Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, by Peter Longerich, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK; 2010, 645 pp.

If indeed, as USHMM Director Sara Bloomfield recently commented, the Holocaust is still a “relatively new field of academic study”—now 65 years after the fact—then it is presumably appropriate to find new ‘milestone’ works still being produced. Earlier writings were dominated by the likes of Reitlinger, Hilberg, Dawidowicz, Gutman, and Arad. More recently we’ve seen people like Browning and Kershaw rise to the top. But now we have a new standard-bearer, and his name is Peter Longerich. His new book, Holocaust, is “now generally recognized by historians as the standard account of this horrific chapter in human history”—or so says his prestigious publisher, Oxford University Press. As such, it is worthy of careful analysis and review, by traditionalists and revisionists alike.

Longerich is no newcomer to the field, having published important works since the late 1980s. He is a German researcher and historian, currently serving as a professor in the German Department at the University of London. He made his mark in 1998 with the release of the book Die Politik der Vernichtung (The Policy of Destruction). This work received widespread acclaim but its impact was muted by the fact that it was published only in German. Early plans for an English version were delayed, and by the time agreement was reach with Oxford Press, new developments demanded numerous changes. Hence, the present book: a “significantly reworked” version of Politik, to the point where we may treat it as a new work.

At 645 pages, Holocaust is a substantial effort, but nothing like Hilberg’s massive 1300-page, three-volume epic (cf. his 2003). Still, plenty of space to address all relevant and unsettled aspects of the topic, and (presumably) shed new light on them—or else, why even write such a book? Given that this decade alone has seen the publication of nearly 28,000 books on or about the Holocaust,[1] surely the historians of the world can be expected to publish only truly new material, addressing the many unanswered questions and troubling aspects of this dark era of our past. At least, this was my initial hope upon acquiring the book. Alas, I was disappointed.

But first the basics: The book is unique, the author tells us, in a number of ways. First is its heavy reliance on primary sources—from German archives, of course, but also those of the former Warsaw Pact states, particularly Russia.[2] Second is Longerich’s focus on the perpetrators, i.e. Nazi actions and motivations, with a notable de-emphasis on the victims, witnesses, and survivors—more on this below. Third is his detailed look at the build-up and “decision process” that led to the extermination of the Jews. Longerich has made something of a specialty in the study of the “Hitler order” (or lack thereof) for the Holocaust, and he has some interesting thoughts on this troublesome issue.

This latter point is reflected in the book’s contents, which are weighted heavily to the ‘pre-extermination’ years. The first four (of five) parts of the book cover 1933-1941 in substantial detail; his analysis of the Einsatzgruppen shootings is of particular interest. But the ‘meat’ of the Holocaust, which begins only in 1942, is covered in just the final Part V—only slightly more than 100 pages. And so we are misled by his title; it’s not so much the “Holocaust”, but rather like the “Prelude to the Holocaust”. Apparently Longerich felt that the ‘Holocaust proper’ had already achieved sufficient coverage—in those other 27,999 books of recent years.

Be that as it may, we must analyze the content as given. I was immediately impressed, not so much by what was in the book, as what was not. The absences here are striking, and telling. First, as mentioned above, is the priority on German documents and other wartime sources, at the expense of the foundation of the traditional view—the witnesses. Survivor statements, as fragile and problematic as they are, serve as the core of the entire edifice. Without their precise and self-assured testimony, historians are left with a hodge-podge of difficult and ambiguous German documentation. Longerich warns the reader of this up front, and true enough—the witnesses are nowhere to be seen. A scan through the book finds no mention—nothing—of: Wiesel, Frankl, Levi, Rajzman, Wiernik, Vrba, Reder, Tauber, Nyiszli, etc. This is quite shocking, but in retrospect, probably good strategy. The holes and contradictions here are legion.[3] Perhaps this will be the traditionalist strategy of the future: distance oneself from the troublesome survivors, continue to ignore truly difficult issues, and focus on ambiguous documentation and abstract speculation.

The second omission is as unsurprising as it is contemptible. In the present day, in 2010, to publish a major work on the Holocaust with not a single mention of revisionists, or revisionist challenges, is the height of deception and academic dishonesty. To utterly ignore the work of Mattogno, Rudolf, Graf and others—even David Irving has not a single mention—is absolutely inexcusable. We can have no doubt that Longerich is aware of them, as he testified as an ‘expert witness’ in the 2000 Irving trial. And as a German scholar, he was certainly aware of the uproar over the Zündel and Rudolf imprisonments. What kind of expert is it that, in his own lengthy publications, chooses to willfully ignore the evidence and analysis that most deeply challenges his own personal interpretations?

But perhaps I am too hard on Professor Longerich. After all, his own orthodox contemporaries fare not much better. Browning and Gerlach earn the most discussion in the text, with five or six minor citations each. But apart from scattered footnote references and uncited listings in the bibliography, he virtually ignores the likes of Kershaw, Pressac, Piper, Evans, Tregenza, Gutman, and Arad. Van Pelt merits only a single mention in the text (p. 281). Andrzej Kola’s revealing excavation work at Belzec and Sobibor is completely overlooked.[4] Even the former dean of Holocaust research, Raul Hilberg (God rest his soul), is virtually dismissed. Only seven years after the definitive 2003 edition of his magnum opus, and just three years after his demise, Hilberg earns but three passing mentions in the text. In a final insult (p. 202), Longerich even misspells the poor man’s name (“Raoul”). This dismissal of Hilberg can be read as a kind of implicit admission that Jürgen Graf (2001) was right all along—that this giant does indeed have feet of clay.

A fourth area of neglect is the use of relevant photographs. There is, sadly, not a single photograph in the entire book: no air photos, no ground photos, no corpse photos, no mass grave photos. The uninformed reader may not realize what he is missing, but knowledgeable ones will immediately suspect that important information is being overlooked, and perhaps even deliberately avoided. As we know, air photos of the death camps show neither mass burials nor any signs of mass murder. The many wartime ground photos of, for example, Auschwitz show nothing extraordinary—certainly nothing consistent with what is alleged to have happened there. Traditional historians seem to have figured out that photos cause nothing but trouble, and thus best to avoid them altogether, rather than trying to construct ad hoc explanations for their benign appearance. In this same category of neglect I would include charts, tables, diagrams, or other figures that could help clarify the situation. There is not one such item to be found in the book—just wall-to-wall text. To name one example, I myself have argued for a simple time-based charting technique, showing fatalities over time, that turns out to be very useful in depicting the flow of events.[5] It’s a shame that Longerich didn’t adopt something like this. But it’s understandable, if clarity is not an objective.

Two final omissions: The six death camps, which together account for around 50% of alleged Jewish deaths, play an absolutely minimal role here. Auschwitz gets its obligatory scattering of references, but the other camps are near invisible. Belzec and Sobibor are mentioned on a dozen pages or so; Treblinka, Majdanek and Chelmno get about half that. At a minimum, one would hope for updated death figures for each of these camps—but such figures are not to be found.[6] Any details offered on the camps are merely perfunctory, a repetition of standard accounts that one has been reading for years. Even granted that the ‘extermination phase’ was not the focus of the book, it’s hard to understand how any work purporting to be “the standard account” of the Holocaust can spend such little time on those notorious camps.

Finally, what was, to me, the most surprising omission: the ‘six million’ is nowhere to be found. Not once does Longerich mention this number, so vital to the orthodox account that the powers-that-be are willing to mete out prison sentences and book-burnings for those who dispute it. And it’s not that he has an alternative figure; he simply offers none at all. On a couple of occasions I found mention of “millions” of Jewish deaths—but how are we to take this? If it’s ‘two millions,’ then Longerich is in for trouble. Whatever he has in mind, I think revisionists should take heart here: the absence of the sacred touchstone may portend a future backing-down, and thus yet another concession to revisionism.

* * * * *

But let me move on to the substantive remarks in the book. Right from the start we learn that anti-Semitism was the focal point of Nazism:

“What seems to me to be crucial to any analysis [of the Holocaust] is the fact that Judenpolitik was central to the whole National Socialist movement, indeed that the very aims, the distinctiveness, and the uniqueness of National Socialism as a historical phenomenon were determined by its Judenpolitik. […] Hitler himself had […] developed a worldview in which anti-Semitism held a central position: it was the linchpin for all the various ideological clichés […].” (pp. 5, 15)

This not only demonstrates the Nazi ‘obsession’ with the Jews, but it also points to a favored theme of Longerich’s: that, due to this deeply-ingrained Jewish antipathy, a ‘single decision’ or a ‘single order’ by Hitler to murder the Jews was not necessary.

“[W]e should abandon the notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision that led to the ‘Final Solution’. This approach is pointless not only because the debate on the ‘Final Solution’ has evidently reached the limits of what is provable, but above all because any attempt to identify a decision taken at a single moment in time runs counter to the extreme complexity of the processes that were in fact taking place.” (p. 6)

So we ought not bother to look for a nice, clean ‘Hitler order.’ And the lack of one—or even any indirect reference to one—should not trouble us. The Holocaust was “a highly complicated decision-making process,” and thus we should naturally expect to find gaps in the chain of command. Naturally.

Hence, in spite of “an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available” to researchers, a definitive account of the decision process is lacking; “the state of source material can only be described as ‘patchy'” (p. 8). The most important orders, he says, were verbal. Vital documents were destroyed. And all remaining documents “relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to veil their true purpose”—thus the infamous ‘code language’ theory is evidently alive and well, despite a total absence of evidence.

The bulk of Part I—comprising six chapters—is dedicated to recounting the growing persecution of the Jews from 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939. Longerich marks out three phases of increasing anti-Semitism: March-June 1933, spring to late summer 1935, and the year 1938 (culminating in Kristallnacht on November 9/10). He charts the steady progress of the Entjudung, or de-Judaization, of German society that began in late 1935; these are well-documented in Goebbels’ diary entries of the time.[7]

Much emphasis is placed on a post-Kristallnacht meeting, of 12 November 1938, in which the Nazi leadership works out the process of “getting the Jews to leave Germany”—in the words of Heydrich (p. 115). As is well-known, the Germans at this time had no thoughts of mass murder (if they ever did), but only intended to achieve a Reich that was Judenfrei, or Jew-free. Having some 600,000 Jews under their direct control,[8] they clearly faced a massive problem of population transfer. Longerich quotes Goering regarding the Madagascar project, which was conceived as a possible destination for Jews who were not accepted into other countries. This is the earliest mention of Madagascar in the book, and the reader is left with the impression that it started here. But in fact it had been a topic of discussion months before.[9]

Another deceptive move occurs at the beginning of Chapter 6, wherein Longerich examines the threats of “extermination” of the Jews, which supposedly began in late 1938. For one, he never informs the reader of the ambiguities involved with the German terms Ausrottung and Vernichtung. The terms themselves, which are translated as ‘extermination’ or ‘annihilation,’ never explicitly appear. In fact the words have a range of meanings that are dependent on the context; often they mean something far less than mass murder. In their most literal sense, they mean simply a ‘rooting-out’ or forced deportation.[10] To suggest otherwise is dishonest.

Second, Longerich implies that the whole concept of Jewish extermination was invented at that time, by the Nazis—citing a 1938 article from the SS journal Schwarze Korps. But in fact Jewish fears of “extermination” had existed for decades already. As early as 1905, we read in the London Times that “Anti-Semitic disturbances are now in full swing in the Odessa (Russia) district […A]uthorities have received an Imperial [order] commanding the extermination of all Jews” (7 Nov.). Ten years later the New York Times reported that “the Russian Government [has] only one aim in view, to exterminate the Jewish race” (14 April). In 1930 the NYT wrote about anti-Semitism in Romania, and the need for “world intervention to thwart extermination of the Jews” (24 Dec.).

By 1933, the ‘exterminators’ were now the Germans. In a revealing progression, the NYT first reports on the “economic extermination” of the Jews there (13 March; 6 April). Then on June 29 we read in a headline that “Hitler’s program is one of extermination”—but the text below clarifies that “the aim of the Hitler regime is the extermination of the Jew in German life” (emphasis added). (In case we thought he meant killing.) By August, the economic context is dropped; we read only of “the avowed object of exterminating them [the Jews]” (7 Aug.), and that “600,000 Jews of Germany are facing certain extermination” (16 Aug.). From then on, it’s murder all the way—to 6 million.

To his credit, Longerich acknowledges that such talk was nonsense. Even through Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, he tells us, reference to extermination does not mean murder. Rather, such talk indicates only a “tactical intention”: to increase the “pressure of expulsion,” and to coerce the foreign nations, “through a form of blackmail,” to take in the Jews (p. 124). Of course, all this changes by 1941, as we are soon to read.

Part II of the book is brief: three short chapters addressing the T4 ‘euthanasia’ program and the initiation of Jewish deportations in 1939 and 1940. About 1.7 million Polish Jews came under German control in late 1939, which was a huge increase over the (by then) roughly 250,000 Jews in the expanded Reich. This demanded a major reassessment of the Jewish Question. Longerich identifies four progressive phases in this process: (1) initial plans, in September and October 1939, for a Judenreservat (Jewish reservation) in Poland; (2) deportations into the General Government, combined with ghettoization and accelerated emigration, in the period November 1939 to March 1940; (3) development of the Madagascar plan (June to October 1940); and (4) deportations to unidentified areas in “the East,” from November 1940 on.

Phase 1 is of some interest, as it centers on the “Nisko project.” This small town, located in south-east Poland about 100 kilometers west of Belzec, was the initial target station for the first wave of deportations. It was to be a Durchgangslager, “a kind of filter through which the deportees would be moved to the ‘Jewish reservation'” (p. 152). Upon passing through Nisko, the Jews would either be left stranded in their reservation, or, “[driven] over the demarcation line into the occupied Soviet zone, which was common practice in the district of Lublin at the end of 1939” (p. 153). Noting that such a process would result in many deaths, Longerich comments that

even those who initially survived would not have found adequate living conditions, or conditions for reproduction, and would therefore have been condemned to extinction. The Nisko campaign therefore permits the conclusion that [it] was a first version of a ‘final solution’ policy since its aim was the physical termination of those Jews […].” (p. 154)

Though this project was short-lived, it did serve as a successful experiment in Jewish deportation—one that would be repeated later, in much great numbers.

Shortly thereafter, construction commenced on the first large Jewish ghettos. These temporary holding pens would suffice until a longer-term deportation plan was developed. Interestingly, Longerich cites a Himmler memo of May 1940, in which the Reichsführer SS entertains an extreme solution: “the Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people”—an option which is immediately rejected as “un-Germanic and impossible” (p. 162).

It was in this context that the Madagascar plan emerged. It became all the more urgent as the estimate of the number of Jews under Nazi and Axis control surged: from 3¼ million (Heydrich; June 24) to 4 million (RSHA; August 15) to 6½ million (!), as cited by Rademacher in late August 1940. Indeed: if there ever was a factual basis for the ‘extermination of 6 million Jews’, it was in the context of the (non-homicidal) Madagascar plan. That round figure was evidently in circulation for several months in late 1940; Longerich additionally cites two notes by Eichmann, of December 3 and 4, referring to ‘six million’ (p. 492, note 154), and “a total of some 5.8 million Jews” (p. 173), respectively. As before, Longerich sees in this the nefarious beginnings of the Final Solution:

“[T]he idea that millions of European Jews would be deported to Madagascar for years and years, and the fact that […] a large proportion of the transported Jews would presumably die there relatively quickly as victims of the hostile living conditions they would meet,[11] all this makes it perfectly clear that behind this project lay the intention of bringing about the physical annihilation of the Jews under German rule.” (p. 164)

It’s surprising, to say the least, that Longerich can deem “perfectly clear” the Nazi intention for total annihilation already in late 1940. Particularly so, given his overall thesis of a long, drawn-out, “complicated” decision process for mass murder.

Rapid advances on the eastern front would change things, but the Madagascar plan remained viable well into 1942. Goebbels mentions it in his diary as late as March 7 of that year, as a true final destination (‘final solution’?) of the Jews who were evacuated, provisionally, to the Soviet East. That he would write this, in March 1942, is striking: at that point the mass killing was allegedly well underway.[12]

* * * * *

Longerich dedicates Part III to the Einsatzgruppen, those roving militias that allegedly killed between one and 1.5 million Jews in the occupied Soviet territory. As those who have researched this topic know, the entire basis for the claimed shootings is murky. Everything relies upon a series of German reports that are fraught with difficulties, ranging from exaggeration and miscounting to contradiction and outright fraud. Despite the many books on the subject, no one has yet constructed a clear, basic explanation of the ‘who’ and ‘when’ of these killings.

He spends several pages puzzling over the absence of an extermination order for the Soviet Jews. The Ohlendorf testimony at Nuremberg, long considered to be ‘proof’ of such an order, is rightly dismissed as a contrivance for self-defense. After mulling over “local initiatives” and “framework orders,” Longerich offers up this Hilberg-esque statement:

“What emerges from all this is the impression of a degree of vagueness in the way orders were issued to the Einsatzgruppen. A manner of issuing orders in which the subordinate was supposed to recognize the ‘meaning’ behind the words intuitively is familiar from National Socialist anti-Jewish policy [… T]his practice presupposed a certain collusiveness, a strongly developed feeling of consensus amongst those involved […].” (p. 189)

As with the larger Holocaust, “no order from the Führer to murder the Jews was ever issued to the Einsatzgruppen” (p. 499, note 69); this alleged event “cannot be understood as the implementation of a single order issued by the National Socialist hierarchy” (p. 235). Consequently, Einsatzgruppen B and C “displayed some considerable perplexity” about how to handle the ‘final solution’ (p. 210): on the one hand, they were supposed to shoot partisans attacking the German army from the rear, but on the other, there was strong need for forced labor. Alfred Rosenberg described “the establishment of ghettos and labour gangs” as the “key solution” to the Jewish question, and the Einsatzgruppen leadership evidently concurred. Ghettoization was to be the first phase of the final solution, to be maintained during the war. Complete removal (“annihilation,” according to Longerich) would come after the war.

On top of this strategic confusion was the number of groups allegedly shooting Jews. In addition to the four primary Einsatzgruppen (A, B, C, D), Longerich describes a fifth “special purpose” group, and then two more undefined ones, making seven in total. To these he adds police battalions (p. 203), SS brigades (p. 214), “local voluntary troops” (p. 239)—of whom there were an astounding 300,000 or more!—and the Wehrmacht (p. 242). Bullets were flying everywhere, and Jews, it seems, were the main recipients. (One could almost be excused for thinking that a war was going on…)

And not just bullets: Longerich continues the story that “gas vans […] were commissioned for use in the occupied Eastern areas” (p. 240). But he offers neither details, evidence, nor numbers killed.

In the end Longerich offers only a disconnected and incoherent account of the Einsatzgruppen. All the documentation on ghettos, forced labor, and Jewish reserves suggest minimal killing, as do reports that the vast majority of Jews fled the incoming Germans and thus were not there to be killed. Not to mention the fact (the author certainly didn’t!) that there is far too little evidence of human remains or former mass graves to account for more than a fraction of the alleged 1-1.5 million fatalities.

The sole bases for the orthodox claims are the German reports, but these “do not represent precise statistics.” Longerich acknowledges that “some commandos reported exaggerated totals or reported the same figures twice” (p. 254). He is being charitable. Another knowledgeable source, Headland (1992: 94) states, “the irregularity of the reporting frustrates us at every turn”; he goes on to lament “the often contradictory nature of the reports, the obvious self-promotion and self-serving criticisms […] and their incomplete, inconsistent, and at times, inaccurate quality” (p. 203). Butz (2003: 243-246) argues that many reports were Russian forgeries, to further implicate the hated Germans. There is the additional problem that the report totals often did not include a racial breakdown, so we cannot be sure how many Jews were included. Longerich’s final flaw is his emphasis on the year 1941. That year covered only six months of Einsatzgruppen operation, and thus only about a third of the alleged murders—a number that “must be” around 500,000.

One would have expected him to give much greater weight to the shootings in 1942—but the 10 pages covering that period, in Chapter 17, are a mish-mash of statistics devoid of coherent conclusions. To mention the most glaring example, Longerich cites, almost in passing (p. 353), the single most stunning Einsatzgruppen statistic: the assertion that HSSPF Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann and his team reportedly killed a mind-boggling 363,211 Jews in just three months (Sept-Nov 1942)—over 4,000 per day.[13] This, in addition to the on-going Einsatzgruppen actions. But we get no analysis or discussion; just the comment that “Hitler took note of it.” All this suggests that Longerich has in fact a very superficial grasp of the reality of the Einsatzgruppen.

* * * * *

Even into late 1941, the ad hoc ‘regional’ killing continued. It functioned “in a largely uncoordinated fashion,” because there was as yet “no overall plan for the murder of the European Jews” (p. 283). The growth of these regional exterminations “required a very complicated interaction” between units, “a mélange of orders and intentions on the part of the central authorities, and independent initiatives and intuition on the part of the regional powerholders” (p. 304)—bringing us back to Hilberg’s ‘mind-reading’ again.

Part V, finally, arrives at the full-blown extermination phase. But even here, into 1942, we get qualifications and hesitations. Longerich places a repeated emphasis, not on the systematic mass murder of orthodoxy, but on an alternative hypothesis, that of “extermination through work.” This is a kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy: all the actual evidence points toward confinement, deportations, ghettos, and forced labor… but that’s just work, not murder. So, clearly, they must have been worked to death. And those incapable of work were, naturally, killed straightaway.

By our author’s counting, a fourth wave of deportations commenced in May 1942. Previous removals were destined for the ghettos; but now, “the great majority of deportees were shot directly at the end of the journey, or suffocated in gas vans. […] The murder machinery was completely freed from the context of ‘resettlement,’ ‘expulsion,’ and ‘work programme’ […]” (p. 323). This is an odd statement, given that the six death camps were allegedly gassing (in chambers) between 60,000 and 100,000 Jews per month at this time, and would soon be well over 250,000 per month.

Chapter 17 continues with a very cursory overview of the camps themselves; even Auschwitz gets less than one page of dedicated text (p. 344). It closes with the on-going lament about how incomprehensible was the ‘mass murder’ order: “The decision-making process underlying the systematic genocide remains largely obscure and must be reconstructed from the course of events” (p. 359). It would be more accurate to say constructed, since Longerich himself fills in all necessary gaps with assumptions, inferences, and outright inventions. Critical pieces of evidence in the extermination story are missing and unaddressed: the impossibility of gassing with carbon monoxide, the incoherent account of Zyklon-B chambers, the impossibility of mass open-air incineration with wood, the air photos, the missing bodies, the missing mass graves, and any analysis of Jewish population movement. Even his own account is peppered with incriminating facts, like the continued eastward deportations through late 1943, the expulsion (not murder) of foreign Jews at that same time, and Himmler’s suspension of Jewish deportations from Hungary in August 1944.

“As confusing as the overall picture may seem at first […]” (p. 428). Confusing indeed. More like an ad hoc construction, using selective pieces of evidence with a predetermined conclusion in mind. And a failure to examine contrary evidence in a critical manner, and to examine alternative accounts that better explain the evidence. In other words—an entirely unscientific account.

In the end, I can’t recommend this book to anyone interested in a better understanding of the Holocaust. This book adds as much confusion as insight. But it is useful in the study of ‘Holocaustism’—that growing ideology of persecution and guilt, so useful for propaganda purposes and monetary extortion. The failings of orthodoxy are now in full view, open to all who are willing to see.

Bibliography

• Butz, A. 2003. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (3rd edition). Theses and Dissertations Press.
• Dalton, T. 2009. Debating the Holocaust. Theses and Dissertations Press.
• Dalton, T. 2010. “Goebbels on the Jews,” Inconvenient History, 2(1); online: https://codoh.com/library/document/goebbels-on-the-jews-part-1/; https://codoh.com/library/document/goebbels-on-the-jews-part-2/
• Graf, J. 2001. The Giant with Feet of Clay. Theses and Dissertations Press.
• Headland, R. 1992. Messages of Murder. Farleigh Dickinson University Press.
• Hilberg, R. 2003. The Destruction of the European Jews. Yale University Press.

Notes: