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The Holocaust Mark Roseman

Abstract This chapter outlines some of the Holocaust’s fundamental causes and characteristics, and its parallels and contrasts with other genocides. It begins by reminding readers of the profound questioning and uncertainty about human progress that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust, as a result of which our relationship to the modern world has changed. It notes the continuing difficulty historians, social scientists and others face in applying general models or frameworks to explain the Holocaust, despite a growing consensus that it is neither uniquely mysterious nor a unique event. It then identifies a series of causal moments – crisis, ideology, participation, war, imperialism, and collaboration – that provide entry points to understanding the Holocaust, and at the same time illustrate the ways it mirrors and diverges from other genocides and mega-murders. It concludes with one of the Holocaust’s most distinctive features – the scale and sophistication of victim chronicles of the event.

Keywords Holocaust; Genocide; Imperialism; Crisis; Ideology; Antisemitism; National Socialism; Totalitarianism; Nationalism; Total War

The question of the century The Holocaust is the term now most commonly used to describe the Nazi genocide of European Jews.1 Between 1939 and 1945 mass shootings, gassing in specially constructed extermination camps, murderous labor, starvation in ghettos, and other measures resulted in the deaths of between 5.1 and 6.2 million Jews. The Nazis themselves referred to their anti-Jewish measures as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” At first this verbal formula did not necessarily mean outright murder, but evolved through various plans for the expulsion and territorial concentration of European Jewry. At the latest by the end of 1941 it had become a euphemism for a program of extermination that sought to eliminate some 11 million Jews. The Jewish genocide was the most comprehensive, systematic, and unrelenting element of the Nazis’ exterminatory goals that was actually implemented. Yet the Nazis targeted many

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other groups too, killing directly or through neglect millions of Polish and Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Roma, and the mentally and physically handicapped (homosexuals were viciously persecuted but not the subject of mass killings). The projected territorial cleansings for future settlement in Poland and on Soviet territory, if realized, would undoubtedly have entailed murdering even larger numbers.

Ever since victims and other contemporaries first began to grapple with the enormity of what was happening, we have had difficulty making sense of the Nazi war against the Jews. Every grand project in history aspiring to the mass murder of other human beings has provoked consternation and examination, but none has given rise to the profound reflection among historians, philosophers, moral theorists and the European and North American public that followed the Holocaust. The unprecedented attention has produced great works of literature, philosophy, and social analysis and has shaped our understanding of the modern world. It has not, however, led to consensus on the Holocaust’s causes, character or implications. Indeed, the sheer volume of texts now constitutes almost a hindrance to our understanding.

One influential strand of writing on the Holocaust in fact questioned whether we could ever hope to understand it.2 Even while the events were unfolding, many victim diaries written in extremis explicitly discussed the impossibility of conveying what was happening around them.3 By now, sophisticated reflection on the problem of representing the past, much of it provoked by the Holocaust, has influenced the historical discipline as a whole.4 As a result scholars have grown impatient with the idea of the Holocaust as a unique blind spot and believe it to be as open to human understanding as other challenging historical phenomena.5 Nonetheless, we are left with a number of profound and interrelated questions on which observers continue to disagree.

The first is whether the postwar construct of the “Holocaust” (as against the undisputable facts of the murder of millions of Jews by gas and shootings) obscures more than it reveals by differentiating one aspect of a more comprehensive body of Nazi policies. In the postwar Nuremberg trials Nazi actions against Jews were simply one element in a litany of Nazi crimes. Until well into the 1970s, English- and German-language historians of the Nazi period gave the Holocaust little separate attention if they mentioned it at all. It was simply the most irrational of the disastrous consequences of the key historical fact demanding explanation: that a wild, brutish, rabidly nationalist and racist party had come to power in 1933. Only since the 1980s has the vanishing point on the historical canvas, as one historian put it, definitively

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shifted from “1933” to “1941” i.e. to the year in which genocide crystallized into policy.6 It is fair to say that for long many German and Anglo-Saxon historians failed to recognize the enormity of the Holocaust. Nowadays, however, when the Holocaust’s distinctness as a separate phenomenon is challenged, then because the impulses and ideas that led to it are seen as part of something on an even more horrific scale. Scholars of Nazi planning and territorial settlement have argued that the murder of Jews was merely a down payment on a truly gargantuan plan of territorial cleansing, reorganization and settlement planned for Eastern Europe.7 Other historians have drawn attention to the Nazis’ comprehensive racial agenda at home and abroad, of which again anti-Jewish measures are seen as just one lethal installment.8 Even if good reasons remain to see the war against the Jews as more than just a subset of a larger enterprise, it is clear at the very least that the Holocaust must always be considered with an eye to other contexts of murderous social engineering.

For many observers, and this has been true particularly since the 1960s, the special status of the Holocaust is a given. The issue has been whether and how to connect so singular a phenomenon to the more general characteristics of the modern world. In other words, was the Holocaust in the end somehow embedded in larger phenomena or processes? Whilst the first impulse of the postwar world was to marginalize the Holocaust as a horrific anomaly, there were, from the start, observers who felt that it raised profound questions about human progress and civilization.9 More than other modern mass violence the Holocaust has raised questions about modernity, partly because Germany, a source of culture, knowledge, and skilled manufacture, had long epitomized civilization and intellectual sophistication. What is more, the Jewish genocide clearly depended on planning, bureaucracy, the division of labor, industrial machinery, telegraph and telephone, rail and truck, and other trappings of modern society; its iconic invention – the extermination camp – chillingly repurposed the technology and practices of factory production to the task of murdering human beings, extracting value from their bodies, and incinerating them. All this cried out for meaning. In response historians and social scientists offered a wide variety of broader contexts in which to place the Holocaust as, for example, totalitarianism,10 modernity per se,11 imperialism,12 antisemitism,13 or comparative genocide.14 But the task of reconciling the singular shock that the Holocaust has occasioned, and the evident links between it and other features and happenings in the modern world, continues to be a challenging one.

This search for the Holocaust’s relationship to the modern world shades into another key debate which has exercised scholars in recent decades, namely how it compares

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with other examples of mass violence.15 In recent times scholars have not only grown impatient with the idea that the Holocaust is hidden within a “sacred sanctum” of inaccessible reality, but also come to see an untenable moral claim in the idea that the Holocaust is unique.16 But if it is not unique, why has it received more attention than any other mass murder? It can be plausibly argued that a certain western narcissism or myopia is at work when we obsess about violence in our front yard, ignoring tragedies further afield, and indeed ignoring past colonial violence in which we may have been involved. In part, the Holocaust’s resonance in the West reflects Jews’ intellectual and cultural presence in the US and elsewhere, which encourages identification with the victims among influential thinkers and opinion makers. Doubtless it also feeds off Judaism’s historically contested place in Christian cultures, which enhanced the shock value of such massive Jewish martyrdom in the West, as evidenced by the very significant changes in official church positions towards Judaism since 1945. All this may mean that the Holocaust has appeared more singular than it unfortunately is.

What is clear is that the Holocaust was not the only, and, sadly, was far from the largest mass murder in recent history (Stalin and Mao were both responsible for many more deaths), and that the 20th century saw all too many mega-murders and efforts to eliminate entire peoples. We are thus bound to ask whether the Nazis’ genocide follows some shared logic. Yet even in such dismal company, the territorial scope of the Nazis’ genocidal aspirations is striking – covering the length and breadth of the Nazi empire, and aided by collaborators across Europe, the Nazi murder of European Jewry is the only pan-imperial genocide in history. The Nazis even putatively aimed at global murder, encompassing territories over which they had no control and no aspiration to rule, implying a remarkable commitment to total elimination of a people. What makes this commitment even harder to fathom is the fact that the Holocaust seems singularly pointless. All mass murders require that some myth of evil be created around the victims so that the perpetrators can convince themselves that they are acting in self-defense. But the Holocaust not only constructed the Jews as an imaginary enemy but also more unusually strove for few tangible benefits – it brought in no territory, responded to no military or paramilitary threat, cleared no ground for population settlement, removed no obstacle to economic development, and stole resources that, while sufficient to finance the killing program, were totally disproportionate to the moral thresholds crossed. One of the oddities of the current state of historiography is that while many scholars strongly reject the idea that the Holocaust was unique, every effort to fit it into common pattern with other genocides or mass killings has failed. Here, as in other areas of Holocaust scholarship, a moral tussle may stand in the way of analytical clarity.

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Crisis Extreme violence is often a function of some kind of extreme societal crisis. In this respect, the Holocaust fits the general pattern, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic way. For one thing, it took three different kinds of crisis to produce the Holocaust. The first and furthest removed from the murderous events of the 1940s was yet the same time in some ways the most important; namely the crisis of defeat and revolution after WW1 when the German monarchy collapsed, and revolution broke out in Berlin followed by a quasi-civil war. It was in this political tumult that the National Socialist German Workers Party, Nazi Party for short, emerged as a political and paramilitary movement, and acquired its ideology, character, and style. Hitler rapidly imposed his stamp as leader and principal ideologue, even whilst allowing his underlings considerable latitude as to particular stances and policies. At the end of 1923 Germany’s crisis passed its peak, political and financial conditions were stabilized, and the Nazi Party went into the political wilderness.

However important the postwar crisis was for forging the party’s goals and character, the Nazis would have been at best a footnote in history had not a second crisis, the World Depression ushered in by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, terminally weakened postwar Germany’s fragile political legitimacy. It was only in 1932, in the wake of six million unemployed, a government fiscal policy that was indisputably making things worse, fears of Communist growth, and a series of massive votes for the Nazis, that Hitler and his peers were given the elite backing that enabled them to gain control of the levers of state. Arguably, this second crisis did not fundamentally change the party’s mission. True, the Nazis were now obliged to produce a solution to unemployment in order to deliver on their election promises, and they also had to take some care not to alienate important political, business and military elites until their position was impregnable. But what this second crisis delivered was power: a radical band of ideologues and street thugs now had at its disposal one of the most effective and advanced bureaucracies in the world, a potentially powerful economy, and the still functioning core of a lethal war machine.

The third “crisis” comprised the strains and demands of total war that provided the backcloth for the Nazis’ embrace of genocide in the Soviet Union in summer 1941. As we will see in a moment, war created the exigencies and opportunities that pushed the Nazis over the cliff into genocide. But while all these crises were clearly important they were more obliquely linked to murder than in Armenia, Cambodia, or Rwanda (though the Armenian and Rwandan prehistories contain longer-term caesurae of their own).17 The key crisis that gave the Nazis their character took place more than two decades

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before the Holocaust. The 1930s saw the Nazis moving their Jewish policy forward at top speed to the extent that within just five years Germany’s prosperous Jewish community of 1933 had been almost completely ejected from the economy and from society. But this was while the Nazis were solving almost all the problems that had catapulted them to power. By 1938, when the Nazis unleashed the pogrom night of Kristallnacht, destroying most remaining Jewish businesses and synagogues and imprisoning over 30,000 Jewish men, they had ended unemployment, utterly crushed the threat from the left, dissolved the trade unions, rallied a cheering nation behind their foreign policy, restored Germany’s standing the world, and reversed virtually every territorial, military and symbolic restriction imposed by the Versailles Treaty. At the same time, the Nazis’ pace of rearmament was putting huge strains on the economy, and Hitler’s foreign policy was testing the limits of the Allies’ patience with an increasingly risky foreign policy. In that sense the Nazis were creating their own crisis, and, as we will see, anti-Jewish measures sharpened in tandem.

Ideology It seems obvious, indeed axiomatic, that antisemitism made a major contribution to the Holocaust. Antisemitism had a long history in Germany and in the countries where the killings were carried out. The Nazi Party was associated with and indeed virtually defined by virulent antisemitism from its inception. Theirs was a European-wide project: the Nazis extracted Jews from countries under their occupation to murder them in camps in occupied Poland; in Soviet territories under Nazi rule, Jews were murdered in situ; some states allied with the Nazis voluntarily handed over their Jews for murder. The Nazis’ success in soliciting collaboration or at the very least impeding resistance was in many cases closely linked to their ability to mobilize antisemitic sentiment. Here again the Holocaust fits into a more a general pattern: both at the level of the decision-making elites and of the grass roots participants (or those simply willing to look the other way), every genocide and mass killing depends on the existence of tensions and resentments which are more or less pre-formed. Those pre-existing notions help define the victim group, on the one hand, and remove inhibitions to killing them, on the other. However, the comparative frame with other genocides, while underlining the need for a genocidal motive, at the same time raises questions that go beyond antisemitism about how any given motive becomes murderous. Are there some particular hatreds in the world into whose fabric is woven a special seam of murderous, eliminatory potential? Or do antisemitism, “Tutsiphobia,” “Kulak hatred”, and so on merely provide the local instantiation of legitimacy, while we need to look elsewhere, beyond such hatreds, to find the common ingredients that make for a genocidal constellation?

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In the Nazis’ case, the fact that killing the Jews brought so few obvious real gains in terms of land, resources, or weakening a real enemy has made the Holocaust seem the ideological genocide par excellence. However, for many postwar observers it was precisely the lack of obvious real benefits to the Holocaust that cast doubt on the importance of convictions at all. For much of the post-war era, after all, materialist models predominated in the social sciences and historical research. Within this context it was hard to make any kind of sense of the Holocaust, which seemed so far removed from recognizable class interests or material interests of any sort. That is why many historians long assumed that the Holocaust could not be located in any kind of broad logic; instead they emphasized the irrationality of a leadership which had managed to insert itself into power at a time of great crisis, and the more rational secondary motives – loyalty, fear, ambition, greed – which enabled that leadership to fulfill its murderous obsessions. The famous debate between “intentionalists” and “structuralists” that took such hold of historical writing on Nazi Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, now looks less like a debate than a consensus: both sides took an “accidentalist” position, explaining the Holocaust by recourse to the peculiarities of a Nazi rule that was established in crisis – the disagreement was about what those peculiarities were. Was the Holocaust the result of a top-down system, run according to Hitler’s plan, and sustained by charisma, loyalty, and fear, or did it accrue from a more ramshackle regime, in which ambitious subordinates enjoyed untrammelled opportunities to assert their position by running with the leader’s rhetoric.18

The more distance we have from the “intentionalist” and “functionalist” debates, the more unhappy we are with models in which the vast majority of participants did not “really” believe in what they were doing. However, even if we accept the power of ideas in general and antisemitism in particular, we still face the problem that since the early modern period Jew hatred had not been associated with mass murder, and even then murderous outbreaks had been few and far between. As many German Jewish observers were first confronted with Nazi violence on city streets, the comparisons that came to mind dated even further back, namely to the middle ages. That is why from the start serious analysts of the Holocaust like Hannah Arendt, even while recognizing antisemitism’s importance, also felt that some profound rupture had to have taken place, separating the Holocaust from previous developments.

One option has been to see the Nazis as having developed or inherited some particular sub-form of antisemitism – “eliminatory antisemitism”,19 “redemptive antisemitism”,20 “racial antisemitism”21 – that explains why theirs became so violent. Such interpretations assume that at some point –whether in the half century before the Nazis

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or in the fervent pathways of Hitler’s own brain – antisemitism morphed into something much more murderous and destructive than it had been. The idea that, for example, biological thinking helped to give rise to a murderous “racial antisemitism” seems plausible given the biological elements in Nazi thinking. The problem is that the idea of a clearly defined “racial” antisemitism is an illusion. Anti-Judaism did, true enough, change in important ways in the century following the enlightenment. In the emergent age of nation states, while retaining many of the negative associations that they had suffered in Christian popular culture, Jews’ principal “evil” shifted from being “not Christian” to “not belonging to the nation”. Moreover, organized Jewish responses to antisemitism since the mid 19th century, and in particular the creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860, helped cement the image of a potent international Jewry. Self-consciously “racial” antisemitism was not very distinct from this more vaguely national/international critique; its most well-known exponents tended to be at least as cultural as biological in their prejudice. There was, to be sure, recurrent biological language of pollution and contamination in the Nazi assault on the Jews. Yet when we find the same kind of language in Bolshevik attacks on the Kulaks – the parasites and bloodsuckers of the nation – we understand that this was the modern metaphor of the national enemy as much as it was a clearly defined biologically conception giving rise to specific policies.

There is more mileage in linking ideology to a sense of crisis. The specific conditions of the post-WW1 crisis helped give antisemitism an emotional and political meaning for Germany’s radical right that remained an abiding marker of Nazi politics. In the immediate aftermath of WW1 a genuine global panic about Jewish influence emerged. The outbreak of “godless” revolutions in St Petersburg, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna and elsewhere was the principal source of this fear. Jews were overrepresented in the revolutionary left though not a bit as influential as contemporaries feared. In addition, the huge pre-war and wartime flows of Russian Jews into western countries, and the signs of Jewish influence in international diplomacy (of which Britain’s 1917 Balfour declaration supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, or the Jewish role in advocating for the Minority Treaties at Versailles were the most visible and again frequently overblown examples) all added to fears of a global Jewish cabal. The translation into English in 1919 of the mischievously concocted “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and the publication in 1920 of “The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem” reflected and reinforced the scare. No less august an institution than the London Times took the Protocols seriously for a year or two. The first large-scale massacres of Jews in modern times happened in this moment, in the Russian civil war, as Whites and Cossacks targeted Jews. In Eastern Europe, the counter-revolution

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would exact a lesser tribute in blood, but in Hungary and elsewhere see a wave of vicious antisemitism in the early post-war years.

In defeated and revolutionary Germany, this global phenomenon took on particular forms, with radical antisemitism emerging as the common language of a variety of right wing groups. Already before the war, Jews had become a ready trope as insiders who were deemed outsiders – citizens since emancipation, and yet somehow “not us”. The privations of war had enhanced agitation against speculators, and unwarranted rumors had circulated that Jews were shirking their duty at the front. Then as revolution broke out in Russia and socialist anti-war agitation accompanied Germany’s defeat, the myth was allowed to take hold that Jews had fomented internal sedition and thus brought down the Reich. Contemporary Jewish observers in Germany felt the mood very strongly, and sensed pogroms in the air. The evidence is suggestive that Hitler had not been particularly antisemitic before the war, and was possibly not yet politically committed even when war ended. He certainly arrived in the Nazi party almost by accident, on a commission from the army to monitor political activity. He may well have acquired his violent antisemitism only now. He certainly made it both a strategic choice in a political battle within Germany as well as an increasingly compelling explanation for internal and external threats.

One can see here obvious parallels with, say, the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians or the Hutu murder of the Tutsis: at a time of extreme domestic and international stress an internal group was identified as extremely dangerous because somehow connected to external threats. At the same time, we are struck by the peculiar degree of abstraction and speculation required to construe such a threat out of loyal Jewish citizens, patriotic, not globally organized, and not claiming anything as a group other than civic equality. More significantly, the genocide we are seeking to explain was carried out more than two decades after this moment of crisis. Yet the importance of removing the threat of internal sedition to prevent a rerun of the First World War continued to have a strong hold on the Nazi imagination, as evinced in Heinrich Himmler’s infamous 1943 Posen speech legitimating the Holocaust to a select group of SS leaders and others. This genocidal trope of inner security thus remained potent, or at least rhetorically useful, but we will need to find other reasons for the persistence of its power.

Antisemitism on its own moreover cannot explain the Nazi mass killings of other groups – the handicapped, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. Even if none of these killing programs attained the scope or sustained character of the Holocaust, they suggest that the Nazis’ murderous impulse cannot be reduced solely

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to hatred of Jews, and possibly even that antisemitism’s role was secondary to some other motive or factor.

One obvious general point is that the Nazis adopted a ruthless form of biopolitics, in terms of focusing on the healthy and removing the weak. The under-provision for Germany’s institutionalized mentally ill in WW1, before the Nazis even existed as a party, had already been lethal, suggesting a strong shared sense of them as expendable. The Nazis joined a growing field of experts arguing that the future of the nation depended on state policing of population quality. Already in the 1920s Hitler made some radical remarks about culling a significant minority of children for the health of the nation. Measures improving racial “fitness” were introduced as soon as the Nazis came to power. These policies did not directly target Jews. They reveal an important shared characteristic however - a ruthless prioritizing of the nation over the individual. While involuntary sterilization had some parallels and advocates abroad, the killing of the unfit was sui generis. The gassing of the mentally ill allowed an important threshold to be crossed, both in terms of general policy, but also specific institutional practices. The killers from the eugenics institutes would be the core staffs of the first extermination camps (though the killing of Jews by shooting, by then well under way, was carried out by different organizations, so the personnel continuity should not be overstated).

An equally important set of ideas that took firm shape in Hitler’s mind in the 1920s were Nazi plans for expansion in Eastern Europe – the idea of “living space”. For Hitler, Germany’s future as a world power lay in acquiring territory in the East, most of it then in Soviet hands, as part of an expanded Germany. The land would be a material resource, but also provide a stimulus for German population expansion – akin to the expanding western frontier’s material and psychological role for the USA. Though Hitler’s approving references to the British in India are often quoted in connection with German settlement of the Ukraine, this was not imperialism in one of the many forms it had been practiced until the First World War. Germany’s future territories should not lie overseas, Hitler opined, nor did he aspire to create traditional style colonies of extraction, trade, or with clearly demarcated subordinate status. In this, Hitler, like the other radical expansionist powers of Italy and Japan, was responding to the distinctive characteristics of the interwar period, when traditional imperialism was losing its legitimacy all around the globe, and when restrictions to multilateral trade and transatlantic population movements encouraged a new search for autarchy. Like the commitment to the population’s racial health, these ideas and policies too did not specifically target Jews. But they reflected the Nazis’ notion that an epochal moment

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of crisis and struggle was at hand, when the obstacles to such an empire would need to be overcome, and Jews were clearly understood as the source of global opposition to German revival. Moreover, the predilection for clearance rather than coexistence in eastern occupied territory that happened to contain a large part of the world’s Jewish population, contained disastrous potential from the start.

A penchant for violence Looking at these priorities, antisemitism, eugenics and living space, one is struck less by their originality, and more by the extraordinary radicality and violence the Nazis brought to them. We will return in a moment to the issue of violent capacity, which was a function above all of the democratic legitimacy that the Nazis combined with dictatorship. But sticking with propensity for a moment, from their very beginnings the Nazis were characterized by a violent and extremist style that was characteristic of their epoch, but above all born of the particular conditions pertaining in the party’s crucial formation period after the First World War. The party’s rhetoric was extreme in its ruthlessness, its willingness to embrace the ultimate sanctions for the national good. It was also millenarian in its sense of all-or-nothing struggles that would determine the fate of the people for a thousand years. This was absolutist politics with no restraints. The counterpart to such no-holds-barred ambition was a day-to-day thuggishness. The party maintained a paramilitary arm, and many of its members were street brawlers. Some of its members carried out political murders in the 1920s and early 1930s.

In many of these characteristics the Nazis were symptoms of their moment. Defeat and revolution were accompanied by apocalyptic and utopian language on left and right. All or nothing speech about “Vernichtung” was commonplace, as was the language of destiny and liberation. The civil war that followed the revolution saw war-tested troops and young would-be soldiers flinging cannons and wartime brutality onto Germany’s bitterly divided streets. Political assassinations, attempted or successful, were all too common in the Republic’s early years. A cohort of young right-wingers accepted the need for a ruthless realism as the route to reviving the nation’s fortunes. But to restore order and greatness their parents were almost equally ready to call for extreme measures. The future SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, and his father, a dignified headmaster, went to radical right wing political gatherings together. Senior judges pardoned would-be assassins of the Republic’s leaders on the grounds of sincere convictions and national fealty. What helped the Nazis was that in Hitler they had found someone who could package apocalypticism and urgency in a way acceptable to those normally nervous of street violence. With that “cover”, the Nazis would actually electorally benefit in the early 1930s from their street thugs. Street violence suggested

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the Nazis could defeat the feared Communist uprising. But from our point of view the important thing is that practices and discourses of violence and extremes were the defining characteristics of the Nazi party, transforming every borrowed prejudice into distinctively murderous ambition.

The dark side of democracy? Unlike most other 20th century genocides or mass murders, the Holocaust was carried out by a government that had been democratically elected (give or take some elite backstairs machinations that helped nudge an aging president towards offering the Nazis government offices).22 In their last year before gaining power, the Nazis’ electoral results made them the most popular political party in German history hitherto. When in 1933 the Nazis came to command the resources and know-how of an established, law-bound, and highly effective state apparatus, their rule was thus sustained by the twin legitimacy of having lawfully acceded to power and of riding a wave of massive popular enthusiasm.

But was that popular enthusiasm for genocide? It is by now a commonplace that the Nazis followed a “twisted path” to Auschwitz.23 The Nazi leadership had no idea in 1933 that within eight years it would be promoting genocide, even if Hitler spoke in annihilatory terms. The measures it promoted in the 1930s were not aimed at the territorial confinement or the physical destruction of Jews; on the contrary they aimed at dislodging them and forcing them to flee to the far corners of the earth. A large variety of groups were involved in shaping Jewish policy without all sharing the same agenda. Party radicals sought to accelerate the pace towards a Jew-free Germany, and civil servants absorbed and deflected party pressure with measures of their own. When it was coined in the 1970s, the “twisted path” metaphor was a useful corrective to the idea that Hitler had a definitive idea of where he was going and that everything happened according to plan.

But by now this metaphor has itself become misleading, obscuring the extraordinary energy that a democratically legitimated regime brought to cleansing Germany of Jews. Fundamental changes to rights and citizenship, radical intrusions in property rights and business contracts, impassable new barriers to professional accreditation and membership, enforced employment dismissals, new educational limits, censorship of printed and spoken word, ejections from the cultural sphere, and periodical massive street violence all added breathtaking pace to the process. Within two and a half years of the Nazis seizing the reins, by the time of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, Jewish community leaders already recognized there was no future in Germany for Jewish youth. By the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938, an affluent, acculturated,

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highly successful and well integrated Jewish community had been completely ejected from Germany’s economic, social and cultural life. The only aspect of ethnic cleansing the Nazis were not engaging in was that (except for limited action in October 1938) they were not willing to risk the diplomatic consequences of simply pushing Jews over the border. Apart from that, the commitment to Jews’ total exclusion and removal was powerfully in evidence from the beginning.

In fact, the Nazis were moving forward on three different, through interrelated agendas. Apart from the anti-Jewish measures, in the first half of the 1930s the regime also made significant steps towards promoting the “fitness” of the population, by, for example, linking marriage loans and later marriages themselves to fitness criteria that blurred physical health and adherence to certain social norms. These policies intersected with anti-Jewish ones, and drew on some of the same rhetoric of expunging elements injurious to the health of the people. But they mobilized the energies of different experts and groups, and were largely about promoting national efficiency rather than waging war on enemies of the Volk. The mounting body of anti-Roma decrees similarly was about targeting a supposedly anti-social, rootless minority and not an anti-German conspiracy. Even more energy was devoted to the Nazi’s third goal – gearing up society and army to wage the future battles that would be needed to expand the Reich. This policy as we have seen was not explicitly directed against Jews. But the more international tensions and domestic pressures grew, the more the assault on Jews intensified. War-wary conservatives, who had also favored some restraint on the anti-Jewish agenda, were now sidelined. With unemployment solved, the economic necessity of shielding Jewish businesses from attack disappeared. As diplomatic tensions increased, so the notion that a hostile world Jewry was fomenting opposition to Germany became more usable and persuasive for the Nazis.

How popular were these policies? Almost all genocides involve broad participation, and almost all are carried out by populist regimes that mobilize popular involvement. The Nazis were no exception. They were unusual only in the clarity of the democratic mandate they enjoyed. At every stage, their racial and their antisemitic policies involved widespread, un-coerced initiative, from well-placed elites in the civil service, the medical sphere, and the universities, from new party organizations, and from ordinary people in all walks of life. The scale of local activism was powerfully evident in the violence of Kristallnacht, when at central behest marauding gangs, including many youngsters in the Hitler youth, terrorized and destroyed Jewish homes and businesses across the length and breadth of Germany.

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Yet to talk about consensus or democratically mandated policy would be equally misleading. This was a dictatorship with no open discussion of policy goals. There is no evidence that the bulk of Hitler’s voters in 1933 were signing up for the complete removal of Jews from Germany. In fact, local anti-Jewish actions in the early 1930s proved to be an instrument for the Nazi party to assert its hold over city streets and render more pliant the population as a whole. During the war this paradoxical interplay between consent and coercion intensified. Violence against Jews in Poland in the early war years and then the killing spree in the Soviet Union would depend on the participation of hundreds of thousands of policemen, soldiers, administrators and other Germans. With experiences on the front being conveyed back home by letter and word of mouth, by the end of 1941 it was common knowledge that a murderous war against the Jews was underway, even if the details of the extermination camps would remain for many in the realm of rumor. As Goebbels came to recognize, because it was widely believed that Jewish interests were helping to shape the Allied war effort, the knowledge that Germany was carrying out genocide made the German people to some extent hostages to the regime. Fears of the reprisals that would follow German defeat helped to keep the population fighting to the end. In that sense perpetrating genocide was as much communal fate as shared mission.24

The population’s anticipation of the calamity that might follow defeat only reinforced the core sentiment in the Nazis’ stump speech before 1933 and their trump card since the outbreak of war in 1939, namely, patriotic support for a nation under siege. Beleaguered nationalism was the unwavering bedrock of support for the Nazis, the sentiment Hitler was able to count on, at times reinforced by antisemitism, at times rather despite the Nazis’ antisemitism. It was not a mandate for murder, but it gave the Nazis popular legitimacy until the moment of Hitler’s suicide in April 1945, as the nation continued to fight right up to an unprecedented, total defeat.

War and imperialism The Holocaust could not have happened without the Second World War. War brought millions of Jews under German rule, as against the less than two hundred thousand left in Germany in 1939. War licensed radical solutions and gave cover for murder. The outbreak of war in September 1939 ushered in radical anti-Jewish measures in Poland, with Nazi security police and ethnic German units engaged in brutal murders of non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews on a significant scale. German administrations began a program of uprooting Polish Jews from the economy with disastrous humanitarian consequences. 1940 saw some implicitly genocidal planning at various levels of the Nazi administration, most ambitiously in terms of Foreign Office and SS initiatives at

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establishing an overseas “reservation” for European Jews on the island of Madagascar. When that went nowhere, more provisional, local reservations were created by walling in catastrophically under-resourced Polish ghettos.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and the all-out war against “Judeo-Bolshevism” saw the outright transition to a policy of direct mass murder. Aided and abetted by the Wehrmacht, this policy encountered so little internal resistance that by the end of 1941 Hitler and the core policy-making community on Jewish matters had clearly shifted to the notion that murder could serve as the solution to the entire European Jewish “problem”. It was in the fall of 1941, while the murder units were expanding in the Soviet Union, that planning began for that unprecedented phenomenon, the extermination camp, in occupied Poland. Small unobtrusive killing camps (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) came into operation from December 1941 and continued for around 18 months, murdering nearly two million Jews, and leaving only a couple of hundred survivors. The mixed extermination and concentration camp, Auschwitz, would outlast them all, home to the murder of over a million Jews, but also to many more survivors than the other extermination camps. This was partly because the camp had a labor function as well as an exterminatory one, but also because one huge Jewish contingent, namely, the Hungarian Jews, were brought there so late in the war that they had a little more chance than others to survive.

It was only in late 1941 that SS staffs began to sketch out the dimensions of a historically unprecedented global extermination program, among whose earliest archival traces can be found in the minutes of the infamous Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942. The meeting’s biggest significance in retrospect is in the survival of the minutes, which offer us a window onto a moment in German policy when continental-wide murder had crystallized as policy, the possibility of global elimination was being at least scoped out, and the exact balance between direct extermination and short-term labor exploitation had not yet been established. That balance would continue to shift back and forth throughout the war, as the push and pull of genocidal mission and wartime labor needs led to flurries and eddies in the murky sea of Nazi policy. But once conjured into the world, the underlying commitment to complete eradication of the Jews never disappeared from the agenda.

But if the war indeed created context and opportunity, it would nevertheless be wrong to see genocide as a response to the crisis of war. For one thing, as we have seen, the conflict was a product of Nazi planning and ambitions, and in that sense not an accident that happened to them but the logical corollary of their policy. The radicalizing consequences of approaching war could be felt well before hostilities

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began. For another, even compared with the perverted kaleidoscope of other genocidal imaginations, it took a particularly twisted and distorted view of reality to see Jews in alliance with the enemy or their removal in any way helpful to the war’s progress.

Moreover, the crucial point was that from the beginning the Nazis were engaged in territorial cleansing and settlement (though as we will see in a moment, the link to the Holocaust was not direct here either). As the various wartime iterations of the Nazis’ “General Settlement Plan East” would reveal, the presence of non-Germanic peoples on future German soil would be at best conditional, with expulsions and decimation of populations an integral part of settlement planning. Early installments of this kind of policy could be seen in the violent expulsions of Poles from the provinces absorbed into Germany in 1939, and even more lethally, in the resource planning for Operation Barbarossa in 1941, which unabashedly envisaged the decimation of tens of millions of Soviet citizens as a way of ensuring that foodstuffs and other resources flowed to the Wehrmacht and potentially back to Germany. The latter plans were never fully realized, though they did have direct consequences for the utterly catastrophic neglect of Soviet POWs, leading to the death of three of the five million Soviet troops in German hands. The failure to win the war would limit the realization of such grand plans. The mass deaths of non-Jews in Eastern Europe that did take place were often less the product of settlement plans than of the ruthless appropriation of resources for military needs and the despoliation of entire regions by way of anti-partisan warfare. The fact remains that in their planning for the East, the Nazis seem at their most similar to other instigators of genocide, whose actions were often linked to transformational agrarian projects. Tim Snyder has drawn attention to the double victimization of the “bloodlands” where both Stalin’s and Hitler’s conflicting ambitions for harnessing land and grain took a terrible toll.25

Although we now know that planners and technocrats saw the removal of Jews as a logical step in the transformation and Germanizing of agricultural lands in Poland and the former Pale of Settlement, it is clear that the imperial plans in the East were not themselves the source of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish animus, which as we have seen was at once domestic, European, and indeed global. Yet the Nazis’ imperialism was in many respects the Holocaust’s most decisive precondition. It entailed a commitment to control and clear territories that were the historical heartland of Jewish settlement, thus putting the Nazis in a position to preside over the fate of a large proportion of European Jewry. It rested on the acceptance of murderous mega-population-planning to create the expanded nation-empire of the future. Initially, the focus on ejecting

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Poles to make way for ethnic Germans actually slowed down Jewish removals, but in the longer term the intellectual and policy climate of clearance and settlement in Eastern Europe made it easier and more logical to contemplate eliminating Jews. Thus, for example, hunger planning for the Soviet Union in 1941 was not a directly anti-Jewish measure, but it did facilitate the transition to genocide of Jews. Initially, the mass killings of Jews targeted adult men as potential agents of Judeo-Bolshevism. But in the context of ruthless resource control, that security concern was rapidly supplanted by a more economic one that led to an increasingly all-out extermination of Soviet Jewish women and children as “useless eaters”, and the retention of small numbers of Jewish men as essential labor. Roma found themselves the victims of the same murderous calculations.

Yet in looking at this interplay between territorial goals as a whole and anti-Jewish and indeed anti-Roma policy, we should be mindful as much of Nazi methods as of their ambitions. The Nazis were imperial amateurs, with little experience in colonial rule, and with national-imperial visions untested by experience of rule. They were in a desperate hurry, driven in part by the economic and military logic of having to knockout the huge array of potential opponents to their territorial ambitions before the other powers could out-arm them, and in part by Hitler’s private agenda of wanting to transform the world while young enough to do so. Hitler was so unmoved by the fate of millions who fell under German rule that he acquired land without even the barest details of the native population’s treatment being resolved. In occupied Soviet territory in particular that murderousness was only aggravated by occupation forces having to feed themselves off the land.

Collaboration Even if the Nazis’ imperialism was not quite the cause of the Holocaust, what makes the Holocaust stand out against all other ethnic cleansings is that it was the first and only pan-imperial genocide, carried out in every corner of its empire. As a pan-imperial policy, the “Final Solution” was subject to the very varied diplomatic and war-related logics of imperial rule in different parts of Europe, and conducted through the equally varied local structures and dynamics of rule pertaining in the different parts of the empire. Anti-Jewish measures became an implicit or explicit object of bargaining with the Nazis’ subalterns. Sometimes, as in parts of the occupied Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the policy provided a limited measure of payoff for locals where Hitler was otherwise disinclined to make any conciliatory gestures. In a curious way, antisemitism became the Nazis’ one imperial “offer,” a policy that might briefly conceal the lack of overlap between Nazi goals and local interests. Sometimes, as in Hungary, this offer

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was much more explicit, with German staffs planning an expropriation of Jewish assets to reform Hungary’s social structure without targeting its ruling elite. Resources could be divided up between imperial rulers and locals, and the removal of Jews could be presented as enhancing regional autonomy and cohesion. Sometimes, by contrast, particularly where some degree of national sovereignty had been preserved underneath German rule, anti-Jewish measures might test the imperial contract and have to be modified or abandoned altogether, in order to insure the continuing “good will” of the dominated, as in the case of Denmark. The leaks of information to Denmark that allowed it to rescue most of its Jews, for example, may not have been “official” leaks, but they complemented a relatively hands-off approach to rule in that country and deference to local sentiment. In this sense the Holocaust was powerfully conditioned by empire, and performed imperial functions.

The reasons for collaboration varied according to local cultural and sentiment, and to the degree and level of national autonomy the Nazis’ allowed within different regions of their empire. In former Soviet states where the apparatus of government was completely destroyed, individual decisions to join killing squads were probably largely driven by material considerations, bolstered or eased by existing antisemitism. In the transition from Soviet to Nazi rule in the Baltics and eastern Poland in 1941, the widespread local feeling that Jews had been stooges of the short-lived Communist rule (a misperception based on the fact that left-wing Jews had enjoyed greater influence and visibility under Communist rule than in the preceding nationalist governments), led to a limited wave of ferocious local violence against Jews, encouraged by Nazi units. In Western Europe, national bureaucracies cooperated in anti-Jewish policy for the same pragmatic and functional reasons that they cooperated with other occupying measures. Everywhere, however, there were groups for whom anti-Jewish measures imposed by the Nazis resonated with their own anti-Semitic sentiments. These varied national stories of collaboration disappeared underground after the end of the war, and in some Eastern European and former Soviet states remain even now hotly contested elements of wartime history.26 Yet vital and disturbing though the breadth of European participation was for facilitating the Nazi project, no European actors, not even the Romanian government – the most independently murderous agent of Jewish deaths – would have embarked on this genocidal project without the Nazis.

Victims, agents, witnesses Contrary to what is often asserted, German Jews were neither slow to spot the danger the Nazis represented nor complacent.27 Already in 1935, Jewish leaders saw as their most important task preparing young people for emigration. A large majority of

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German Jewish youngsters survived the war in safety as a result. As violence and persecution in the smaller towns intensified, Jews moved to the anonymity of Berlin and other big cities. After Kristallnacht in 1938, all recognized that life with dignity would be impossible in Germany and only the most elderly and immovable did not at least try to leave. Mass murder was, however, on no one’s intellectual horizon. After the invasion of September 1939, the German assault on Jewish bodies and Jewish livelihoods in Poland was so intense that a few far-sighted Polish Jewish observers like Chaim Kaplan did now wonder if the Nazis had a plan for extermination.28 But it was in Vilna in December 1941, in the wake of the unfolding campaign of mass shootings, that the Jewish resistance first clearly discerned the genocide underway. From spring through early autumn of 1942, that insight percolated through the Polish ghettos and became chilling certainty among Polish Jews.

Jews were far from passive in the face of the Nazi threat. Before 1933 Jewish leaders campaigned actively, warning of the Nazi danger. After 1933, within the shrinking room for maneuver allowed them, German Jewish leaders sought to intervene with the authorities, mobilize assistance abroad, and support emigration. From 1939 onwards however Jewish organizations under Nazi rule were subject to direct and brutal control. To a degree unprecedented in any genocide, and using a mixture of threats, lies and murder, the Nazis enlisted the help of Jewish organizations to facilitate persecution – be it relocation and resettlement, forced labor, or deportation to death. Even so, new Jewish groupings emerged as the nuclei for resistance in ghettos, in partisan activity in Eastern Europe, through cooperation with gentile rescuers in France and the Low Countries, and so on. Up to 1941, when the Nazis banned all further Jewish emigration, international Jewish organizations sought to help Jews find passage and a place abroad. The American Joint Distribution Committee continued for as long as humanly possible to find ways of providing assistance in Europe – be it to the welfare bodies of the Warsaw ghetto, to Jewish refugees in Romania en route to Palestine, or to Jews stranded in Lisbon. Jews evaded, circumvented, and resisted genocide in camps and ghettos, cities and countryside, and in both eastern and western Europe. Yet all this made only a tiny dent on Nazi actions. Like other genocides, the Holocaust was predicated on the myth of victims’ power and malevolence and on the reality of their weakness. Despite Jews’ international contacts and resources, the Allied war effort did not in any way respond to their needs. To facilitate the opening of a second front, for example, the Allies in 1943 encouraged Hungary to secede from the Axis, knowing full well that German invasion would follow and that Hungary’s 800,000 Jews would be endangered. Half of them perished.

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During the war Jews were confronted not only by the increasingly certain prospect that they would be murdered, but also by unbelievable cruelty and brutality, particularly in Eastern Europe. In retrospect the Holocaust has often been seen as an industrial, bureaucratic affair, characterized by well-coordinated transports bringing victims to the gas chambers. But Eastern European Jews in particular knew of a chaotic world of willful individual acts of quite extraordinary savagery and sadism. Indeed, to the extent that Nazi policy was met with passivity, it was because the victims were all too aware there were fates worse than death. Even more profoundly disabling was the message that both violence and systematic murder conveyed, namely that the victims were excluded from the circle of humanity. Before the war, the most bitter lesson for many German Jews had been that they could be ejected from their social position and robbed of their national identity. It was the Nazis’ power of exclusion that hurt most. During the war, for many Jews almost as painful as the prospect of death was the fact that their humanity was being denied altogether. As the scale of murder became clear in 1942, chronicles and diaries show their writers struggling with this total denial of their right to life – and with the very real possibility that not just they but all traces of Jewish life would be eradicated. It is this prospect of total extinction, with no trace of communal life left behind, that makes the genocidal experience so distinctive.

That crushing prospect faced victims of other genocides too. Where Jews stood out was in the degree to which they recorded what was happening to them. The great profusion of diaries and chronicles was a result partly of the extended months of incubation of Nazi policy, during which Jews became aware they were experiencing something unprecedented. The quality of the written record reflects also Jews’ high levels of literacy, and, particularly in Eastern Europe, a practice of scientifically recording persecution that had emerged from earlier waves of 20th Century violence. We are still learning much from the observations recorded at the time.29 Yet for all the recent emphasis on recovering victims’ voices and agency, in the end the mystery of the Holocaust was theirs to observe and to suffer, but caused by forces completely out of their control.

1 Footnotes in this chapter have been kept to a minimum, and are used only for citations or to refer to historical debates or controversies mentioned in the text. The best current syntheses are Saul Friedländer’s two volume work, Nazi Germany and the

Jews (see notes 3 and 20) and Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution : A Genocide, Oxford Histories (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Two important recent surveys of Holocaust historiography are by Confino and Stone, see note 5. An

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excellent short account of the Holocaust is Doris L. Bergen, War & Genocide : A

Concise History of the Holocaust, Critical Issues in History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). A succinct review of the evolution of Nazi policy can be found in Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting : Wannsee and the Final Solution (London, England ; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2003). 2 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony : Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). 3 See the discussion in Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination : Nazi Germany

and the Jews, 1939-1945, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). 4 Most notably Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation : Nazism and the

"Final Solution" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 5 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts : The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 30; Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust : A Study in Historiography (London ; Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). 6 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History : Nation, Religion, and Race

across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chapter 1. 7 Götz Aly, Architects of Annihilation : Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 8 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State : Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9 Most famously Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [1st ed. (New York,: Harcourt, 1951). 10 Ibid. 11 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 12 Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk Nach Auschwitz? : Beitra ̈ge Zum Verha ̈ltnis von

Kolonialismus und Holocaust, (Berlin: Lit, 2011). 13 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the

Holocaust, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1996). 14 Bloxham, The Final Solution : A Genocide. 15 See the debates in Alan S. Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique? : Perspectives on

Comparative Genocide, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). 16 Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice : Reorganizing Society under the Nazis

and Argentina's Military Juntas, Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 71ff.

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17 On these three events, see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide :

Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide : Race, Power, and

War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot

Came to Power : Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 18 On the intentionalist-functionalist debate, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship :

Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London; New York: Arnold ; Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000); Mark Roseman, "Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas, and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective," in Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity : Essays on Modern German

History, ed. Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, and Hanna Schissler (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 19 Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 20 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 21 See the excellent discussion of the latter in Peter Pulzer, "Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no. 2 (2005). 22 The subheading is a reference to Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy :

Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 23 Still worth reading on the topic is Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz;

Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (Urbana,: University of Illinois Press, 1970). 24 For an account that hovers between assertions of consensus and communal fate, see Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide : Hitler's Community, 1918-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 25 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 26 Witness the recent debates following the appearance of Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors : The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, The Neighbors Respond : The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in

Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 27 See the evidence presented in Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, Jewish

Responses to Persecution. Vol 1 1933-1938, 5 vols., vol. 1, Documenting Life and Destruction (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press ; In association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).

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28 Chaim Aron Kaplan and Abraham Isaac Katsh, Scroll of Agony : The Warsaw Diary of

Chaim A. Kaplan, 1st Indiana University Press ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Kaplan’s predictions are explored in David Engel, ""Will They Dare?" Perceptions of Threat in Diaries from the Warsaw Ghetto.," in Holocaust Chronicles :

Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal

Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1999). 29 See Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research : Birth and Evolution, Routledge Jewish Studies Series (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013); Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! : Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2012).