research in this area has not, however, resolved the question of what motivated the killers. After concisely presenting the intentionalist-functionalist argument and the Browning-Goldhagen dispute, Westermann comments on social science studies by scholars such as James Waller and Harald Welzer. In this section he covers well-trodden ground, but he concludes with a reference to the value of studies such as Michael Wildt's 2003 monograph on the Reich Security Main Office.¹ Wildt's study reveals that those in the leadership of this organization "did not fit the caricature of myopic desk-bound bureaucrats and proved equally at ease drafting racial policy or holding a pistol to the heads of the Third Reich's putative political and racial enemies in the occupied east" (p. 144). Westermann's review of the wave of murders in occupied Poland ("a dress rehearsal for the war of annihilation that began two years later" [p. 145]) and in the Soviet Union...