[This article is a selection from Chapter 5 of Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal.]
Whenever anti-Semitic attitudes or acts are mentioned, de Zayas observes, Goldhagen speaks of “the Germans”—not “the Nazis,” or even “many Germans”—offering no justification at all; it is simply a polemical trick. He neglects to mention well-known facts, e.g., that everyone connected with the killing of the Jews was bound by Führer Order no. 1, as well as by special orders from Himmler, mandating the strictest silence, under penalty of death. So it should not be surprising that, for example, the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, during the war a Luftwaffe officer, testified that he had never heard or known anything of the annihilation of the Jews; or that Countess Dönhoff, publisher of the liberal paper, Die Zeit, should state that, despite her connections to many key people during the war, she knew nothing of the mass-killings in the camps, and that “I heard the name ‘Auschwitz’ for the first time after the war.” Goldhagen simply disregards major standard works that contradict his thesis. He claims, for example, that the German people approved of and joined in the Kristallnacht (the widespread 1938 murder of Jews and destruction of synagogues and businesses by Nazi thugs) in a kind of nation-wide Volksfest. Yet Sarah Gordon, in her authoritative Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” wrote: “there was a torrent of reports indicating public disapproval of Kristallnacht . . . [whatever the motivation] what is not in doubt, however, is the fact that the majority did disapprove . . . after Kristallnacht, the Nazis deliberately tried to conceal their measures against the Jews.”
None of the scholarly critics made much of an impression on audiences that witnessed the debates in the United States or during Goldhagen’s tour of Germany late last summer, and certainly not on sales of the book. In any case, most of them, except for de Zayas, overlooked the function performed by a work such as Goldhagen’s. While he indicts the Germans as pathologically anti-Semitic and while some of his critics retort that, no, all of Christendom, indeed, Christianity itself, is implicated in the Jewish genocide, attention is kept fixed on the supposed single great crime of the recent past, if not of all of human history to the virtual exclusion of all others. In particular, the misdeeds of Communist regimes are unduly neglected.
A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of Berlin, ignited the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, by asking: “Didn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ come before Auschwitz? Wasn’t the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the ‘race murder’ of the National Socialists?” These are still good questions. In fact, Stalinist—and Maoist—offenses, while acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. In the United States, it is possible for a person who keeps abreast of the news media to encounter references to the Holocaust virtually every day of his life. Yet who has heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China suggest a total in the range of tens of millions. Do these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?
Moreover, there is an aspect of Stalinist atrocities that is very pertinent to the “Goldhagen Debate.” In their history of the Soviet Union, Utopia in Power, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich touch on the issue of whether the German people had full knowledge of the Nazi crimes. They state no opinion. But regarding the Soviets’ murderous war on the peasantry, including the Ukrainian terror famine, they write:
There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, “dekulakized persons,” and “kulak henchmen” died alike. They were not considered human.
There has been no outcry for the Russian people to seek atonement and no one speaks of their “eternal guilt.” It goes without saying that the misdeeds of Communism, in Russia, China, and elsewhere are never debited to internationalism and egalitarianism as those of Nazism are to nationalism and racism.
Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to “trivialize” the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low-rent area of Washington?
If the crimes of Communism go relatively unmentioned, what are we to say of crimes committed against Germans? One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so. In fact— the reader may find this incredible— there was a time when American conservatives took the lead in publicizing Allied, and especially American, atrocities against Germans. Historians and high-level journalists like William Henry Chamberlin, in America’s Second Crusade and Freda Utley, in The High Cost of Vengeance pilloried those who had committed what Utley called “our crimes against humanity”— the men who directed the terror bombing of the German cities, conspired in the expulsion of some twelve million Germans from their ancestral lands in the east (in the course of which about two million died—see de Zayas’s Nemesis at Potsdam), and plotted the “final solution of the German question” through the Morgenthau Plan. Utley even exposed the sham “Dachau trials” of German soldiers and civilians in the first years of the Allied occupation, detailing the use of methods “worthy of the GPU, the Gestapo, and the SS” to extort confessions. She insisted that the same ethical standards had to be applied to victors and vanquished alike. If not, then we were declaring that “Hitler was justified in his belief that ‘might makes right.’ ” Both books were brought out by the late Henry Regnery, one of the last of the Old Right greats, whose house was the bastion of post-World War II revisionism, publishing works like Charles Callan Tansill’s classic, Back Door to War.
Keeping the Nazi period constantly before our eyes serves the ideological interests of a number of influential groups. That it benefits the Zionist cause, at least as many Zionists see it, is obvious. It is highly useful also to the advocates of a globalist America. Hitler and the crying need for the great crusade to destroy him are the chief exhibits in their case against any form of American “isolationism,” past or present. Any suggestion that our Soviet ally in that crusade was guilty of even greater offenses than Nazi Germany, that the United States government itself was incriminated in barbarous acts during and in the aftermath of that war, must be downplayed or suppressed, lest the historical picture grow too complex.
The obsession with the never-ending guilt of the Germans also advances the ends of those who look forward to the extinction of the nation-state and national identity, at least for the West. As the philosopher Robert Maurer argues, it inculcates in the Germans “a permanent bad conscience, and keeps them from developing any normal national self-awareness.” In this way, it functions “as a model for the cosmopolitan supersession of every nationalism,” which many today are striving towards. Ernst Nolte has recently suggested another strategy at work, aiming at the same goal. Nothing is clearer than that we are in the midst of a vast campaign to delegitimize Western civilization. In this campaign, Nolte writes, radical feminism joins with Third World anti-Occidentalism and multiculturalism within the Western nations “to instrumentalize to the highest degree the ‘murder of six millions Jews by the Germans,’ and to place it in the larger context of the genocides by the predatory and conquering West, so that ‘homo hitlerensis’ ultimately appears as merely a special case of ‘homo occidentalis.’ ” The purpose is to strike at “the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of the national states, achieved over centuries, and open the gates to a massive immigration,” so that in the end the nations of the West should cease to exist.
There seem to be cultural dynamics operating that will intensify rather than abate the present fixation. Michael Wolffsohn, an Israeli-born Jew who teaches modern history in Germany, has warned that Judaism is being emptied of its religious content and linked solely to the tribulations of the Jews through history, above all, the Holocaust. More than one commentator has noted that as the West loses any sense of morality rooted in reason, tradition, or faith, yet still feels the need for some secure moral direction, it increasingly finds it in the one acknowledged “absolute evil,” the Holocaust. If these claims are true, then the growing secularization of Judaism and the moral disarray of our culture will continue to make victims of the Germans and all the peoples of the West.
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