January 21, 2007
Wannsee and Victory Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz’s lead piece on the website, “The Final Solution: What Happened at Wannsee?, is published on the anniversary of the Wansee Conference, where, as Josh puts it, the German government “formalized” plans for the extermination of European Jewry. Josh uses the word “formalize” with deliberation, seeking to avoid once-aggressive arguments between historians who think that the genocidal assault on the Jews had been long-meditated by Hitler and those who think that the Final Solution developed slowly and was not the product of a single intention or order. Josh spends some time canvassing theories on when the Final Solution “began” and notes Christopher Browning’s conclusion that an agreement to exterminate European Jewry dates from July of 1941. One thing Josh does not mention is the probable reason for that date. Many historians now believe that in July of 1941 Hitler had decided that Germany had pretty much won the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union had begun in late June, and in July it seemed as if nothing could stop the German armies as they raced toward Moscow. With Churchill’s last possible Continental ally apparently going down, Hitler looked forward to absolute victory and could now do as he pleased. This suggests that fear of the consequences might have deterred the Final Solution, but that in the summer of 1941 that fear vanished. It seemed clear that there could be no consequences. Josh’s column made me think a bit on some other reading I have been doing this week, Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, which has just been published in an English translation by Columbia University Press. Friedrich’s book, a great success in Germany and elsewhere—according to its author, it has already been read by half a million people—has sometimes been taken to be an attempt to erode the distinction between Germany’s conduct of the Second World War and the moral worth of the tactics employed by her British and American enemies. If you take this line, Germany murdered civilians but so did Great Britain and the United States, and “murdered” has to be the right word, since civilians were often the direct rather than the indirect objects of attack. There are, I think, many things deeply wrong about this equation of Allied and Nazi morals, an equation very neatly encapsulated in the now-common, smug, and careless little phrase “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” but Josh’s piece made me focus on one of them. When Germany and Japan surrendered, Allied attacks stopped on a dime. Since Hitler and the German Army, and German officialdom, grievously misread the prospects of the Red Army in the summer of 1941, we cannot know exactly how Germany would have exploited the victory that in July seemed so certain, but we can be sure that the Final Solution would not have stopped with the fall of the Kremlin. Victory in war was for the Nazis the means to a genocidal world empire, while victory in war was for the Allies the means to abort that ghastly possibility. The Allies did some dreadful things to win, while their enemies sought to win to do dreadful things. Blurring this distinction seems to me to be, at best, idiocy. It is, of course, fair to say that the distinction would have been lost on German civilians killed before VE Day. It is also fair to say that if you were a German civilian alive on VE Day, the distinction was probably more striking, and Poles, whose country had been conquered back in 1939 but suffered an additional six million fatalities under German occupation, have had little difficulty with it. What seems odd is that people who blur the distinction invariably seem proud of their historical sophistication.
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