How German Was the Holocaust?

An exchange.

I hope you will allow me to respond to the vitriolic attack on my book Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, recently reviewed by Professor Elshtain in your journal [March/April].

This alleged ethicist violates the fundamental moral responsibility of a reviewer by judging an entire book by two chapters, and compounds her irresponsibility by getting her facts wrong as well.

Here are a few of her errors: She claims I believe the Germans have an "essentialist taint" of racism. Not true. In fact, I specifically state more than once that approximately 50 percent of the German population opposed harming the Jews. Had she read the book she would have found many references to this opposition, even in the preface. She claims I hold "the Christian legacy" responsible for the Nazis; in fact, I explicitly say that Christian anti-Judaism by itself could never have led to Hitler and the Holocaust. And contrary to her claim, I wrote that the popes of the Crusades forbade forcible conversion and the killing of Jews. She implies that I believe practically all Christians were anti-Semites; in fact, I wrote that hundreds of thousands of Christians opposed Hitler's anti-Semitic policies, thousands pleaded with Pius XII to speak out against the Holocaust, and Christians in many lands rescued Jews at their own peril--see the Lutherans of Denmark, for example. She denies that Hitler was a Catholic; he was, and he made a great show of it--nor, by the way, was he or any of the killers who were Catholics ever denied the sacraments or excommunicated for their crimes. And, contrary to her, the pope and Protestant fundamentalists do not and cannot accept the independent legitimacy and validity of Judaism, for to do so would be to accept the Jewish belief that Christ was not the Messiah predicted by the Old Testament. . . .

Let me add that, as a Christian, I, too, along with thousands of other Christians, find it difficult to accept that the German and Austrian church leadership, with the exception of a few glorious martyrs, never protested the murder of the Jews or even the murder of some 18 percent of the priests of Poland by the Nazis, though Christians all over the world did so. Worse, many, but not all, of the German and Austrian church leadership violated Christian theology by sanctioning Nazi racism. What should give all Christians pause is that the vast bulk of those Germans who opposed Hitler were secular humanists or leftists with no religious beliefs. Every year conferences of Christians and Jews meet to try to heal these wounds--but not by denying the facts I mention above. . . .

--John Weiss

Lehman College and

the Graduate Center of CUNY

New York

Jean Bethke Elshtain replies:

I won't begin by calling Professor Weiss an "alleged historian." Were he merely an "alleged historian" I would have expected a good deal less. The fact that he can think of no other way to begin than by calling me an "alleged ethicist" tells us plenty right off the bat. If you lack evidence, go for the ad hominem. Let us begin. First, I did not judge his "entire book by two chapters." I offered a brief résumé of two chapters for the purpose of my review, indicating that I hoped that this would suffice to give readers a sense of the whole. I picked the chapters I did because I thought they would be of particular interest to readers of Books and Culture, covering what Weiss calls "The Christian Legacy" and "Luther and the Reformation." I could as well have picked any other of the book's 25 chapters. Weiss having opened the door, let me give the reader a flavor of a few points from other chapters.

One of Weiss's heroes is Napoleon, and he celebrates the "liberalization of Europe" brought about (imperfectly, to be sure) under Napoleon's auspices--through war, in other words. Consider this from chapter 4: Napoleon didn't succeed everywhere, e.g., in Spain and Russia, Weiss reminds us. Why? Because these sites were "backward, peasant, and pious." It is precisely this sort of global characterization of entire peoples, cultures, and ways of life I indicted in my review. (It would be interesting to count the number of times the word Christian precedes the word reactionary in Weiss's book.)

In chapter 7 we are treated to more peasant-bashing. Peasants lived "with superstitions dating back to the medieval era and into the mists of pagan antiquity." And, thus, "in their dark, primitive, and isolated villages, most Hessian peasants had little entrepreneurial spirit; unaware of the latest agrarian technology, they were slow to adapt to new opportunities." Dark? Primitive? Does Weiss dare deny these claims? If I am quoting him correctly, and I am, is he not culpable of precisely the charge I laid against him, namely, that his book traffics in simplistic characterizations of whole peoples or classes or categories of persons? What else is this? It certainly isn't credible social history. He goes on to berate "backward Hesse" throughout this chapter, at one point describing the peasants as "Fundamentalist" and too dense by far to understand "complex factors governing interest rates, land values, price fluctuations, and the impact of distant markets." Alas, poor peasant, wanting a Ph.D. in economics! Small wonder they were superstitious, reactionary, pious, and altogether unpleasant.

This history-by-caricature is symptomatic of a more pervasive weakness in Weiss's book: a failure to meet the standards of evidence required by historical scholarship. Thus Weiss claims--and he repeats this in his letter--that Hitler "publicly demonstrated his Catholicism." Where? When? How? In the letter he says Hitler was "a Catholic and made a great show of it." This is quite simply false. Hitler was not a communicant of the church. That he had been nominally raised as such tells us very little. He, together with all the Nazi inner circle, made a big point of proclaiming their pagan unbelief. This is amply documented, as is Hitler's determination to "Nazify" all the churches as one way to eliminate authentic Christian witness. Under Hitler's plan, to be implemented in occupied territories, a Nazified Catholicism was to be strictly controlled by the government and permitted no relation with the papacy. This isn't Catholicism anymore.

Then we have the matter of who opposed Hitler--well, didn't oppose but "rejected the racist violence of the Nazis, though they could not halt it." Without citing any evidence, Weiss comes up with the figure--as he mentions in his letter--of about "half of all Germans."

Whatever the stories of rescue or resistance Weiss covers cursorily, and inaccurately in the case of the Confessing Church, the issues at stake between Weiss and myself have nothing to do with whether the Christian response to Hitlerism was adequate: it was not. Rather, what is at stake is the responsibility of the historian to try to get things right; to offer a narrative that attempts to come close to the complexity and nuance of events. When Weiss tells us that the "vast bulk of those Germans who opposed Hitler were secular humanists or leftists with no religious beliefs," where is his evidence coming from? Where is the data? Who were these secular humanists and leftists? How many were expelled or fled or put in camps? Where are the texts of opposition they have left behind? Where can we turn to find their arguments? I know where I can go to find the texts of Christian opposition. Of course, I also know there were Spartacists and Communist revolutionaries of various stripes battling it out ideologically, and in the streets, against the Nazis early on over who would get to run the country dictatorially and under what justification; but is this what Weiss had in mind as anti-Hitler opposition? This had nothing to do with what I thought was his main concern, namely, anti-Semitism.

Sadly, in his letter Weiss repeats his charge that "the pope and Protestant fundamentalists do not and cannot accept the independent legitimacy and validity of Judaism, for to do so would be to accept the Jewish belief that Christ was not the Messiah predicted by the Old Testament." This, I suppose, is what might be called the bottom line. If a Christian refuses to deny that Christ was the Messiah, that person is committed, by definition, to a denial of the "independent legitimacy and validity of Judaism" and on a slippery slope to anti-Semitism, if Weiss's book is evidence. In other words, a Christian cannot be a Christian--for you cannot be a Christian unless you accept Christ as Messiah --and also, at the same time, be free from tacit if not explicit anti-Semitism. This makes it hard for me to see how it is at all possible for Weiss to describe himself "as a Christian."

Others are better able to speak for Protestant fundamentalism. But, in the matter of that suspect figure, "the pope," a few things should be made absolutely clear. Pope John Paul II has repeatedly and energetically embraced Judaism as the religion of the great covenant, the religion that "is closest to our own--that of the people of God of the Old Testament." He has insisted that anti-Semitism should be eradicated completely. In 1980, in an address in Mainz to the Jewish community, he called for a coming together of the peoples of the Old and New Covenants. He has called repeatedly for a catechesis that "will not only present Jews and Judaism in an honest and objective manner, but will also do so with a lively awareness of our common spiritual heritage . . . taking into account the faith and religious life of the Jewish people as professed and lived now as well." In a meeting with Australia's Jewish leaders in 1986, the pope proclaimed: "No valid theological justification could ever be found for acts of discrimination or persecution against Jews. In fact, such acts must be held to be sinful." Are you listening, Mr. Weiss?

Christian-Jewish dialogue cannot be based on denying facts. But it also cannot be based on ignorance of what Christians and Jews are actually saying and what they actually believe. It sets back the cause of ecumenical exchange to falsely describe the positions of people--including Pope John Paul II--who are energetically and powerfully building bridges between Catholic and Jews.

Here's a Goldhagen update. Readers may recall my critical review of the much-publicized Daniel Goldhagen book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Now comes war-crimes historian Ruth Bettina Birn, writing in the prestigious Cambridge Historical Journal, arguing that Goldhagen's work isn't reliable as a historical account. Why is that? Because "he uses historical documents only to a limited extent, and for the most part relies on ones from German post-war investigation of Nazi crimes, which are mainly to be found in Ludwigsburg, Germany." Around this core of historical data, Birn charges, Goldhagen "weaves a web of fantasy." He speculates on "how many of the killers discussed their genocidal activities" with wives and girlfriends and freely offers accounts of motivation based on his own undocumented reconstruction of things. But, most important, Goldhagen offers no comparison between Germans and non-Germans to substantiate his claim that German anti-Semitism was uniquely German. After recounting some brutalities committed by non-Germans, Birn writes:

By denying the possibility that the crimes committed during the Holocaust are within the scope of human behaviour, [Goldhagen] places those crimes and their perpetrators outside the realm of human possibility open to others. Only the Germans could have behaved as they did; nobody else. Their behaviour is "unfathomable" and, as a consequence, cannot be repeated by someone else. Absurdly, after drawing such a sinister picture, he claims the Germans changed drastically after the war as a result of American re-education efforts. Although Goldhagen's argument is illogical, its function is clear: the Holocaust is now firmly outside the realm of people's action and it is over historically. The Holocaust is sanitised.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 37

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