Holocaust research

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The Holocaust research explores the Holocaust of six million Jews of Europe ( Holocaust ) and its relationship to other mass murders in the era of National Socialism : including the Porajmos to hundreds of thousands of Roma , the Action T4 at over hundreds of thousands of disabled people and millions of murder of Slavs (see NS Forced Labor , General Plan East , Hunger Plan ).

As part of the more comprehensive Nazi research , Holocaust research relates to historical conditions of origin, decision-making process, organization, implementation, perpetrators, accomplices, victims, effects and specifics of the Holocaust. This is being researched around the world, but particularly in the US , UK , Israel , Poland and Germany .

Yad Vashem , Jerusalem, founded 1953
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Washington DC

Beginnings

United States

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954), formerly chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials

Even during the Holocaust, Jewish and non-Jewish contemporary witnesses and resistance fighters collected reports of the systematic Nazi mass murders of Jews that appeared in some countries from 1941 to 1949.

Holocaust survivors and historians who emigrated from Europe during the Nazi era laid the foundations for Anglo-Saxon Holocaust research. This began in 1945 immediately after the end of the war in connection with the first Nazi trials . An essential prerequisite for this was the securing of Nazi archives by the Allies and the collection of contemporary witness reports by institutes on Jewish history. So built Jacob Robinson that in 1925 Berlin , founded the Institute for Jewish History (YIVO) in New York City from 1940 scratch. As a member of the UN Human Rights Commission in 1945, he was an advisor to US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and in 1952 helped negotiate the Luxembourg Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany.

His colleague, the Polish Holocaust survivor Philip Friedman , had managed a branch of this institute in Warsaw until the German occupation of Poland . After the war he emigrated to the USA and published the first historical works on the Holocaust from the victim's perspective. Robinson and Friedman published the first regular journal on the Holocaust in 1960, followed by extensive bibliographies. These collections of primarily Jewish Holocaust literature are considered to be the basic works for the Holocaust studies that have emerged as a special branch of science since 1967. The testimonies of the victims play just as crucial a role as testimonies of the perpetrators.

Germany

In Germany, under the impression of the details of the extermination camps now becoming known, in the immediate post-war period the question of who was responsible was in the foreground, which was mostly answered apologetically. The fact that the Allies had confiscated the Nazi archives made empirical basic research difficult.

From 1950 the files of the first Nuremberg trials were available. A few source documentations were initially published, mostly by Holocaust survivors such as Bruno Blau, HGAdler and Joseph Wulf . A gradual return of archive material began in 1960. The Nazi trials in the Federal Republic increasingly set empirical studies on the Nazi mass crimes in motion, often as court reports and reports for reparation authorities or as publications of state educational work.

From around 1960, broader historical research into the Nazi era began. It was driven forward in 1961 by the epochal work of Raul Hilberg , in 1963 by the Eichmann trial , the thesis of the trial observer Hannah Arendt of the " banality of evil " and the Auschwitz trials 1963–1966. However, German research concentrated more than research in the USA, Israel and Great Britain on conditions for advancement, the " seizure of power ", consolidation of power and warfare of the Nazi regime and barely addressed the Holocaust.

Institutions

Various institutions have been collecting and publishing documents from the Holocaust since around 1942:

In 1953, the Yad Vashem National Memorial and Research Center was founded in Israel . Since 1957 the regular Yad Vashem Studies , which are considered the basis of the later Holocaust Studies in the USA, have been published there. In 1955 German Jews founded the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem with three branches (Jerusalem, London, New York) as an international center for Holocaust research. From 1967 onwards, an independent research direction on the Holocaust with special chairs, research institutes and specialist journals emerged in the USA. An independent institution is the Simon Wiesenthal Center, founded in 1977 and headquartered in Los Angeles . Wiesenthal's extensive archive, founded in 1946, has been in Yad Vashem since 1954; the Documentation Center of the Association of Jews Persecuted by the Nazi Regime , which he founded in 1961 , has been at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Vienna since 1975 .

In 1980 the Holocaust Memorial Museum was established in Washington, DC . It has its own research department and the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies .

In 1994, US director Steven Spielberg started the Shoah Foundation project , a collection of around 52,000 video-recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. The Free University of Berlin has had access to this archive of oral history since 2006 .

In the Federal Republic of Germany, the Institute for Contemporary History , founded in 1949, assumed a leading role in the collection and publication of documents from the Holocaust. Since 2009, in cooperation with the Federal Archives and around 40 other international archives, a series of documents has been published in 16 volumes under the title: Persecution and Murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945.

In Poland, the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute and the State Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) each set up their own archives on the Holocaust, which were opened for international Holocaust research from 1989 onwards. They developed joint research projects with the German Historical Institute in Warsaw .

1995 in Frankfurt a. M. founded the Fritz Bauer Institute as a study and documentation center for research into the history and effects of the Holocaust.

In 2013 the “Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich” was founded, which sees itself as a forum for international Holocaust research and is linked to the institutions of the “European Holocaust Research Infrastructure” (EHRI).

Overall representations

Numerous works initially dealt with individual episodes and individual aspects of the Holocaust. They provided the basis for later overall presentations. Of these, the following are widely recognized in the international research community:

Léon Poliakov, 1952

Léon Poliakov's Breviaire de la haine (1951), published in English as Harvest of Hate (1979), was based on the documents of the Nuremberg Trials that were available at the time and other sources from the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris. In spite of the significantly improved source situation, the research continues to largely follow the questions of the time.

Gerald Reitlinger's book The Final Solution (1953) is based on the same sources that Poliakov evaluated, but analyzed them more extensively and included the Jewish rescuers more closely in the overall picture. His estimate of the number of victims at 4.5 million has now been refuted.

HGAdler researched the history and sociology of the Theresienstadt ghetto ( Theresienstadt 1941–1945, The Face of a Compulsory Community , which Adler completed in 1949 and published in 1955). He supplemented his portrayal of the National Socialist camp with the documentary Die Verheimlichte Truth (1958) and research into the bureaucracy of expulsion and extermination in: Der Verwalten Mensch, Studies on the Deportation of Jews from Germany (1974).

Raul Hilberg's dissertation, completed in 1955, was not published until 1961 as the book The Destruction of the European Jews , German: " The destruction of the European Jews " . It is regarded as the main work of Holocaust research on which many other researches were based. From 1945 onwards, Hilberg sifted through countless sources of the Nazi regime in Germany and the USA. He examined the history and ideological continuities as well as the functioning of the Nazi regime and placed the bureaucratic decision-making processes and the interaction of the various Nazi authorities at the center of his analysis. The bound three-volume original edition contains detailed maps of the extermination camps , ghettos and deportations from the individual countries. The footnotes are missing in the abridged study edition.

Nora Levin's The Holocaust (1968) describes in detail the persecution of Jews from 1933 and the reactions to the Nazi mass crimes becoming known in the occupied, neutral and opposing individual countries from 1940 onwards. The author describes the interaction between victims and perpetrators in the affected areas, especially the The attitude of the Jewish councils , compares the conditions for the rescue of most of the Jews of Italy and France with the extradition of most of the Jews of the Netherlands and subjects the collaborators of the Nazi rule to a comprehensive criticism. It also takes into account the fate of the surviving concentration camp prisoners after their liberation, which most Holocaust organizations have so far ignored.

Lucy Dawidowicz published The War against the Jews in 1975 . Like Levin, she first analyzed the anti-Semitic legislation in the Third Reich, its expansion and radicalization in the conquered areas and the reasons for it. The main part compares the living conditions of the Jews before and after their ghettoization and describes the role of Jewish organizations, which in some cases unintentionally played into the hands of the National Socialists . For Eastern Europe, the sources are given very precisely; but the situation in individual countries is not thoroughly examined and the casualty figures are presented in the appendix. The rescue operations in Denmark and Sweden and the collaboration in the other countries are not shown.

The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer traced the roots of anti-Semitism in A History of the Holocaust in 1983 and describes the migration movements of Jews in Europe as one of the reasons for this. He gives wide scope to the failure of the Weimar Republic as the reason for the rise of the NSDAP . His criticism of fellow travelers and the failure of the major churches to deal with the Nazi persecution of Jews is more cautious than that of his predecessors. Instead, Bauer cites examples of Christian aid and rescue operations for Jews at the time and names names of Jewish rescuers who had not previously been mentioned in Holocaust research. He also refers to the perpetrator sources, e.g. B. SS files or diplomats from neutral countries. He was the first historian to mention an intervention by the Vatican against the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944, without attributing it to papal initiative. In contrast, Bauer hardly evaluated the sources available in Israel, especially reports from survivors.

In 1985, the Briton Martin Gilbert relied in Der Holocaust mainly on contemporary sources, which he offers chronologically, and interviews with survivors, which he lets speak for himself without comment. He is the first historian to portray the mass murders during the attack on Poland in 1939 as the beginning of the Holocaust. He sees this as the deliberate acceleration of the gradual death of Jews who were ghetted parallel or later through starvation and epidemics. His representation with photos and eyewitness reports of perpetrators, victims and observers is deliberately descriptive and includes the entire breadth of mass crimes outside of the extermination camps.

In The Holocaust (1987), the Israeli Leni Yahil evaluated the materials that have since been collected in Yad Vashem. For the first time she mentions the previously neglected Karaites and Krimchaks in the Crimea , of which only the second group was racially persecuted. She emphasizes the Jewish resistance and describes the faith of the Orthodox Jews as an obstacle to it (without depicting their actual debates about it during the Nazi era). It describes the rescue operations of all neutral countries except Turkey and Portugal. She only described anti-Semitism from 1932 onwards. The cards on offer do not reveal the differences between German concentration camps for political prisoners , labor and extermination camps.

Debate on the decision and planning of the Holocaust

In the 1960s and 1970s, conflicts over the overall interpretation of the Nazi era in the context of totalitarianism - or theories of fascism, especially in Germany , overlaid Holocaust research. Around 1969 a fundamental dispute began over the question of whether the Holocaust carried out more programmatic-ideological intentions ( intentionalists , programmologists ) or developed out of contradicting and chaotic structures ( structuralists , functionalists ). The empirical detailed research on the Holocaust was initially hardly affected, but has been increasingly included in this dispute since around 1975.

One aspect was the question of the timing and role of specific orders from Hitler to carry out the Holocaust. Alan Bullock ( Hitler , 1952) had portrayed Hitler as the driving force behind all of Nazi Jewish policy; Gerald Reitlinger ( The Final Solution , 1953) had unquestionably accepted a “Führer order” on the Holocaust issued in the spring of 1941. Following this point of view, Eberhard Jäckel ( Hitler's Weltanschauung , 1969) and Joachim Fest ( Hitler. Eine Biographie , 1973) , for example, referred to the continuous radical nature of Hitler's public threats against the Jews. According to Lucy Dawidowicz ( The War against the Jews , 1975), Hitler is said to have planned the extermination of the Jews since the 1920s and to have persisted in it.

In the wake of Hilberg, Uwe Dietrich Adam ( Jewish policy in the Third Reich , 1972), on the other hand, emphasized on a broader source basis that Hitler had approved the "process of annihilation" but had not planned it for the long term. Rather, the deportations of Jews and mass shootings were expanded and intensified under sometimes chaotic circumstances after the military defeat in the Russian War. This also narrowed Hitler himself in his decision-making freedom.

The British history revisionist and later Holocaust denier David Irving claimed in 1977 ( Hitler's War. The Victories 1939–1942 ) that Hitler only learned of the organized extermination of Jews in October 1943; Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich initiated this without authorization. Martin Broszat first responded with a differentiated analysis of the sources in the course of the war. He came to the conclusion that Hitler's fanatical hatred of Jews and his overall responsibility for the Holocaust were undeniable. But the Holocaust can be explained “not only because of a given will to annihilate”, “but also as a 'way out' of a dead end into which one had maneuvered oneself”. It is likely "that there was no comprehensive general extermination order at all, the 'program' of the extermination of the Jews rather developed gradually and factually from individual actions up to the spring of 1942".

In 1976, Hans Mommsen became the main advocate of this “structuralist” interpretation of the Holocaust in Germany: He sees it as the result of a “cumulative radicalization” for which Hitler, the Berlin power centers of the Nazi regime and the regional administrative bureaucracy in the conquered areas were equally responsible. In 1979 he affirmed that the constant competition among subordinate Nazi agencies for the “favor of the Führer”, the weight of “secondary bureaucratic apparatus” and the “segmentation of responsibilities” had created a dynamic of its own, so that there was no “formal, let alone written, order on the part of Hitler “needed more. In 1983 he again emphasized that the “overall political and psychological structure” of the Nazi system had to be reconstructed in order to be able to adequately explain the Holocaust.

In contrast, the Briton Gerald Fleming in 1982 drew a line of continuity from Hitler's early anti-Semitism to his statements on “Jewish policy” in 1941: He demonstrated that Hitler dealt with it more intensively from January to June 1941 than before. For this reason, for example, he declared his order to keep him personally informed about the mass shootings of Soviet Jews that had been going on since June 1941 as the implementation of a long-cherished plan. With a detailed analysis of the files held by the Foreign Office, Christopher Browning proved the expansion of the mass shootings since June 1941, thereby refuting Broszat's assumption that the Holocaust only emerged from a "dead end" in military war planning in 1942, on which the deportations were dependent. He also believes that it is likely that Hitler consented to Himmler and Heydrich's concrete preparation for the Holocaust in July 1941 and approved the implementation plans that were triggered in October and November 1941.

As a court expert for the David Irving trial against Deborah Lipstadt (London 1996–2000), Peter Longerich once again compiled all the documents that prove Hitler's knowledge of and initiative in the Holocaust.

Because of the many testimonies of the highest Nazi officials documented in writing, verbal “Führer orders” for the extermination of the Jews are now considered proven. According to the extensive historical consensus, subordinate Nazi groups of perpetrators were only able to systematically exterminate the Jews with Hitler's permission, approval and order. Christopher Browning also highlighted agreement between intentionalists and structuralists on the following points:

  • The Holocaust was not decided on a single date, but developed in interaction with the war situation.
  • This process was gradually radicalized from unorganized massacres in the Polish campaign to extensive deportation plans to mass shootings and the construction and operation of extermination camps.
  • The most important decisions about the Holocaust were made in the second half of 1941.

Within the framework of this consensus, some historians set their own accents, interpret and weight certain documents and factors differently. According to Longerich, the expulsion of the Jews turned into mass murder as early as autumn 1939. All of the deportations of Jews planned and carried out since the Polish campaign had aimed for their destruction in the medium term and had taken into account. This was then only increasingly expanded and accelerated. There were four escalation levels. Since July 1942, the deportees had been murdered immediately upon arrival at their destination; thus the decision to adopt the “ final solution ” has become irreversible.

Similarly, Magnus Brechtken interpreted the Madagascar Plan as a death sentence for European Jewry: it only differed in location and method from the gassing in Auschwitz. According to Richard Breitman , the planners of the Russian campaign at the beginning of 1941 calculated the destruction of large parts of the population in the areas to be conquered. At the end of August / beginning of September 1941, this fundamental decision was followed by decisions on the practical implementation of the murder of Jews.

Philippe Burrin contradicted this : The Soviet Jews were only released for indiscriminate murder as a result of the failed Blitzkrieg . Since October 1941, Hitler had put into practice his conditional resolution to exterminate the Jews, which he had articulated on January 30, 1939.

On the other hand, following earlier theses by Christian Streit and Alfred Streim , Browning emphasized that the orders for the murder of Jewish women and children in the Soviet territories were not given out of disappointment at the lack of a lightning victory, but while the victory was certain. At the beginning of October the murder order was then extended to all European Jews; Himmler's insistence on more competencies for the SS played an important role in this. Even Dieter Pohl , Götz Aly and Peter Witte seen in October 1941 the critical turning point of the Nazi Jewish policy.

Hans Safrian , LJ Hartog and Christian Gerlach contradicted this : They see December 1941 as the key period and the entry of the United States into the Second World War as the triggering factor. According to Safrian, the expulsion of the Soviet Jews became impossible in early December, so the Wannsee Conference was postponed to work out other options. For Hartog, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed Hitler's actual pursuit of the extermination of the Jews: it had become obsolete for him to use the German Jews as hostages to blackmail the USA in order to delay their entry into the war . He wanted to exterminate the Jews under all circumstances and to do this he also waged the world war.

Gerlach dates Hitler's decision exactly on December 12, 1941: On that day, Hitler informed his closest confidants that he wanted to finally solve the Jewish question by murdering all European Jews. This was confirmed by Goebbels' diary entries on December 16 and other, so far neglected documents.

Saul Friedländer dates the transition to the Holocaust in late autumn 1941 and, along with Burrin and Gerlach, explains it as a reaction to the failure of the Blitzkrieg and the United States' entry into the war. At the same time, he emphasizes the ideological constant in Hitler's thinking: He believed that he had to free the world from “the Jew” as the absolute evil. The “final solution” should therefore be interpreted as an attempt at redemption .

Singularity Debate

As "singularity", "uniqueness" (English uniqueness ) or " unprecedentedness " one designates special historical characteristics that so far differentiate the Holocaust from all other genocides and mass murders in history.

In 1978, when the Holocaust Memorial Museum was being planned in the USA, a dispute arose over the definition of the term Holocaust : representatives of non-Jewish groups of victims wanted their persecution during the Nazi era to be included in the national memorial of the Holocaust. In the research that was initiated by this, most of the Israeli, German, British and US Holocaust researchers emphasized the singularity of the Holocaust with regard to the real and targeted number of victims, state planning as an overall social project and its systematic and industrial implementation. A minority denies this singularity and emphasizes parallels between the goals of extermination, implementation and magnitude to other genocides.

The comparative genocide research has only developed in the wake of this controversy. She rejects the interpretation of the singularity as "incomparable" because the unique characteristics of the Holocaust can only be determined in comparison with other genocides. Some of their special studies on the origins, planning and execution of other genocides have confirmed the basic assumption of most Holocaust researchers about the singularity.

In Germany, a singularity debate arose since 1986 in the historians' dispute over the theses of Ernst Nolte : He interpreted Stalin's labor camps as direct models of the National Socialist labor and extermination camps and the Holocaust as a preventive extermination of groups of people that only began in the war against the Soviet Union and as a reaction communist ideology had been declared enemies. History revisionists took up Nolte's theses in order to relativize the Holocaust as ordinary mass murder, which cannot be qualitatively differentiated from other major crimes.

Criteria and arguments

In contrast, many historians have emphasized the singular peculiarities of the Holocaust, according to Israel Gutman 1987:

“It did not arise from a real conflict between the German people and the Jews in Germany or in the world. In truth, the Jews were a loyal and devoted part of German society; they made a major contribution to the development and prosperity of the German economy, science and culture. [...] Rather, it was a campaign of extermination that resulted from the racial ideology of the Nazis and was only decided for this reason. [...] But the National Socialist racial doctrine was not limited to defining the Jew as a being who, contrary to the process of natural selection, adaptation and survival established by Darwinian theory, would have assumed inferior racial-biological traits. According to Hitler's principles, the Jews were neither a religious nor a national group, but a power-hungry, well-organized subversive 'race' that had set itself the goal of eliminating the natural competition between human races ... The 'war' against was based on such baseless claims the Jews, which was continually exacerbated until it reached the stage of relentless physical annihilation. [...] The goal was to catch and kill all Jews regardless of age, gender, opinion, occupation or class. "

Eberhard Jäckel mentions the crucial historical peculiarity of the Holocaust that “never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced to kill a certain group of people including the elderly, women, children and infants as completely as possible Implementation of the resolution with all possible state power. "

Dieter Pohl sees the peculiarities of the Holocaust, also in relation to other Nazi mass murders, a state program to murder a group of people completely and in the shortest possible time only because of their origin, based on hostility towards Jews raised to the state doctrine of the German Reich with characteristics of a world Conspiracy theory , which therefore spread rapidly and could become "relevant to action" for large sections of the population:

"What made anti-Semitism explosive in comparison to the other prejudices was primarily the belief, shared by many, that Jews as a collective are in the process of ruling the world, that they are a threat to humanity."

Nevertheless, this did not necessarily cause the mass murder:

“Rather, the fundamental importance of the expansion policy for the escalation of violence, the generally murderous politics in Eastern Europe as well as the disintegration of conventional political strategies should be underlined. Utopian plans for the redesign and the radical exploitation of the occupied territories put any attempts at a legitimate policy inoperative. More and more extremists competed for the most radical possible action against the Jews. This crime was also accompanied by a gigantic raid. In the minds of the anti-Semites, the idea haunted that Europe's Jews had fabulous wealth. So every measure of persecution was accompanied by expropriation ... "

Pohl emphasizes "serious differences" to mass murders under Stalin: There dictatorship and state terror had determined politics since 1918 and were primarily directed against their own citizens:

“In Germany, on the other hand, one could observe a fall in civilization that no one had thought possible. After the war was unleashed by Hitler, the National Socialist regime murdered a considerable part of the European population in almost four years [...]; 97% of all those murdered were foreigners. Above all, the goal and the resulting procedure was specific: the attempt to completely exterminate a minority with all men, women and children where they could be found. The crime against Jewish children alone is unparalleled ... At least 1.5 million Jewish children were killed in World War II ... "

Yehuda Bauer described the Holocaust as a unique, unprecedented form of genocide , measured against its UN definition:

“Because it should lead to the death of anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. In other words, these people's crime was to be born in the first place. [...] All other genocides that occurred before, during and after the Nazi regime were local in nature, i. that is, the genocide occurred within a specific geographic region. In the case of the Holocaust, however, Germany had its sights set on every single Jew around the world. The Nazi ideology was a universal, global and murderous ideology. […] [It] was not rooted in any political, economic or military pragmatism. It was based on the sheer fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy that supposedly ruled the whole world. […] But the Jews had the lowest rank in the camp. Their humiliation reached depths that had never been known or experienced in history. "

Joachim Fest summarized three main arguments for the singularity of the Holocaust:

  • "That their operators did not ask about guilt or innocence, but made racial affiliation the exclusive cause of the decision about life or death"
  • "The administrative and mechanical form [...] in which the mass murder was carried out"
  • that "such relapses into dehumanity occurred in an ancient civilized people." (see civilization breach thesis ).

Peter Longerich, on the other hand, stated that the singularity of the Holocaust could not be justified by the mere number of victims, nor by a special historical role of Jewish victims or the fact that the murderers belonged to a cultural nation:

“The thesis of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, on the other hand, can only be upheld if one emphasizes the intentions of the persecutors to completely murder the Jews and at the same time emphasizes the systematic nature of the persecution measures and mass killings, up to and including the existence of regular killing factories. If one applies these definition criteria, there is some evidence that the Holocaust is actually unprecedented [...]. "

Comparative genocide research can confirm this, since an intention of complete extermination and an analogous systematics for non-Jewish groups of victims cannot be proven; the Armenian genocide most closely resembles the Holocaust.

The priority of the extermination of the Jews also in the course of the war is shown by the following measures: The National Socialists and their helpers organized in the attacked European states (including Poland, France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union) immediate access to the Jewish population, but not to others in the German Reich Victim groups such as the disabled and homosexuals. They gave the ghettoization and deportations to concentration , labor and extermination camps absolute priority in Eastern Europe since 1941. Material urgently needed by the Wehrmacht was first delivered to the extermination camps; in return, delayed supplies for the front were even accepted, regardless of the disadvantages for the conduct of the war. State authorities, Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen worked hand in hand, as was demonstrated in the Nuremberg follow-up process via the "Einsatzgruppen" (see also: Crimes of the Wehrmacht ).

For Saul Friedländer, Heinrich Himmler's Posen speeches show that the perpetrators were fully aware of the exceptional nature of their extermination of the Jews. Like opponents of faith or party opponents in the Middle Ages and modern times, they would have “propagated their goals with pride and generally and naturally recognized them as a binding goal in the sense of an ideological necessity”, but nevertheless kept the implementation strictly secret from the outside world. Himmler's request to his listeners to take this "never written and never to be written glory sheet of our history" into the grave as a secret, Friedländer explains as follows:

“Here Himmler indicates that he and those present - in this case - are aware of an absolute transgression of boundaries, which the following generations will not understand, not even as a necessary means to a 'justified' end. […] The secrecy imposed for all time can only mean that there is no “higher”, “sound” argument that could “justify” such total annihilation in the eyes of posterity. [...] In my opinion, there is a not insignificant difference between the National Socialist and the Stalinist 'plan'. Regardless of how many crimes were committed by and under Stalin, formally they were committed in the name of a universal 'ideal' or - more precisely - that ideal was most likely upheld by the perpetrators themselves as an explanation of their actions. If we take Himmler's solemn desire for secrecy seriously, then the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis becomes a goal that no “higher, generally understandable” purpose can justify. As a result, it seems that the uniqueness of the National Socialist project lies not only in the fact itself, but also in the language of the perpetrators and in the way in which they perceived themselves. "

Accordingly, the extermination of the Jews, which for the National Socialists themselves could not be justified for any broader aim, “stood for amorality beyond all categories of evil”. The widespread denial and suppression of the known facts of the persecution of the Jews in the population, also among the victims themselves, point to a "common denominator": "The 'final solution' was, so to speak, 'unthinkable'."

objection

The ancient historian Christian Meier emphasized in 1990 that the singularity of the Holocaust could not mean incomparability, but only that the Nazi crimes, which can only be determined by comparisons, stood out from the series of other crimes in such a way that "a new chapter in history has been opened". The ancient historian Egon Flaig criticized the singularity thesis in 2007 as trivial: every historical event is unique and unrepeatable in its own way.

Following Ernst Nolte's theses, Stéphane Courtois has been denying the singularity of the Holocaust with regard to the number of victims and ideological causes since 1997. The National Socialists reacted with their concentration camps to Gulags under Stalinism . The mass crimes in systems ruled by the totalitarian ideology of state communism far exceeded those of the Holocaust as a whole. Its alleged singularity has distorted this historical knowledge.

Some researchers found a racism aimed at total exclusion and partial eradication in other genocides, such as the genocide of the Nama and the Herero in 1904 and the genocide of the Armenians 1909–1917. The US authors Ward Churchill and David Stannard described the gradual, approximately 400-year-old, extensive decimation of the Native Americans (" Indians ") as genocide comparable to the Holocaust and determined by an intention to exterminate. They combined this with harsh attacks on US historians who hold on to the singularity of the Holocaust.

Some historians have compared the Nazi mass murder of Roma and Sinti (“ Porajmos ”) with the Holocaust in order to support the descendants of victims of Nazi persecution for equality and compensation claims. In 1998/99 this led to a public controversy between Yehuda Bauer and Gilad Margalit on the one hand, Romani Rose from the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and the historian Silvio Peritore on the other. In the result of a study from 2005, Wolfgang Wippermann stated that the genocide of Sinti and Roma was just as singular as that of the Jews because both were racially motivated, planned and ordered by the Nazi regime, aimed at extermination and carried out systematically.

The former federal commissioner for the Stasi files, Joachim Gauck , warned in a lecture in 2006 at the Robert Bosch Stiftung against elevating the murder of Jews to something uniqueness that deprived him of understanding and analyzing its causes. Such a "de-worldization of the Holocaust" shifts the historical events into a religious dimension: It now appears as "absolute evil " from which "certain post-religious milieus" hope to gain an orientation that would help them through the loss of the "coordinate system [s ] religious meaning ”.

In his laudation for Götz Aly on the occasion of the 2012 Ludwig Börne Prize, the journalist Jens Jessen placed the singularity thesis in line with the theory of fascism and totalitarianism . These would place National Socialism in a larger context and thereby free the crimes against the Jews from their personal imputability: They distracted from the fact that ordinary Germans participated in them or benefited from them. The singularity thesis does the same:

“What happened outside of all human imagination, incomparable, unrepeatable, unique, does not have to and cannot be related to itself by anyone. Inactive repentance is all that remains. "

Research on implementation and perpetrators

Since the mid-1960s, detailed historical knowledge of the implementation of the Holocaust in the individual states occupied by Nazi Germany increased. Jacob Presser described the Nazi persecution of Jews in the Netherlands in 1965, Leni Yahil in Denmark in 1969, Frederick Charry in Bulgaria in 1972, Meir Michaelis in Italy in 1978, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton in France in 1981, Randolph L. Braham in Hungary in 1981. In 1979 Helen Fein first compared the implementation of the Holocaust in different countries.

Until 1977, Adalbert Rückerl evaluated court files from Nazi trials on the processes in the Nazi extermination camps. Helmut Krausnick and Hans Heinrich Wilhelm published a thorough study on the task forces in 1981 . Eugen Kogon and others documented the use of poison gas in the Nazi extermination camps in 1983 .

The connection between the Holocaust and other Nazi mass crimes has also been examined more closely since around 1980. Christian Streit and Alfred Streim described the murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war in 1981 and 1983 . Diemut Majer analyzed the legal discrimination against "foreign" groups in Germany since 1933. In 1985 Ulrich Herbert presented a study on the Nazi treatment of Eastern European "foreign workers". Ernst Klee and Hans-Walter Schmuhl analyzed the euthanasia murders of 1939/40 on institutional patients in Germany and Poland in 1985 and 1987 . Much of this detailed research has been incorporated into more recent overall presentations, such as the historiographical overview by Michael Marrus (1987) and the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1989) compiled by around 200 historians .

The opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s made it possible to carry out detailed investigations into the implementation of the Holocaust in individual regions using original sources. Works on the persecution of Jews in the Warthegau have been published by Ian Kershaw (1992), in Latvia by Dieter Pohl (1993) and Andrew Ezergailis (1996), in East Galicia by Thomas Sandkühler (1996) and Dieter Pohl (1997), in the Lublin district by Bogdan Musial (1999), in Belarus by Christian Gerlach (1999), in East Upper Silesia by Sybille Steinbacher (2000). In 1996 Ralf Ogorreck presented a new paper on the task forces in the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, the role of various areas of Nazi perpetrators, authorities and plans in the extermination of the Jews was examined in more detail. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim demonstrated in 1991 that the plans for research on the East during the Nazi era were already tantamount to the "disappearance" of the Jews. How far they influenced the real decisions about the Holocaust is unclear. In 1995, Aly described the Holocaust as the beginning and part of the comprehensive Nazi genocide plans to change the population structure of Eastern Europe. Christian Gerlach and others placed the Holocaust in the context of the targeted German hunger policy in Eastern Europe.

In addition, Dieter Maier (1994), Wolf Gruner (1997), Norbert Frei , Bernd C. Wagner and others (2000) examined the Nazi system of exploitation and "extermination through work" in special camps, work assignments and treatment methods for mainly Jewish forced laborers . Maier and Gruner showed the role of German labor and community administrations since 1938, Alfons Kenkmann and Bernd A. Rusinek (1999) that of the tax authorities. In 1995 Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann examined and emphasized the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust, which they portrayed as part of the racist war of extermination . Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork supported the decision-making process on the Holocaust in 1996 based on the architectural history of Auschwitz. Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann in 1998 and Karin Orth in 2000 have traced the structural, functional and social development of the other Nazi concentration camps in detail.

The regionalization and diversification of research has corrected older interpretations of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic "administrative murder" organized and carried out by a relatively manageable group of main perpetrators, mainly for ideological motives (intentionalists) or competing, independent authorities (functionalists). Peter Longerich summed up in 2002:

“The more research is shaped by thematic cross-sections, regionally based work and micro-studies, the more it becomes clear that the murder of European Jews is a gigantic massacre of millions of people, perpetrated by more than a hundred thousand perpetrators and helpers under the eyes of an incalculable number of contemporaries who were passive witnesses to the crime. "

See also

Sources and documents

The Trial of the Major War Criminals (German)
HG Adler: Theresienstadt (1955)
  • Jacob Robinson (Institute of Jewish Affairs, ed.): Hitler's Ten-Year War on the Jews. New York 1943; New edition, Kessinger Publishing, 2008, ISBN 1-4367-0578-9 .
  • Jacob Apenszlak (Ed.): The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry under the Nazi Occupation. American Federation for Polish Jews, Roy Publishers, New York 1943. New edition: Arno Lustiger , Syndikat Buchgesellschaft, 1995
  • Boris Shub, Zorach Warhaftig (Institute of Jewish Affairs, ed.): Starvation over Europe made in Germany, a documented record. New York 1943
  • Eugene M. Kulischer: The Displacement of Population in Europe. Montreal 1943
  • Samuel Kassow: Ringelblum's Legacy: The Secret Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto . ( Oneg Schabbat , 1939–1944) Rowohlt, Reinbek 2010, ISBN 978-3-498-03547-1 .
  • Wassili Grossmann, Ilja Ehrenburg: The Black Book. The genocide of the Soviet Jews. (Russian, 1946) German: Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994
  • Seymour Krieger: Nazi Germany's War against the Jews. American Jewish Conference, New York 1947
  • Eugene Levai: Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry. Central European Times Publication, Zurich 1948
  • War crimes trials before the Nuremberg Military Court according to Control Council Act No. 10 (IMT files and interrogation protocols, 1947–1949, 42 volumes) Microfilm edition, Olms, Hildesheim
  • Institute for Contemporary History (Ed.): Eyewitness Reports , 1953
  • Bruno Blau: The right of exception for the Jews in Germany. (1952) Verlag Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 2nd edition 1954
  • Helmut Heiber : From the files of Gauleiter Kube. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, issue 1, 1956, pp. 67–92 (PDF file; 5.2 MB)
  • Hans-Günter Adler: Work on the Theresienstadt concentration camp (1955, 1958), on the deportation of Jews from Germany (1974)
  • Martin Broszat (Ed.): Commandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographical notes of Rudolf Höß. (1958) Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, new edition 1998, ISBN 3-423-30127-9 .
  • Joseph Wulf: The Third Reich and its executors. The Liquitation of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Documents and reports. (1958, 1961) Extended new edition, Wiesbaden 1989, ISBN 3-925037-47-0 .
  • Joseph Wulf: Lodz . Federal Center for Homeland Service, Bonn 1962
  • State of Israel, Ministry of Justice: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem 1961. (Jerusalem 1992) Rubin Mass, 1998, ISBN 965-09-0503-0 .
  • Black Book of Localities whose Jewish Population was Exterminated by the Nazis , Jerusalem 1965
  • Jacob Robinson, Yehuda Bauer (Ed.): Guide to Unpublished Materials of the Holocaust Period. Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit bi-Yerushalayim, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Division of Holocaust Studies. Vol. I-VI, 1970-1981
  • John Mendelsohn (Ed.): The Holocaust. Selected documents in eighteen volumes. (New York 1982) Lawbook Exchange Ltd, Reprinted 2010, ISBN 1-61619-000-0 .
  • Yeshayahu Jelinek: The Holocaust of Slovakian an Croatian Jewry from the Historiographical Viewpoint. A comparative analysis. (1988, contains Yugoslav reports from 1946 ff.)
  • Gideon Greif: "We wept without tears ...". Eyewitness reports from the Jewish “Sonderkommando” in Auschwitz. 6th edition, Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13914-7 .
  • Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps . Nine volumes, Beck, Munich 2005–2009
  • Federal Archives , Institute for Contemporary History and Others (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 . (16 volumes, previously published: Volumes 1–5, 7, 9. For details, see here )
Source criticism
  • Raul Hilberg: The sources of the Holocaust. Decipher and interpret. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3596181801 .
  • Jürgen Finger, Sven Keller, Andreas Wirsching: From Law to History. Files from Nazi trials as sources of contemporary history. Göttingen 2009, ISBN 3-525-35500-9 .

literature

Bibliographies
  • Philip Friedman: Bibliography of Books in Hebrew on the Jewish Catastrophe and Heroism in Europe , 1960
  • Jacob Robinson: The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English , 1973
  • Philip Friedman: The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecents, History, Reflections (Ed .: Yad Vashem), Jerusalem 1976
  • Emil Fackenheim: The Jewish Return into History , New York 1978
  • Harry Jams Cargas: The Holocaust: An Annotated Bibliography. American Library Association, Chicago / London 1985
  • Abraham J. Edelheit, Herschel Edelheit: Bibliography on Holocaust Literature. Westview Press, Boulder / Colorado 1986
  • Saul S. Friedman (Ed.): Holocaust Literature. A Handbook of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings. Greenwood Press, Westport / Connecticut / London 1993, ISBN 0-313-26221-7
Research history
  • Wolfgang Scheffler: Problems of Holocaust Research. In: Stefi Jersch-Wenzel (Ed.): Germans - Poles - Jews. Your relationships from the beginning to the 20th century. Copress, 1991, ISBN 3-7678-0694-0 , pp. 259-281.
  • Dieter Pohl: The Holocaust Research and Goldhagen's Theses. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) 45 (1997), pp. 1–48 -
  • Ulrich Herbert: National Socialist Extermination Policy 1939–1945. New research and controversy. Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13772-1 .
  • Ulrich von Hehl : National Socialist Rule. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-55020-9 (Part II: Basic problems and trends in research ).
  • Gertrud Koch (Ed.): Fault lines. Trends in Holocaust Research. Böhlau, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-412-07199-4 .
  • Peter Longerich: Holocaust. In: Wilhelm Heitmeyer: International manual of violence research. 2002, pp. 177-214.
  • Fred Kautz: Holocaust research in the barrage of flak helpers. Edition Av, 2002, ISBN 3-936049-09-2 .
  • Dan Michman: The Historiography of the Shoah from a Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations - terminology - views - basic questions. Dölling & Galitz, 2001, ISBN 3-935549-08-3 .
  • Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. 3rd edition, Wallstein, Jena 2004, ISBN 3-89244-610-5 .
  • David Banker. Dan Michman (Ed.): Holocaust Historiography in Context. Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Berghahn Books, 2009, ISBN 9653083260 .
  • Saul Friedländer: Describing the Holocaust - Towards an Integrated History. Wallstein, Jena 2010, ISBN 3-8353-0671-5 .
  • Boaz Cohen: Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution. Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2012, ISBN 0-415-60105-3 .
  • Micha Brumlik, Karol Sauerland: Rethinking, Silence, Remembering: The late coming to terms with the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Fritz Bauer Institute, Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-593-39271-2 .
Overall representations
  • Léon Poliakov: Breviaire de la haine , 1951; English: Harvest of Hate , 1979
  • Gerald Reitlinger: The Final Solution , 1953
  • Joseph Tenenbaum: Race and Reich. The Story of an Epoch. Twayne, New York 1956
  • Raul Hilberg: The Destruction of the European Jews , 1961; German: The annihilation of the European Jews
  • Nora Levin: The Holocaust , 1968
  • Uwe Dietrich Adam: Jewish Policy in the Third Reich , 1972
  • Lucy Davidowicz: The War against the Jews , 1975
  • Louis S. Snyder: Encyclopedia of the Third Reich , New York 1976
  • Yehuda Bauer: A History of the Holocaust , 1982
  • Martin Gilbert: The Holocaust , 1985
  • Leni Yahil: The Holocaust , 1987
  • Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , 1st edition 1987, 2nd edition 1998
  • Steven T. Katz : The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age , New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-19-507220-0 .
  • Götz Aly: Final Solution , 1995
  • Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews , Volume 1–3
  • Christopher Browning: Jewish murder: Nazi politics, forced labor and the behavior of the perpetrators. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-005210-2 .
  • Dieter Pohl: Holocaust. The causes - what happened - the consequences. Herder Spectrum, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000
  • Martin Gilbert: The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust. Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2009/2012, ISBN 0-415-48481-2 .
Decision and planning
  • Alan Bullock: Hitler. A study on tyranny , English 1952, German 1977
  • Eberhard Jäckel: Hitler's Weltanschauung , 1969
  • Joachim Fest: Hitler. A biography , 1973
  • Martin Broszat: Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution , 1977
  • Hans Mommsen: Hitler's position in the National Socialist system of rule , in: Gerhard Hirschfeld (Hrsg.): The “Führerstaat”. Myth and Reality , 1981, pp. 43-72.
  • Christopher Browning: On the Genesis of the "Final Solution". An answer to Martin Broszat , 1981
  • Gerald Fleming: Hitler and the Final Solution. "It is the Fuhrer's wish ..." , 1982
  • Hans Mommsen: The Realization of the Utopian: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the “Third Reich” , 1983
  • Philippe Burrin: Hitler and the Jews. The decision for the genocide , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-046308-0 .
  • Dieter Pohl: From “Jewish Policy” to the Murder of Jews. The Lublin District of the General Government 1939–1944 , Frankfurt am Main 1993
  • Hans Safrian: The Eichmann Men , Vienna 1995
  • Peter Witte: Two Decisions concerning the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question': Deportations to Lodz and the Mass Murder in Chelmno , in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9/3, London / Jerusalem 1995
  • Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945 , Munich 1997
  • Christian Gerlach: The Wannsee Conference, the fate of German Jews and Hitler's fundamental decision to murder all Jews in Europe , in: Werkstatt Geschichte , No. 18/1997, pp. 7–44.
  • LJ Hartog: The order to murder Jews. Hitler, Amerika und die Juden , Syndikat Buchgesellschaft Bodenheim, 1st edition 1997, 2nd edition 2000, ISBN 3-931705-11-0 .
  • Richard Breitman: Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew , Hill & Wang Publishers, 1st edition 1998, ISBN 0-8090-3819-6 (English); German first edition: State Secrets. The Crimes of the Nazis - Tolerated by the Allies , Blessing, 1999, ISBN 3-89667-056-5 .
  • Peter Longerich: The escalation of the Nazi persecution of Jews to the “final solution”. Fall 1939 to Summer 1942 , lecture at the Symposium on the Origins of Nazi Policy , Gainesville, Florida / USA, 1998
  • Peter Longerich: The unwritten order. Hitler and the way to the "final solution" , Piper, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-492-04295-3 .
Singularity Debate
  • Eberhard Jäckel: The miserable practice of subordinates , in: Historikerstreit , Munich 1987, ISBN 3-492-10816-4 .
  • Saul Friedländer: The “Final Solution”. About the discomfort in interpreting history. In: Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): The historical place of National Socialism. Approximations. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-596-24445-5 .
  • Egon Flaig : The incomparable, here's an event , in: Merkur 701, October 2007, pp. 978–981.
  • Christian Meier: On the singularity of the Holocaust. In: Christian Meier (ed.): 40 years after Auschwitz , 2nd expanded edition, Munich 1990
Shoa and Porajmos
  • Romani Rose: "The same order was valid for both at the time". A reply to Yehuda Bauer's theses on the genocide of European Jews, Sinti and Roma. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 43 (1998), pp. 467–472.
  • Yehuda Bauer: "The same order did not apply to both of them". A response to Romani Rose's theses on the genocide of European Jews, Sinti and Roma. In: Blätter for German and international politics, 43 (1998), no. 11, pp. 1380-1386.
  • Gilad Margalit: An answer to Silvio Peritore. In: GWU 50 (1999), issue. 10, pp. 610-616.
  • Silvio Peritore: The 'Gypsy Question' in National Socialism. Notes on the article by Gilad Margalit. In: GWU 50 (1999), Issue 10, pp. 605-609.
  • Wolfgang Wippermann: Chosen victims? Shoa and Porrajmos in comparison. A controversy. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86596-003-0 .
Nazi camp system
  • Geoffrey P. Megargee (Ed.): The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. Indiana University Press
Volume 1, 2009, ISBN 0-253-35328-9 .
Volume 2, 2012, ISBN 0-253-35599-0 .
  • Guy Miron (Ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust . 2 volumes. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009 ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 .
Casualty numbers
  • Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Dimension of the genocide. The number of Jewish victims of National Socialism. (1991) Dtv, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-04690-2 .
  • Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933–1945. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 .
Magazines
  • Jacob Robinson, Philip Friedman: Guide to Jewish History Under Nazi Impact , 1960

Web links

swell
Holocaust in the historians' dispute

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Kühl: Holocaust research researches itself sociological perspectives on the problems of contemporary history research. Bielefeld University, Chair of Sociology, November 2, 2017, accessed on January 4, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e For the publications see the bibliography .
  3. ↑ Examples in the two-volume collection of reports from the Institute for Contemporary History , 1958
  4. ^ Guy Miron: The Leo Baeck Institute and German-Jewish Historiography on the Holocaust. In: David Bankier, Dan Michman (eds.): Holocaust Historiography in Context. 2009, p. 305
  5. ^ Simon Wiesenthal Archive: History of the Documentation Center
  6. ↑ Der Spiegel, December 4, 2006: Holocaust Research: FU Berlin gets huge video archive
  7. ^ Hans Michael Kloth (Der Spiegel, November 18, 2009): Holocaust Research: Monument to leaf through
  8. ^ Jochen Böhler: Second World War and Holocaust Research at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw: The institute project “Prelude to the War of Extermination. The German attack on Poland in 1939 ”.
  9. ↑ Homepage of the Fritz Bauer Institute
  10. ↑ EHRI project
  11. ↑ EHRI Project: "Public History of the Holocaust"
  12. ^ Institute for Contemporary History: "The Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History" ( Memento from July 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ German The war against the Jews. Own translation. Kindler, Munich 1979 ISBN 3-463-00768-1 Fourier, Wiesbaden 1979 ISBN 3-925037-08-X . With a detailed list of sources and references
  14. ↑ Martin Broszat: Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution , 1977, p. 63 + note 27
  15. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Hitler's position in the National Socialist system of rule , in: Gerhard Hirschfeld (Hrsg.): Der "Führerstaat". Myth and Reality , 1981, pp. 43-72.
  16. ↑ Hans Mommsen: The Realization of the Utopian: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the “Third Reich” , 1983
  17. ↑ Gerald Fleming: Hitler and the Final Solution. "It is the leader's wish ..." , 1982, p. 14 ff.
  18. ↑ Christopher Browning: On the Genesis of the "Final Solution". An answer to Martin Broszat , 1981
  19. ↑ Peter Longerich: The unwritten order. Hitler and the way to the "final solution" , Piper, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-492-04295-3 .
  20. ↑ Christopher Browning: Judenmord. Chapter 2: The Decision-Making Process in the Center of Power - Setting the Course for the “Final Solution” , 2001, pp. 47–55.
  21. ↑ Peter Longerich: The escalation of the Nazi persecution of Jews to the "final solution". Fall 1939 to Summer 1942 , lecture at the Symposium on the Origins of Nazi Policy , Gainesville, Florida / USA, 1998
  22. ↑ Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945 , Munich 1997
  23. ^ Richard Breitman: Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew , Hill & Wang Publishers, 1st edition 1998, ISBN 0-8090-3819-6 (English); German first edition: State Secrets. The Crimes of the Nazis - Tolerated by the Allies , Blessing, 1999, ISBN 3-89667-056-5 .
  24. ^ Philippe Burrin: Hitler and the Jews. The decision for the genocide , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-046308-0
  25. ^ Christian Streit: No comrades , Dietz Verlag, Bonn 1997 (new edition), ISBN 3-8012-5023-7
  26. ↑ Alfred Streim: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the Barbarossa case , Müller Jur. Vlg.CF, 1981, ISBN 3-8114-2281-2
  27. ↑ Christopher Browning: Judenmord. Chapter 2: The Decision-Making Process in the Center of Power - Setting the Course for the “Final Solution” , 2001, pp. 47–55.
  28. ↑ Dieter Pohl: From the "Jewish policy" to the murder of Jews. The Lublin District of the General Government 1939–1944 , Frankfurt am Main 1993
  29. ↑ Götz Aly: Final Solution , 1995
  30. ^ Peter Witte: Two Decisions concerning the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question': Deportations to Lodz and the Mass Murder in Chelmno , in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9/3, London / Jerusalem 1995
  31. ^ Hans Safrian: The Eichmann men , Vienna 1995
  32. ↑ LJ Hartog: The order to murder Jews. Hitler, Amerika und die Juden , Syndikat Buchgesellschaft Bodenheim, 1st edition 1997, 2nd edition 2000, ISBN 3-931705-11-0 ; presented in Chronology of the Holocaust: Hitler's Threat: The Greatest Hostage-Taking in History
  33. ↑ Christian Gerlach: The Wannsee Conference, the fate of the German Jews and Hitler's fundamental decision to murder all Jews in Europe , in: Werkstatt Geschichte , No. 18/1997, pp. 7–44; presented by Ulrich Herbert: A “Führer decision” to the “final solution”? New approaches in an old discussion , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from 14./15. March 1998
  34. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews , Volume 1, 2000, pp. 111-120
  35. ↑ Ernst Nolte: Past that does not want to pass. FAZ, June 6, 1986; in: Ernst Reinhard Piper (Ed.): "Historikerstreit". Documentation of the controversy about the uniqueness of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews. Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-492-10816-4 , pp. 39-46
  36. ↑ Examples: Max Brym : History revisionists and anti-Semites in intellectual guise
  37. ↑ Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , 2nd edition 1998, foreword to 1st edition 1987, p. 12
  38. ↑ Eberhard Jäckel, Die miserable practice of subordinates , in: Historikerstreit , Munich 1987, ISBN 3-492-10816-4 , p. 118
  39. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933–1945 , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 , p. 109 f.
  40. ^ Dieter Pohl: Holocaust. The causes - what happened - the consequences. Herder Spectrum, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, p. 182
  41. ↑ David Bankier (ed. On behalf of the Yad Vashem Memorial): Questions about the Holocaust. Interviews with prominent researchers and thinkers: Interviews with Christopher Browning, Jacques Derrida, Saul Friedländer, Hans Mommsen and others. a. , Wallstein Verlag, 2006, p. 88 f.
  42. ↑ Peter Longerich: Holocaust , in: Wilhelm Heitmeyer: International manual of violence research. 2002, p. 179 f.
  43. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The "Final Solution". About the discomfort in interpreting history. In: Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): The historical place of National Socialism. Approximations. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-596-24445-5 , pp. 84 f.
  44. ↑ Christian Meier: On the singularity of the Holocaust , in (ders.): 40 years after Auschwitz , 2nd expanded edition, Munich 1990, p. 38
  45. ↑ Egon Flaig: The Incomparable, Here It Will Be Event , in: Merkur 701, October 2007, pp. 978–981
  46. ↑ Stephane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism: oppression, crime and terror. Piper, one-time special edition, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-04664-9 , p. 35 and more
  47. ^ Ward Churchill: A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. City Lights, 1998, ISBN 0-87286-323-9 ; David E. Stannard: Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship. In: Alan S. Rosenbaum (Ed.): Is the Holocaust unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. (1994) Westview Press, 3rd Edition 2008, ISBN 978-0-8133-4406-5 , pp. 163-208
  48. ↑ Joachim Gauck: What memories does Europe need? In: Robert Bosch Stiftung (Ed.): Building Europe, Shaping Change . Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-939574-02-3 ( full text ( memento of March 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF; 3.0 MB ; accessed on March 24, 2019]).
  49. ↑ Jens Jessen: In Hitler's Society . In: Die Zeit from June 6, 2012, p. 59.
  50. ^ Peter Longerich: Holocaust. In: Wilhelm Heitmeyer: International manual of violence research. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2002, ISBN 3-531-13500-7 , p. 188