Revisited

Peter Hayes seeks to answer the lingering questions about why the horrors happened

By MATT NESVISKY
Peter Hayes (photo credit: Courtesy)
Peter Hayes
(photo credit: Courtesy)
WITH SOME 16,000 books on the Holocaust held in the US Library of Congress, Prof. Peter Hayes asks in the introduction to “Why? Explaining the Holocaust” what sounds like a reasonable question: Why yet another book on this subject? Hayes’s answer is twofold: because the Holocaust to a considerable degree “continues to resist comprehension,” and because over the years numerous myths and misconceptions about the Holocaust have developed. I’ll add a third: because these days a staggering ignorance of even recent history is epidemic.
As evidence for my view, I submit the occasion when I chatted up some American soldiers who on a cold and windy day were among the sparse number of visitors to Dachau. When I inquired about how they liked being stationed in Germany, they revealed that among other things it had been “very educational.” I asked how so. With embarrassed grins and with combat boots shuffling the gravel, they admitted that before being shipped overseas they hadn’t known that America’s opponent in the Second World War had been Germany. When I pressed them, they confessed they’d thought the Yanks had fought, um, the Russians.
Why another book on the Holocaust? Why indeed. I’m tempted to suggest that if a reader takes up only one survey of the Holocaust, Peter Hayes’s “Why” might very well be it. To be sure, Hayes readily agrees that no single work can thoroughly cover the topic, which is underscored by his book’s excellent 22-page bibliography. Yet “Why” largely does offer, as he claims, a “comprehensive stocktaking directed squarely at answering the most central and enduring questions about why and how the massacre of European Jewry unfolded.” I recommend his book even as I believe much of what he writes still remains open to interpretation.
Peter Hayes is a professor of history and German at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He has written or edit - ed a dozen books, including “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies.” He says his latest publication is the result of give and take with his students over the course of his 30 years teaching the subject. This foundation also informed a series of lectures Hayes delivered in 2015 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the book and the lectures, the author addresses what he believes are the eight most commonly recurring questions about the Holocaust. The result is masterful. This is true even as Hayes’s answers to his fundamental questions are often provocative and even counterintuitive. Moreover, because he was trained as an economic historian, his thinking and his discourse are heavy on numbers. Nonetheless, overall Hayes comes off as eminently sensible and convincing. As for those fundamental questions, here they are: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why genocide? Why was the mass murder so swift and sweeping? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often? Why did survival rates diverge in the various occupied nations? Why such limited help from outside? What are the legacies and lessons from the Holocaust? Hayes begins with the notion that the Holocaust was a phenomenon of a particular time and place, and in a familiar formulation he says that the Great Depression and the Bolshevik Revolution prepared the way for the bloodletting to come. But along with this economic and political interpretation, Hayes does not minimize the parallel groundwork laid by centuries of antisemitism propagated by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. To this he adds the less common argument that because of the Jews’ financial, professional and social success in Germany, a sizeable role in fueling antisemitism arose out of sheer jealousy. Voting patterns in fact show that antisemitism in Germany fluctuated considerably in the years between the end of World War I and the advent of the Nazi years. But Nazi ideology eventually took hold, Hayes writes, because it “was a witches’ brew of self-pity, entitlement, and aggression. It was also a form of magical thinking that promised to end all of Germans’ postwar sufferings, the products of defeat and deceit, by banning their supposed ultimate cause, the Jews and their agents.” So compelling was this ideology, Hayes adds, that it was a case of more Germans becoming antisemites because they joined the Nazis than vice versa.
Questions lead to more questions. Did the German public know of the genocide? Hayes provides abundant documentary evidence that such knowledge was not only widespread, but that from the start Germans worried about the reprisals when the rest of the world found out. As an example he quotes from a diplomat’s diary entry early in the Holocaust (November, 1942): “Men, women and children have been slaughtered in large numbers by poison gas or by machine guns. The hatred that inevitably must arise from that will never be appeased. Today every child knows this in the smallest detail.”
Were Poles complicit? “Most people who hid Jews there [Poland] did so in return for money or other payments, yet very few of the Jews hidden on that basis – only 9 per - cent – actually managed to survive the war. This suggests that they were turned in when they ran out of valuables to exchange for protection.”
Did the Vatican have dirty hands? Hayes quotes numerous Vatican-approved publications that condemned Jews for the “domination over money and their preponderance in socialism and communism” and called for their deprivation of citizenship – or worse. At the end of the war Vatican officials also helped numerous Nazis flee Europe. The author might have added the fact that Pope Pius XII excommunicated all Catholics who embraced communism – but not those who became Nazis. Nor did the Vatican even condemn the invasion of Catholic Poland. Was the Holocaust a product of modern technology and science? Hayes argues that the Nazis were essentially anti-modern and steeped in pseudo-science. Should the Allies have bombed Auschwitz? Possibly, Hayes says, but argues that, “In the end, bombing the camp might not have saved many lives.” (But how many?) Did the Nazis weaken their war effort by devoting so many trains to shipping Jews to their deaths? Not in the least; Hayes’s statistics persuasively argue otherwise. After the war, is it true that the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust escaped punishment? “A number of infamous figures did avoid punishment,” Hayes allows, but says the record is not nearly as distressing as many believe. “In fact,” Hayes writes, “in the early postwar years, the reckoning was pretty intense. Al- together, European courts condemned and sentenced approximately 100,000 Germans and Austrians for criminality of one sort or another.” Perhaps, but how many served anything like suitable sentences? And is 100,000 really a large number? The overall story inevitably remains bleak. While reading history, one takes comfort in signs of progress, of advancement in the human predicament, of glimmers of hope. Little glimmers in “Why?” It’s a miserable story. In only the rarest of exceptions does anyone – German, Jew, cleric, Allied nation, occupied population – come off here very well. Even if the Holocaust “continues to resist comprehension,” Hayes can still conclude thus: “The Holocaust was not mysterious and inscrutable; it was the work of humans acting on familiar human weaknesses and motives: wounded pride, fear, self-righteousness, prejudice, and personal ambition being among the most obvious. Once persecution gathered momentum, however, it was unstoppable without the death of millions of people, the expenditure of vast sums of money, and the near-destruction of the European continent.” Perhaps no event in history, therefore, better confirms the very difficult warning embedded in a German proverb that captures the meaning I hope readers will take away from this book: “ Wehret den Anfangen ,” “Beware of the beginnings.”
For those seeking answers, Peter Hayes’s “Why? Explaining the Holocaust” is clearly an excellent place to begin.