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Professor
Christopher Browing |
“The Holocaust is almost
universally recognized as a preeminent symbol of ‘radical
evil’ in human history,” according to Christopher
Browning—Professor of History, world-renowned author, and
eminent Holocaust scholar. “It is the yardstick by which other
atrocities and genocides are now measured. Given the vast
increase in scholarship on the Holocaust in the past two
decades, I certainly do not see it as a lesson of the past
that is not being learned or about to be forgotten.
Unfortunately, as a paradigmatic event it inevitably has also
been politicized, both exploited on the one hand and
trivialized or denied on the other for various agendas.”
Over the past three decades,
Browning has focused the better part of his time investigating
this “symbol of radical evil.” As well as his teachings and
publications, he has testified in numerous trials (both of
accused Nazi criminals and Holocaust deniers) developing a
complex and inexorable relationship with the Holocaust, and
consequently with Yad Vashem—the Holocaust Martyrs’ and
Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.
The Holocaust was not always at
the forefront of Browning’s interests. It was not until he
began his Ph.D. that his curiosity was piqued. While preparing
a German history course, he read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann
in Jerusalem and became fascinated by her concept of the
“banality of evil”:
“I had read little about the
Holocaust, and Arendt obviously had taken (and in some cases
clearly misused) information from Hilberg’s The Destruction
of the European Jews. Thus I turned to Hilberg’s book,
and reading it was a life-changing experience... At that time
the topic had no academic legitimacy in the US.”
His early readings stimulated
Browning to focus his Ph.D. dissertation on the role of the
German Foreign Ministry, and particularly its cadre of
so-called “Jewish experts” in the Final Solution. Initially he
was warned that such a topic had “no professional future,” but
the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—especially
Robert Koehl and George Mosse—supported him. His first book
was published in 1978, just as American consciousness of the
Holocaust was radically evolving.
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Deportation
of Jews from the Lodz ghetto |
Einsatzgruppen mass shooting- 1941 |
Since then, Browning has published numerous
books on the Holocaust, including the controversial and
groundbreaking Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland.
His most recent work is
Origins of the Final Solution: September 1939-March
1942 as part of Yad Vashem’s multi-volume, comprehensive
History of the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem first contacted
Browning in 1983, asking him to author this publication. He
spent two years researching in Jerusalem, mainly at the Yad
Vashem Archives. (The publication was delayed somewhat due to
the flood of new sources unexpectedly emerging after 1989
following the revolutions in Eastern Europe.) It is due to be
released in English by Yad Vashem in conjunction with the
University of Nebraska Press and in Hebrew by Yad Vashem
within the next two years.
To date, Yad Vashem’s multi-volume
comprehensive History of the Holocaust remains a
work-in-progress. Many of the volumes detailing events of Nazi
genocide of the Jewish people in Europe have already been
published. Three volumes on the evolution and the stages of
Nazi Jewish policy are still incomplete: Comprehensive
History of the Holocaust: Germany, Origins of the Final
Solution: September 1939-March 1942, and
Implementation of the Final Solution, 1942-1945.
In Origins of the Final
Solution, Browning focuses his scholarship on Nazi
population and resettlement policies and ghettoization in
Poland (the “laboratory” for Nazi racial policies) in
1939-1940. Between 1941-1942, the focus is on the Nazi “war of
destruction” against the Soviet Union, the decision-making
process for the Final Solution, and the initial steps toward
implementation of the Final Solution (building the first
killing centers, executing the first deportations to Lodz,
Minsk, and Riga, and initiating the Nazi bureaucracy). His key
sources were gathered from surviving German documents, as well
as post-war court records. Jewish sources (such as
Czerniakow’s diary and the chronicle of the Lodz ghetto) were
utilized for sections of the book that deal with
ghettoization.
The book is comprised of two
parts. The first section argues that Nazi racial policy in
Poland resulted from the Nazis’ ideological vision of
realigning the demographic map of Eastern Europe to create
German lebensraum. This was achieved through the mass
“ethnic cleansing” of Jews and Poles. The Jewish populations
under Nazi control were targeted for total expulsion in a
succession of “resettlement” plans—first to the “Lublin
reservation,” then to Madagascar, and finally to the Siberian
or Arctic wastelands of the Soviet Union. Each of the
so-called “resettlement” plans culminated in mass death (or in
Nazi terms “decimation”). None of these schemes came close to
implementation, and local German occupation authorities in
Poland bore the consequences.
The most preferred solution to the
demographic problem was ghettoization. Death rates among the
ghettoized Jews soared as a result of starvation and epidemic.
Local German authorities discussed options: “attrition”
through starvation or “production” through harnessing Jewish
labor. More often than not, those advocating “production”
through the creation of ghetto economies initially prevailed,
though food supplies to the ghettos remained inadequate.
The second part of the book
details the manner in which planning for a “war of
destruction” radically affected Nazi policies. Resettlement
schemes initially led to vague notions of genocide through an
unspecified combination of execution, starvation, and
expulsion and then to concretize plans for the Final Solution,
i.e. systematic mass murder of every last Jew within the Nazi
grasp.
Browning contends that the peaks
of radicalization in Nazi Jewish policy correspond to those of
Nazi victory euphoria (victory over Poland and approval of the
“Lublin Reservation” in September 1939, victory over France
and approval of the Madagascar Plan in May/June 1940, the
first point of presumed victory over the Soviet Union and the
decision for the total destruction of Soviet Jewry in mid-July
1941, and the second point of presumed victory and the
decision to extend total mass murder to the Jews of the rest
of Europe in late September/early October 1941). Further,
enthusiastic participation in the East’s racial imperialism
project by the German population along with various
administrators, troops, and policemen was a vital precondition
for Nazi readiness to implement the Final Solution.
Browning’s multi-year project has yielded a
work of scholarship that is not only comprehensive in its
content, but also highly comprehensible. In the words of the
author, “I hope that the book will not only be useful to
scholars and experts in the field but also accessible and
informative to general readers. |
