« The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz | Main | More on the Pope's Auschwitz Speech »
May 31, 2006
Dean Esmay and the Revisionist Reconstruction of a Coerced Germany
You'll recall that I argued that
no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich [as Ratzinger does -- namely,] as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals.Esmay responds:Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans who pulled triggers, typed lists, ordered supplies, "aryanized" property, guarded trains, drove trucks, medicated "defectives," built buildings, extracted fillings, collected taxes, broke windows, stitched clothing, tallied numbers, scheduled shipments, and did the thousands and thousands of other tasks that that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running.
Eric, there are too serious academic scholars who say the German people, or at least vast swaths of them, were bullied and terrified into following Hitler's gang of criminals. A gang of criminals who were never legitimately elected. I can point you to academic sources that debunk the "Hitler was elected" nonsense any time you like. He and his group of thugs seized power, through terror, duplicity, and coercion. They then constructed an image of German national unity that had nothing to do with what everyday Germans actually thought.Why does Dean Esmay wish to propagate the revisionist myth of a terrorized German populace whose will was overborne?
Consider some excerpts from Doris Bergen's "War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust" (Rowman & Littlefield 2003), pp. 54-57, a well-regarded primer on the Holocaust that summarizes existing scholarship:
Hitler's political position in early 1933 (when he was appointed Chancellor) was not that strong. His party's support had dropped from its July 1932 peak, and even then it had received only 37 percent of the votes cast. . . .To be sure, Hitler and his associates used terror and intimidation to silence their loudest critics or to drive them into exile; Dachau began operation in 1933 as a political prison, not a site of racial extermination.Hitler made his first major move in early 1933 against the Communists, a target he chose with care. Communism could have posed a real threat to Nazi power. Like the Nazi party, the Communist Party had local cells throughout Germany. It was well represented both in the Reichstag and in the streets ... The Communists, however, were an ideal first target for another reason as well; Hitler was guaranteed to have allies against them. Precisely those elements in German society that had helped Hitler into the chancellor's seat -- conservatives, nationalists, industrialists, and military men -- hated and feared Communism. They were unlikely to protest any anti-Communist measures, no matter how unconstitutional or harsh.
...
The Reichstag fire gave Hitler a pretext to dismantle what was left of Germany's democratic institutions. Pointing to the supposed risk of disorder and to his now proven ability to act decisively, he convinced the members of the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Law of 23 March 1933. The Enabling Law allowed Hitler to put through any measure without approval from the Reichstag. ... Social Democratic representatives opposed the Enabling Law, but they were the only mainstream party to do so. In effect the Reichstag was now defunct; its own members [of whom only one-third were Nazis--ed.] had voted it out of existence. Their reasons for doing so varied: quite a few welcomed the new regime they thought would replace the cumbersome parliamentary system they hated with authoritarian order; others felt intimidated by Nazi attacks on Communists and Social Democrats; some hoped to curry favor with Hitler and his people by proving how willing they were to cooperate.
...
Hitler's political revolution was not without violence, but he established his dictatorship through means that were, at least in a narrow sense of the word, legal.
The Nazi revolution had immediate effects on those groups Hitler had described as enemies for years. It was not only political opponents like the Communists who felt early blows; homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, German Jews, people considered physically or mentally handicapped, and Afro-Germans all experienced attacks with the first year of Nazi rule.
Hitler and his associates in the new German leadership struck in dramatic, decisive ways, but they always tested the public response to each move before proceeding further. This mixture of boldness and caution would be typical of Nazi tactics throughout the Third Reich, form its inception in 1933 to its collapse in 1945. Public opinion was very important to Hitler. A firm believer in the stab-in-the-back myth [which preached that Germany had lost World War I not because of military failure but because internal state enemies such as Jews and Communists "stabbed Germany in the back" and surrendered], he was convinced that a disgruntled German public had lost Germany the First World War. He was determined to avoid a repeat of that situation under his rule."
But there is no support, outside of Dean Esmay's imaginings, for the proposition that "everyday Germans" -- indeed, "vast swaths" of them -- were just "bullied and terrified into following Hitler's gang of criminals."
Why Dean Esmay prefers to fantasize about Germany in this way is anybody's guess.
Posted by Eric at May 31, 2006 8:50 AM
Comments
So the Nazis used fear of communism and social disorder, but still only had 37 percent support or less. The Reichstag passed the Enabling Law due in substantial part to "intimidation" and the wish to "curry favor" which presumably entailed fear of the consequences of disfavor. A narrowly legal accession to power "that was not without violence." "Boldness" as well as "caution." And "to be sure," Dachau existed--largely to encourage the others.
Right or wrong, your argument needs a little work. Germans in the Thirties let a bad economy, social unrest, nationalistic grievances and socially accepted antisemitism blind them to just where the national socialist road was likely to lead. This is true despite dissembling and coercion by the regime. However, Germans weren't alone in underestimating the Nazis. To what standard to we hold Germans generally for events of 1933-1939?
Let's try something else. It's, say, early 1942. You're Ratzinger, or some other ordinary German soldier or civilian. You start to sense, despite lack of direct evidence and the regime's coercion and dissimulation, that systematic killing of civilians has begun. What "resistance," to use your term, should you offer? Say you're "sewing uniforms" or work in a rail yard, or are a fireman or flak crewman in the Ruhr, or are a soldier out east. What should be done, at the individual level?
ELM: CS, you're dropping in on the conversation a little late. The pope distinguished quite starkly between a "band of criminals" who "stole power" and the "German people" who were tricked, intimidated and coerced. Dean Esmay agrees. I do not; I believe that the circumstances of the Nazi accession to, and weilding of, power, were far more complex than the simple Nazi-criminal/Volk-innocent dichotomy of the pope and Esmay.
If I read you right, you agree with me on that score.
So why, exactly, are you pointing your questions at me?
Posted by: CS at May 31, 2006 12:22 PM
Actually Dean was on the issue with me as well and I jumped in on his post countering you
Posted by: Larry Bernard at May 31, 2006 1:13 PM
Mr. Esmay obviously should cite the names and scholarship of the "too serious academic scholars" in order to debunk the claim that "no respectable scholar the evil of the Third Reich [as Ratzinger does -- namely,] as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals."
I'd give him a chance to do so before saying that he "prefers to fantasize about Germany." I don't know what Esmay "prefers" or doesn't prefer.
Posted by: Glen Bowman at May 31, 2006 1:40 PM
Esmay's assertion that Hitler et al were "never legitimately elected" is not necessarily a contradiction of Bergen's point that Hitler "established his dictatorship through means that were, at least in a narrow sense of the word, legal." There is an entire school of political thought stemming from the Reformation and continuing through the so-called Wars of Religion and English Revolution that questioned not the legality of a political ruler but his (or her) legitimacy. No one questioned whether Charles I was legally monarch, but Milton and others questioned his legitimacy.
And we all know what happened to him ultimately.
Hitler was a master of using propaganda through speeches and writings to win over the German people, who with their own free will chose to accept his dangerous and repulsive ideas and act on them. Many did not drink his Kool Aid, but far too many did, and probably would have wanted more.
Posted by: Glen Bowman at May 31, 2006 1:56 PM
If your position is that the psychology and politics of ordinary Germans' relationship to the Nazi regime were complex and complicated, we do agree.
The most prominent recent work on Germans' participation in the Holocaust (Goldhagen, etc.) tends towards methodological problems and polemics. However, it's a needed antidote to previous work, which tended to rehabilitate Germans too easily. I'm still waiting for an adequate synthesis.
You may have overreached a little in some of your comments on the Auschwitz speech. Nonetheless, your expressed surprise at the general tenor of modern central European views on the Shoah is on target. The fight over characterizations of the Holocaust stems from two obvious and seemingly compatible notions: that of Jews as particular targets of the Nazis, and that of crimes against non-German gentiles as equally worth commemorating. It's frankly hard not to see some residual antisemitism in gentile reactions to what's portrayed as Jewish exceptionalism. It's just awful, isn't it, that the same old resentment over perceived exceptionalism that created the disaster, now poisons its commemoration.
B16's a product of his environment, and his words provide insight into how Europe has changed, and how it hasn't. (Truism alert)
All that being said, the realist or pessimist's question remains. Given that Germans were no more or less perspicacious than anyone else, there's no point complaining that they were incautious in the Thirties. Once things got truly disastrous (morally, not in terms of military reverses), how should Germans have responded? The only value in thinking about all this is cautionary and instructive. We can't assume we'd have been less blind early on. Could we have been braver or more clever once we found ourselves emeshed in moral horror?
So, my earlier questions weren't antagonistic. I'm genuinely interested in what someone who obviously feels strongly about this area thinks were possible forms of "ordinary" and "exceptional" "resistance."
Posted by: CS at May 31, 2006 4:48 PM
The issue, in my opinion, is not whether the Germans suffered and were victimized but rather whether their, true or imagined, suffering come even close to the murder of 6 million Jews (including most of my family), myriad of gays, gypsies and about 2 million Russian POW.
Her Ratzinger clearly is not fit to serve as moral figure not only on world wide scale, but I wouldn’t trust him with a small parish.
As for Esmay (about whom I know nothing), I know quite a few leaderless parishes in rural Pennsylvania that could use his/her services.
Posted by: shmuel at May 31, 2006 10:59 PM