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PARTISAN REVIEW
truth is easIer to attain from a point of view equidistant from the
"extremes" have put themselves in a safer position; whether they are
closer to historical truth is by no means certain. There are excellent new
works on interpretation, above all Stanley Payne's magisterial
Fascism,
History, and Interpretation.
But these are the achievements of individual
writers and do not even remotely make up a consensus.
Among the literature on Nazism in recent years there is the influen–
tial thesis of a leading German historian that, everything considered,
Hitler was a weak dictator and that much of the time chaos prevailed
under the surface of the Third Reich. (The same thesis was put forward
some years ago with regard to Stalin .) A group of younger German his–
torians, including Susanne Heim and Goetz Aly, attribute the Final So–
lution to the ambitious plans of technocrats to establish a new order in
Eastern Europe. The Jews, in other words, were not killed because of
anti-Semitism but because of the desire of the planners to rationalize in–
dustrial production, to remove the premodern sectors, and to reduce
overpopulation.
In
his subsequent book recently published and widely hailed in
Germany,
EndlOsung,
Aly slightly modifies his views inasmuch as he
considers the dynamic of Nazi resettlement policy just one of the factors
leading to the mass murders. But he still believes that Himmler, Heydrick,
Eichmann
et al
somehow maneuvered themselves into a cuI-de-sac; that
there had never been an order from Hitler to exterminate the Jews (even
though Himmler, in a famous speech in 1943, said that there had been
such an order); and that the Jews were killed, if not as the result of a
series of accidents, then in consequence of some imperfect blueprint made
by some not very competent and short-sighted planners.
This view of the Final Solution as a genuinely rational, social, and
economic concern is shared by Zygmund Bauman, a British professor of
Polish origin. Princeton University scholar Arno Mayer has put forward
a different theory, according to which Hitler had the Jews killed mainly
because he hated the Communists so much. A whole legion of social
historians on the left and the right has focused its research on Nazism as
a modernizing factor. The state of affairs is further confounded because
the arguments of the revisionists of the left are pi cked up by the
revisionists of the extreme right, so that in the end it is exceedingly diffi–
cult to establish with any certainty who claims what and from what
ideological vantage point.
Broadly speaking, the right wants to "historicize" the Holocaust,
that is to say, to put it into a wider historical perspective. This means
equating the mass murders of World War II with the civil wars in Bosnia
