Guenter Lewy

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Guenter Lewy (born August 23, 1923 in Breslau ) is a German - American university professor. He is an emeritus professor of political science . He has published several controversially received books on topics related to the role of the Catholic Church in the Nazi era , the Vietnam War , the Porajmos and the Armenian genocide .

Life

Lewy grew up in Breslau. After he had been beaten up during the November pogroms in 1938 , he emigrated to British-administered Palestine in March 1939 before the Nazi persecution . Here he joined the British Army in December 1942 and fought in the Jewish Brigade of Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army in the Italian campaign . In 1946 he moved to the USA and studied at the City College of New York and at Columbia University , where he received his doctorate in 1957. Then he taught as a professor political science at Smith College and the Amherst College of the University of Massachusetts . Today he lives in Washington, DC and contributes to the Commentary .

In the film Wir sind Juden aus Breslau (2016) by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies, Guenter Lewy gives a detailed account of his childhood in Breslau and the stages of his later life.

Scientific works

The Catholic Church and the Third Reich (1964)

  • The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany , New York, 1964, reprint in 2000, ISBN 0-306-80931-1 , in German translation by Hildegard Schulz: The Catholic Church and the Third Reich , Munich, 1965.
    The 1964 in the English original The published work by Lewy is considered a pioneering standard work based on extensive source study on the attitude of the Catholic Church to the events of the Third Reich . In 1965, Der Spiegel printed excerpts from the book in an eight-part series. For decades it stood alongside Rolf Hochhuth's works solely with his critical assessment of the role of the papacy and the Vatican before and during the Holocaust . Modern studies such as those by David I. Kertzer , Susan Zuccotti , John Cornwell , Daniel Jonah Goldhagen , James Waller, Ingo Müller , who had more archival material and documents than Lewy, confirmed Lewy's results from 1964 in recent years. Lewy is considered to be one of the pioneers among historians who studied this subject. His work is based primarily on church sources in Germany.
    Lewy asked about the importance of Adolf Hitler's youth , who was himself a Catholic. Hitler spent his early youth in Austria, where the anti-Semitic     Christian-Social Movement , supported by the Vatican , was active at the time. Lewy recalled that Hitler himself had declared that he was inspired by Karl Lueger , the leader of this movement. Lewy's work came to the conclusion that it was difficult not to come to the conclusion that the Pope and his advisors - influenced by a long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism widely accepted in Vatican circles - did not address the plight of the Jews with an urgency and have seen a moral outrage.

America in Vietnam (1978)

  • America in Vietnam , Oxford University Press, 1978, ISBN 0-19-502732-9 .
    In his 1978 work, Lewy gives a systematic analysis of the course of the Vietnam War , American strategy and tactics, the drive to Vietnamization (i.e. the gradual withdrawal of US troops) and American guilt. Lewy gives some of the testimony from the Winter Soldiers Inquiry , a media event launched in 1971 on the initiative of Jane Fonda and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War , which resulted in a three-day witness meeting interviewing 109 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians in Detroit against allegations against the United States Navy and theirs Allies for war crimes in Vietnam should publicize the credibility. He noted that many of the Detroit witnesses later refused to testify to the United States Navy investigation , and that some of the Detroit witnesses were not present in Detroit. (see also John Kerry's confession )

Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism (1988)

  • Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism , 1988, ISBN 0-8028-3640-2 .
    In his 1988 work, Lewy uses the example of four leading pacifist organizations to examine the change in the ethical attitude of American pacifism, which he criticizes as having lost its philosophical constancy and moral integrity. He accuses the four then prominent pacifist organizations, the Fellowship of Reconciliation , War Resisters League , Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the American Friends Service Committee , of creating the basic conflict between the ideal of non-violence and the liberation of the oppressed (especially in the Third World ) to go through. In doing so, they would support communist movements in Vietnam or in Central and South America, but ignore the Afghans' struggle against the Soviet Union. Lewy accuses American pacifism of having given up its commitment to non-violence on the basis of hostility towards American democracy and delusion towards revolutions in the third world.

The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life (1990)

  • The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life , Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-19-505748-1 .
    Lewys' 1990 work examines the representation of communism in American politics (20,000 members of the US Communist Party in 1988). However, he declares the more moderate left parties to be more influential.
    In his first chapters, Lewy deals with the early years of the American communist movement from 1919 to 1939. The main part of his work deals with the phase after the beginning of the Cold War and reborn radicalism. It is described as communism in the United States rises again slowly, which, according to Lewy of Joseph McCarthy was favored, the accused is his style, anti-communists scared and "anti-anti-Communists" paved the way to have.
    Lewy evaluates an abundance of primary sources and thus builds a picture of American society in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. The Vietnam War and the accompanying anti-war movement accelerated the process. According to Lewy, this movement made increasing use of Marxist - Leninist vocabulary, which led to its radicalization and parallels to the American left in the early years of American communism. He concludes from this that the old and the new left had found a common line of cooperation that continued "until our days" (1990).
    Lewy uses examples to illustrate how important organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) underwent a change of heart during the Vietnam War.

Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents (1996)

  • Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents , Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0-8028-4162-7 .
    In his 1996 work, Lewy explores the question of whether secular modernity is responsible for the social changes with regard to the decline in the family and the increase in the lower class in the USA. In his book he builds a balance between those who view Christianity as a source of moral inspiration and those who condemn Christianity as a source of intolerance. In the course of his book, his arguments boil down to the postulate that America needs a traditional religion in order to maintain a decent moral order.
    He concludes that the cultural ethos of secularism, with its accompanying radical individualism, has supplanted traditional values ​​such as civic virtue, family solidarity, and social compassion and was an important factor in the growth of the lower class. He also examines how faith changes the believer's life and draws attention to the low rates of social disease and moral defect among believing Christians. He suspects that the feeling of serving God and being loved by him contributes to this.
    At the end of his book, Lewy still does not believe in God, but he now defines himself as a nontheist instead of a secular humanist and finds that he has more in common with religious thinkers than with secular thinkers.

"Return not wanted" - The persecution of the Gypsies in the Third Reich (2000)

  • The Nazi persecution of the Gypsies , Oxford University Press 2000, ISBN 0-19-512556-8 , in German translation by Klaus-Dieter Schmidt: >> Return not desired << - The persecution of the Gypsies in the Third Reich , Propylänen Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-549-07141-8 (review [1] ).
    The work, published in 2000, deals with a field that historiography has not dealt with much: the porajmos of the National Socialists . Following the standard work by Michael Zimmermann from 1996 and alongside the work by Martin Luchterhandt from 2000, it once again offers a comprehensive and detailed overview and overview. Lewy worked on a broad source basis. He evaluated a large number of documents from German and Austrian archives.
    After a brief overview of the long history of the Gypsy persecution, Lewy describes the National Socialist persecution in order to deal with the continuation of persecution, refusal of compensation and disregard under the conditions of the Federal Republic of Germany in a further historiographical chapter.
    He divides the persecution under National Socialism into three phases:
    - Adoption and increasing intensification of anti-Gypsy measures from the Weimar Republic as part of a concept of “preventive fight against crime” as well as an ethnic-biological racial concept (1933–1939)
    - With the beginning of the war, the focus on “Gypsies "As spies and helpers of the enemy and thus legitimized the internment, deportation and murder of the European Roma under National Socialist rule, at the same time a multitude of decentralized and central measures for the" creation of social outsiders "(1939–1942)
    - the deportation to Auschwitz and deportation to others Concentration camp (1943–1945).
    In a “final consideration” he emphasizes that there is “no evidence that the deportation [to Auschwitz-Birkenau ] was part of a comprehensive plan to exterminate the Gypsies” (p. 366). It is even conceivable that the "gypsies" who were unable to work would not have been exterminated in Auschwitz "if they had not had to find temporary accommodation for the doomed Hungarian Jews because of the overloading of the gas chambers" (p. 366) . This essential act of annihilation was therefore a by-product of the genocide against the Jewish minority. Based on the legal genocide definition of the United Nations of 1948, he comes to the overall conclusion that “the various deportations of gypsies to the east, despite their fatal consequences ... do not constitute genocide. With these deportations, including those to the gypsy camp in Auschwitz, the intention was not to destroy the gypsies as such, but only to drive this widely despised minority out of Germany ”(p. 370).
    For Lewy, Jews and Roma were not persecuted in the same way in Germany. Only Jews could claim to be victims of genocide.
    In the specialist discourse, these conclusions were received critically and in some cases vehemently rejected.
    Contradiction also provoked Lewy's irritating tendency to use an obsolete “people” construct to describe the European Roma with their numerous subgroups as a closed unit of people with collective personality traits. The author took it to a small extent from the fund of romantic stereotypes, but mainly from the traditional antigypsy repertoire of rejection, with which the National Socialist persecutors also justified their concept of “preventive fight against crime” (pp. 10, 27ff). Here he saw "the roots of rejection" (p. 27). He did not hesitate to refer to the hereditary hygienist and doctor Hermann Arnold , who continued the Nazi research after its official end in 1945, the protagonist of which Arnold tried to rehabilitate (p. 382).
    In this context, Lewy describes Sinti as a “tribe” using a 19th century term (p. 10) and emphatically rejects the use of the collective terms “Roma” or “ Sinti and Roma ”. He prefers the everyday language "Gypsy", which label "in itself" has nothing derogatory. It ensures “historical continuity”, namely not stigmatization, but solidarity with those “who have been persecuted under this name” (p. 10). The vagueness of the term means that at one point of his "'final consideration" he includes "gypsy-style travelers" in his consideration and incorrectly equates them with "' white gypsies' ( Yeniche )". Listed as “anti-social” under “anti-social”, the Yenish were never mentioned separately by the police and the camps (p. 364). So nothing can be said about the extent of the persecution. He himself only noticed one - albeit unsecured - case of a concentration camp deportation.

The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (2005)

  • The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide , University of Utah Press 2005, ISBN 0-87480-849-9 ; in German translation by Karoline Ruhdorfer and Michaela A. Gabriel: Der armenische Fall. The politicization of history. What happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Edition Diwan, Klagenfurt 2009, ISBN 3-902713-03-8 .
    In his work from 2005, Lewy deals with the question of whether or not the deportation of the Armenians to the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the First World War can actually be classified as genocide . Using the known sources, Lewy compares the opposing versions and works out the undisputed and disputed points.
    In Lewy's view, the Ottoman Empire was in an existential crisis when it decided to deport the Armenians within the country. The Armenians lived in both Russia and the Ottoman Empire. When Russia and the Ottoman Empire entered the World War in late 1914 and Russian troops advanced into Ottoman territory, old tensions arose again. According to Lewy, many of the Ottoman Armenians , who had long been striving for autonomy or even a state of their own, sympathized with the Russians and the Western powers allied with them. When supply problems arose later and the British landed on Gallipoli in April 1915 , from where they threatened Constantinople , there was a panic that formed the background to the decision to deport the Armenians.
    Lewy calculates a total of around 642,000 Armenians who died during deportation due to starvation, disease, and murder, which corresponds to around 37% of the pre-war population. He names several pieces of evidence that speak against the killings planned by the central government. Rather, he suspects that the daunting task of relocating several hundred thousand people in a short period of time and in the face of a highly primitive transport system was simply beyond the capabilities of the Ottoman bureaucracy.
    Lewy states that the three pillars of the scientific genocide allegation - the Istanbul trials (Unionist     trials ), the role of the specialized organization ( Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa ), the Andonian documents - as well as the other evidence put forward, the planned nature of the killings and thus genocide in the According to the UN convention.
    In addition, Lewy sharply criticizes in his work the methods and theses of Vahakn N. Dadrian , whom he accuses of deliberate translation errors, selective quoting and other serious violations of scientific ethics.
    Lewy further states that he was not impressed by the unanimous declaration by the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the deportation was genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars is an association of genocide researchers doing research in Europe and North America. In 1997, the organization passed a resolution in which it unanimously confirmed the classification as genocide. Lewy states that the majority of these researchers have never set foot in an archive or done their own research on the subject.
    Lewy himself relies on the following archives for his work: the German ( Political Archive of the Foreign Office in Berlin), the British (Public Record Office in London) and the American ( National Archives in Washington) as well as the documents in the archive of the Library of Congress in Washington. He also draws on published collections of archive documents and secondary literature.

Lewy's stance on the UN Genocide Convention

  • Can There Be Genocide Without the Intent to Commit Genocide? , in: Journal of genocide research , Vol 9, Issue 4, 2007, pp. 661-674.
    In political science the attitude of the General Assembly is the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in terms of the concept of "intention ( intention ) that must underlie the policy of extermination if they should apply as genocide" controversial. Lewy is one of the critics of the UN Convention who only recognizes genocide if Sensu stricto (in the strict sense ) an overall plan for the genocide is available. In contrast to the Shoah , he sees this overall plan as not given in the Porajmos , for example .

Other works

  • Constitutionalism and statecraft during the golden age of Spain. A Study of the political philosophy of Juan de Mariana , Geneva, éditions Droz, 1960
  • Religion and revolution , New York, Oxford University Press, 1974
  • Perpetrators: the world of the Holocaust killers . New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 ISBN 978-0-19-066113-7

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.): The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide . Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 , pp. 421 f .
  2. ↑ Desider Stern: Works by authors of Jewish origin in German . Vienna 1970, p. 251. US District Court District of Columbia Complaint. Gunter Lewy vs. Southern Poverty Law Center, November 13th, 2008. PDF
  3. ↑ We are Jews from Breslau . There you will also find more information about the film and its history.
  4. ↑ Gerhard Czermak: 2000 years of Christians against Jews. On the causes and effects of a constant of the so-called Christian West . Website of the Federation for Freedom of the Spirit Munich . February 1, 2000
  5. ^ Guenter Lewy: With a firm step into the New Kingdom . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1965, p. 40 ff . ( online ).
  6. ↑ a b Review by Michael Mannion ( Memento of the original from June 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mindshiftinstitute.org
  7. ^ Institute for Global Jewish Affairs: Reassessing Pope Pius XII's Attitudes toward the Holocaust , October 2009, accessed on November 8, 2009. Excerpt: […] Another pioneer author was Guenter Lewy, a political scientist from the University of Massachusetts who researched Church documents in Germany and was somewhat critical of Pius XII. [...]
  8. ↑ Guenter Lewy America in Vietnam ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bibl.u-szeged.hu
  9. ↑ Annenberg Political Fact Check Project of the University of Pennsylvania Swift Boat Veterans Anti-Kerry Ad: "He Betrayed Us" With 1971 Anti-War Testimony , August / November 2004 ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.factcheck.org
  10. ^ Reviews of the Publisher's Weekly and the Library Journal
  11. ^ Anti-communitarian League Anti-communitarian analysis of the implications of Professor Guenter Lewy's conclusions in "Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism." , August 2003 ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nord.twu.net
  12. ↑ Review by Sam Tanenhaus in the Commentary ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.commentarymagazine.com
  13. ^ Review by John-Peter Pham
  14. ^ Michael Zimmermann: Racial Utopia and Genocide. The National Socialist "Solution to the Gypsy Question". , Hamburg 1996.
  15. ↑ Martin Luchterhandt, The way to Birkenau. Origin and course of the National Socialist persecution of the 'Gypsies', Lübeck 2000.
  16. ↑ Review by Michael Zimmermann, in: Newsletter [of the Fritz Bauer Institute], No. 21, 2001; see. also: Sybil Milton, Gypsies and the Holocaust, in: History Teacher, 24 (1991), pp. 375-387; this., Correspondence. "Gypsies and the Holocaust", in: History Teacher, 25 (1992), pp. 515-521.
  17. ↑ See: Statement by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma: PDF .
  18. ↑ Footnote 3, p. 433. Zimmermann sees the "systematic presentation of the Nazi policy against this group" as a research desideratum: Review by Michael Zimmermann, in: Newsletter [of the Fritz Bauer Institute], No. 21, 2001.
  19. ↑ Guenter Lewy The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide , page 240: Lewy assumes a number of 1,750,000 Armenians before the World War and estimates a number of 1,108,000 survivors, which he subtracts from the number of the pre-war population
  20. ^ Commentary-Magazin, February 2006, Genocide ?, p. 10
  21. ↑ Genocide or not? Hundreds of thousands of Armenians probably died unintentionally in 1915/16 - review by Eberhard Jäckel in the FAZ: Genocide or not? - Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in 1915/16, probably unintentionally - March 23, 2006
  22. ^ Lewy's summary of his work
  23. ↑ a b c Commentary Magazine, February 2006, Genocide? , P. 8
  24. ^ Letter from the International Association of Genocide Scholars of June 13, 2005 to the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan
  25. ^ Guenter Lewy The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide , pp. 333–358, Section Works Cited
personal data
SURNAME Lewy, Guenter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw