1.
You have famously argued that there were three
solutions to the Jewish problem; conversion, expulsion, and finally
extermination. Could you explain what you mean by that?
2.
This is an underlying pattern to which I came to
early on in my research. Looking through the sweep of history it is clear that
conversion was an object of the Christian world. The expulsions began in the
late Middle Ages when it would appear that the Jews were not willing to become
Christians. That pattern existed for several hundred years in Europe. You could
take it back to Oxford and then go to Spain in 1492 and Portugal a few years
later. So we are really talking about the later Middle Ages and the beginning
of modern times for the expulsions. Now, the business of a final solution, that
permanent solution, is a Nazi idea. You go back even to the beginnings of the
Nazi party and find that they are still thinking in terms of the emigration of
the Jews —there was a plan called the Madagascar plan, which was actually a
thought in Poland and even in France (Madagascar was a French possession),
maybe all of the Jews could be shipped there. So this idea was still floating
in the German foreign office and all the way up to Hitler as late as 1940,
especially 1940 when France surrendered. However, when the War did not end as
the Germans had hoped it would with the West (they were already making
preparations to attack the Soviet Union), the serious thought of annihilating
the Jews emerged. The earliest indication of this is a meeting Hitler had with
a bunch of party members early in February of 1941. He had by then not quite
formed the decision, but it was on the way.
3.
There was the revisionist conference in Iran
several months ago. How worried should scholars and the general public be about
the capacity of this kind of revisionism to engender anti-Semitism?
4.
This revisionism began in the 1960s. It is not
new. I boycotted Germany for quite a while, but when I passed through a while
back Munich I went to a kiosk and bought a local right wing paper, a German
paper, I found to my great astonishment that I was mentioned on the title page
as a Zionist leader. Now, that was a big surprise to me, but the headline was:
“The Lie of the Holocaust”. So, Germany in the sixties had adherence to this
belief, even though there they should have known better than anywhere else.
There was a Frenchman who was already in print in the 1960s. Half of his book
was devoted to me. It was a neo-Nazi publication. As soon as my book, The
Destruction of the European Jews, was out in 1961, I became a target of these
groups. To me, the later developments in Holocaust denial were just a very slow
spread, not even a growth, but a spread from France/Germany to the United
States to Canada and ultimately picked up by the Arab world. The Arab world is
very disoriented when it comes to Europe anyway. They are as confused about the
West as we are about them. Even so, the conference in Iran did not even succeed
in Iran - it was needless difficulty and trouble. There were Iranians who
publicly denounced this conference. So, I am not terribly worried about it even
though at the time that that conference took place last December I was asked by
the German government to take part in a counter-conference as the keynote
speaker that was held the same day in Berlin. I ordinarily do not engage in
debates with Holocaust revisionists. I did not do so at the Berlin conference
either, but the essence of my talk was that, yes, there was a Holocaust, which
is, by the way, more easily said than demonstrated. I demonstrated this and
people did come to it. Nevertheless, the German papers did not publicize the
counter-conference in Berlin because they could not resist publishing the faces
of the Rabbis who had gone to Iran. I have come to the conclusion, not once but
several times, that, as far as I am concerned, I do not agree with legislation
that makes it illegal to utter pronouncements claiming that there was no
Holocaust. I do not want to muzzle any of this because it is a sign of weakness
not of strength when you try to shut somebody up. Yes, there is always a risk.
Nothing in life is without risk, but you have to make rational decisions about
everything.
5.
Many of the recent anti-Semitic incidents in
Europe have led people to talk of a new anti-Semitism. Is this really something
we should take seriously or is this simply a continuance of the older
anti-Semitism?
6.
It is not even that. It is picking up a few
pebbles from the past and throwing them at windows. I am old enough to remember
what the effects of an anti-Jewish attitude are. Here, at the University of
Vermont it was unthinkable, even in this liberal state, to have a Jew as a dean
as late as the seventies, let alone president. In other words, there was still
a lot of segregation in the United States. If you go back and you pick up any
New York Times in the thirties or even the forties you will see ads for
apartments in New York City and the word “restricted”. This is a Jewish owned
newspaper and they printed ads barring Jews. And this was an embedded anti-Jewish
regime, which the society itself supported and it’s gone. It’s simply gone. We
cannot even talk about restrictions on Jews in the Islamic world because the
Jews have left the Islamic world. They are not there anymore except in Morocco
and maybe some tens of thousands still here and there, but that is a remnant of
the two hundred thousand that were still there when the state of Israel was
created. So the anti-Semitism of the past belongs to the past, and particularly
the word “anti-Semitism.” There was an anti-Semitic party in Germany and there
was an anti-Semitic party in Austria. The leader of the Hungarian regime,
Admiral Horthy, who, when some extreme right wing guys were trying to take over
Jewish businesses shouted them down. He said, and I am paraphrasing, “you are
not going to take over these businesses because the Jews at least know how to
run them and who are you? And don’t you talk to me because I was an anti-Semite
before you were born.” Adolf Hitler himself, and nobody reads Mein Kampf, makes
a statement that his father would not be an anti-Semite because it would
degrade him socially. Nietzsche’s sister married an anti-Semitic leader and he
referred in letters to his sister in the whole correspondence “to your
anti-Semitic husband.” Now, you can see that anti-Semitism was somewhat
correlated with some backward glance. It belongs to the nineteenth century with
its other “-isms,” with imperialism, with colonialism, with racism. It sounds
bizarre if I tell you that the Nazis did not call themselves anti-Semites. You
do not even find the word.
7.
Really?
8.
Yes, there was a sense that Nazism was something
new. The anti-Semite had stopped at a certain point; the anti-Semite could talk
about eliminating Jews, but did not know how to do it. The anti-Semite did not
have the power, the anti-Semite was a propagandist. The Nazis were serious and
this was a far different proposition. When you see the actual legislation in
Germany, Austria, and elsewhere that states that it is criminal to deny that
there was a Holocaust, it is because these governments have to distance
themselves from Nazism. Nowadays of course Nazism and anti-Semitism are
conflated into one kind of ideology, but it is a different phenomenon. There
was an extreme anti-Semitic newspaper in Germany, Der Stürmer, which was
published by Julius Streicher. I do not remember now whether it was Höss, the
Auschwitz commander, or somebody else who was asked, “Did you read Der
Stürmer?” He said, basically, “Look, I’m a lieutenant colonel of the SS, I
wouldn’t be caught dead reading Der Stürmer.” It was like reading the lowest of
the low gossip rags in the United States. There was an issue of social
standing.
9.
What are your thoughts on the rhetorical and
symbolic usage of the word “Holocaust”?
10.
I resisted the use of the word “Holocaust” to
begin with because of its religious underpinnings. In the end, it is like
anything that becomes usage; you do not escape from it. But, “Holocaust”
becomes problematic in a number of ways, and the one which is least discussed,
because it’s politically incorrect to do so, is that everything is becoming a
Holocaust. I will give you one example: I was walking in Berlin one day and I
see a sign “Holocaust” and saw some street demonstrators with signs reading
“Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.” I could not figure out what they were
demonstrating about until I saw a cage and realized they were talking about
cruelty to animals. The word “genocide” is also being bandied about, and of
course the Genocide Convention has a definition which goes beyond what they
call a “Holocaust.” So if you kidnap children in order to make them do
something that’s genocide, if you use opium that’s genocide, etc. Because it’s
an international convention, the Greeks put something in there, the Chinese put
something in there and so on and so forth. “Holocaust” is a misused word again
and again because it means, especially when it is capitalized, the Jewish
catastrophe and once you pin it on all sorts of things it loses its
effectiveness. There are now books being written that state the Armenians were
not really subjected to genocide or the Gypsies were not really subjected to
genocide - even though in my opinion both were - but it results in these
arguments and it’s an unavoidable situation. As soon as the President’s
Commission on the Holocaust was set-up—that’s the same President Carter who is
now being called an anti-Semite who created the Commission—everybody showed up:
the Armenians, of course, showed up, the Poles showed up, the Ukrainians showed
up, the Czechs showed up. There are all of these definitional problems and
arguments that emerge when using words like “Holocaust” or “genocide.”
11.
Moving beyond the way these words are
symbolically and rhetorically employed, what do you see as the kind of relation
of the Holocaust to other historical and current genocides? How can we use the
lessons of it to confront the kind of violence and persecution of groups which
are occurring today, whether or not sociologically we consider them genocides?
12.
I did not know what to do with Cambodia or other
events like that, but Rwanda convinced me. That is why in the third edition of
my book I got Rwanda in there. Why I put it there is the answer to your
question. In Buchenwald and possibly some other camps as the war ended, the
inmates put up big signs that said “never again.” I think it was really the
Communists who were behind that, but I am not sure. The signs said “never
again” in various languages because there was a Babel of languages in these
camps. Millions of people, men, women and children killed only because they
were classified as Jews. Now, that should not happen again and that is the
responsibility of the world. The result was, in fact, the Genocide Convention.
The word genocide was a made up word by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from
Poland whose previous speciality was terrorism. When the Holocaust happened he
published a book in 1944, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In that book he
invented the word genocide because he argued that the law has to have that
concept as a crime. Of course the United States did not want to sign the
Genocide Convention because the State Department and other representatives had
their doubts. One major doubt was that if we had a Genocide Convention, then
the blacks in this country would challenge all the segregation laws. The
Genocide Convention is a treaty, and if it’s a treaty under Article six of the
Constitution we cannot sign this convention because it would override our
sacred state laws which discriminated against blacks. That was their argument.
Eventually that argument collapsed. What remains today, however, is that the
“never again” is implicit. Yet, come Rwanda and President Clinton refused to
call it genocide when it really was! We said that we will never tolerate this
sort of thing again, but allow half a million people plus to be killed in three
or four months in Rwanda. After ten Belgians were killed withdrawals began of
the international peacekeeping force. It was the same thing as in Germany, the
Hutu decided now we are going to solve the Tutsi problem like the Germans did
with the Jews. It is even clear that they decided it months before they started
killing because they imported machetes and made preparations like the Germans.
So here we were, the whole world, there’s no World War II going on, there is no
excuse that we need all the aircraft we have, so we cannot bomb Auschwitz
because we need them on the Western Front, and nothing is done. It’s peace,
it’s the nineties, and nothing is done. So much for “never again.” So the problem
has obviously not disappeared. You have to make decisions. When you are sitting
in the Defense Department or the State Department in the White House you never
can predict exactly what configurations some happening will show you. You have
to think it through and these people haven’t got any time to think. They have
to do all their thinking before they took office. This is a major problem.
Nevertheless, this is the first time in history that we take a sort of global
responsibility. I am not saying we are alone, we have our partners doing this
and the notion of a gloabl responsibility is really brand new, it is post-World
War II.
13.
What are your thoughts on the current debates
over how to interpret the Holocaust and its legacy in the work of people like
Norman Finkelstein or Daniel Goldhagen?
14.
Well Finkelstein is now maligned all over the
place. There were obviously lobbies who tried to dislodge him from his
position. Finkelstein is a political scientist. I believe he has a PhD degree
from Princeton and, whatever you may think of Princeton, this is a pretty
strong preparation to be a professional political scientist. He wrote to me a
couple of times. He was the first one to take Goldhagen seriously. He attacked
Goldhagen in a very long essay which I could never have written because I would
have never had the patience. Goldhagen is part of an academic group that in my
kind of research is a disaster...
15.
Why is that?
16.
Because [Goldhagen] was totally wrong about
everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong. In other words, this whole fury
of his anti-Semitism was, at the root, that it was especially eliminationist
anti-Semitism, was totally absurd. He talks about anti-Semitism among Germans,
Estonians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, but where did this unique eliminationist
anti-Semitism come from? It is just totally absurd. I mean, totally off the
wall, you know, and factually without any basis. Finkelstein took this
seriously. I took it less seriously, but I was a latecomer in attacking this
Goldhagen fellow. Now Finkelstein had a second point, which, in my opinion, was
one hundred percent correct and that is that the response to the issue of the
Swiss banks and German industry, which had coincided during the War, was not
only coercive on the part of the Jews who mobilized, but also on the part of
all the insurance commissioners, the Senate, the House, and the critical
committees. The only thing they could not break through was to the courts,
which still have independence. So they lost at court, but they threatened
people like Alan Hevesi in New York. They could make threats because Swiss
banks wanted to expand here. For Finkelstein, this was naked extortion and I’m
not sure who agreed with him except for me and I said so openly. In fact, I
said so to the press in maybe seven countries. The press did not expect my
answer. The World Jewish Congress was led by a man who was appeared to be from
his own autobiographical statements to be totally, not even average, but like a
child almost. What this tycoon, who took over the World Jewish Congress, was
saying was totally preposterous. The claims lawyers, joined by the World Jewish
Congress, made an incredible display of totally inappropriate behavior. Now
when he talks about the Arabs, some Jews feel that he is also anti-Zionist,
that he is anti-Israel; that he seems to always emphasize the suffering of the
Arabs. I do not join him in this particular venture because I have my own view,
but you cannot say he is altogether wrong either. Would you like to be an Arab
citizen in Israel? Think of the doors that are closed. You may eat better and
have a better income than if you lived in a slum in Cairo. The great irony is
that the economic condition of Israeli Arabs is considerably better than the
proletariat in some other Arab countries, but a person needs something more. A
person needs a feeling of dignity. Think of the security check points. It is a
life that certainly something ought to be done about it in one way or another.
This particular battle cannot be fought forever. It cannot be. The Israelis
will tire of it. The Israelis will simply tire of mistrusting people. It is not
possible to go on this way forever. Finkelstein has the corner on the germ of
correct vision in these matters because he is pretty sharp. More often than not,
especially with regard to these other matters like Goldhagen and the Swiss
banks he has been right.
17.
One last question, as time goes on in the
twenty-first century what direction should research on the Holocaust take now?
18.
Well, if you had asked that question first, it
would have needed a half hour. Rightfully so, the research today is oriented
towards finding out details and especially what happened at the local level.
This research has already started. It is not very well developed in this
country, but it is very much in progress in Europe. The principle researchers
of the Holocaust today are Germans and Austrians. There are also some French
and Italians. There are not many Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this
country. The second thing that we should and must do is look at those aspects
of what happened which are still taboo. What is taboo is the life of a terminal
Jewish community in some ghetto and the notion that some people died first,
then other people died next, still other people died last, and then, better
yet, some of them survived. What accounts for these very discernible
developments? Example: the first to die were the poorest of the poor. We have
got to face this issue. We have got to realize that it will not do in the
academic world to call all of the Jewish dead – as I have heard one Rabbi call
them, Kedoshim, which means holy people. This is not my language. We cannot do
that. We have to see them as they were and we have not done this. We have had
the lectures. This is one aspect in which I do not agree with Elie Wiesel
although I have known him for a long time. He says “listen to the survivors and
listen even to their children.” I say, yes, we will listen to the survivors. We
have listened for quite a long time, but it is not enough. It will not tell us
what happened to the people that did not survive. You are not a random sample.
This requires a lot of assiduous research through a lot records that have been
buried and have not been examined. The third thing that needs to be done is:
you have to identify more clearly who the neighbors of the Jews were. How they
were impacted if at all? How their reactions were motivated, be it to join the
perpetrator or help the victim or, in most cases, remain neutral. Neutrality does not mean ignoring something. It means a
decision not to do anything. We have to examine that as well. So we have
to examine the Holocaust in all ways and it boils down to doing a lot of local
research because at the local level are the records that tell us something. For
example, if I read in local records that the Byelorussians are not delivering
enough grain to the Germans because they secretly steal it to make vodka and in
such huge quantities under the German occupation, you would have to begin to
ask the question what percentage of that population was perpetually drunk? Now
these are very, very important questions and that is the direction the research
needs to go in. It is not for amateurs, it is not for untrained people, it is
not for philosophers, it is for people who know languages, who know history,
who know political science, who know economics, etc. At the root they must be
well trained. The Holocaust is not today, as it might have been in the
beginning, a subject for the laymen.
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