The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

If another document is needed to prove what already seems indisputable, that the destruction of Europe’s Jews was intended well before the Final Solution was promulgated at the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942, I offer this savory declaration of premeditated genocide from a Top Secret memorandum written by Secret Service Brigadenführer Friedrich Uebelhoer in ordering the concentration of the Jews of Lodz, Poland, in a ghetto:

It is obvious that the establishment of the ghetto is only a transitional step. I reserve for myself the decision of when and how the city of Lodz will be cleansed of Jews. In any case, the final aim must be to burn out entirely this pestilent abscess.

The memorandum was written on December 10, 1939.

Istvan Deak’s insightful review [“The Incomprehensible Holocaust,” NYR, September 28] of the underlying questions concerning the Holocaust as they are reflected in recent books contains a significant mistake concerning the Lodz Ghetto and its leader, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, however. Deak states that Rumkowski ordered the execution of members of the Jewish resistance. To the best of my knowledge, one of the few powers which the Nazis did not confer on the Eldest of the Jews of Lodz was the right to carry out executions. Instead, Rumkowski used the power of deportation to consolidate his power, placing on the lists the leaders of widespread labor unrest and critics of his policies—of whom there were many. These so-called trouble-makers were put to death in the gas vans at Chelmno. And the ghetto, which was fraught with dissent during 1941, remained quiescent until its final liquidation in 1944. While the Jewish leader constantly railed against the rumor mongerers who always warned that the entire population would be deported, even vowing in a public speech: “I would like to murder them!” any such intentions had to be carried out through the Germans.

Lodz Ghetto, which Professor Deak found so heartbreaking, departs from the Rumkowski administration’s officially sponsored Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, compiling excerpts from the diaries of more than a dozen ghetto residents, nearly all of them viewing the Jewish leader and his police force with deep criticism and resentment.

The film which Kathryn Taverna and I made from these same diaries is entitled Lodz Ghetto, just as the book which is its companion. Mr. Deak’s footnote gives the title as “Dark Music,” not a bad suggestion but a phrase which he evidently took from the caption of a picture published with The New York Times‘ laudatory review of the film.

Alan Adelson

Executive Director

The Jewish Heritage Project

New York, New York

To the Editors:

Professor Deak’s encyclopedic review and essay contains some of the most powerful of rhetorical questions I have had the pleasure of considering. My students in Humanities courses will receive his extraordinary monograph for years to come.

Some of his questions cause me as a Catholic to examine my religious culture for intrinsic dangers which may loiter unexamined in the alley of current political and scholarly cooperation and appreciation. I take only one exception to Professor Deak’s lengthy scholarship. Pius XI made a different impact on the history of Vatican-Nazi affairs than Pius XII. I believe I can be proud of his efforts, as opposed to those, or lack of them, made by Pius XII. I do wish I had been taught Pius XI’s position stated on September 6, 1938, in the Vatican:

Anti-semitism is a movement which is repulsive, a movement in which we as Christians can have no part. No, it is not possible for Christians to be part of it. Anti-semitism is not permitted, we are spiritually Jews through Christ, and in Christ, we are the children of Abraham (cited in L’Allemagne Nazie et le Génocide Juif, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1985, p. 384) (trans. mine).

A minor objection can be observed about the superfluous addition of the line, “[the Holocaust] is the only true genocide of our times” (p. 69). As one who lives in a community with tens of thousands of Armenians and several Native American scholars, I cannot understand the rationale for the argument, especially when a self-serving definition of “genocide” is presented as in Professor Deak’s article. The perpetrators of the genocide against the Ohio Indians intended and succeeded in killing the entire nation. Whatever justification does exist, I wonder if the sacrilege inferred to the innocent victims of other massacres is worth it. I do believe with Professor Deak that the Holocaust was “unique.” I believe each genocide is unique and each demands our examination. I do not think, when you’ve examined one, you have examined them all. I am not accusing Professor Deak of having argued that we should only study the Holocaust because it is the only true genocide. I am offering a minor suggestion of decorum in the hope of optimizing the important work of Holocaustologists.

Professor Deak’s high compliments regarding Marrus’ The Holocaust in History, are understatements in my opinion. This work is singular, extraordinary, and exceptional, even in the company of the other fine works reviewed.

My deepest thanks to Professor Deak and the editors of the New York Review for the courage to dedicate the ten pages required for such a profound and useful monographic review. The editors’ judgment is also lauded by this reader.

George Diestel, Ph.D.

Fresno, California

To the Editors:

I think that the participation of Lithuanians and Ukranians in the destruction of the Jews during the Second World War is a far more complicated matter than one might gather from Istvan Deak’s “The Incomprehensible Holocaust” in the September 28 issue of The New York Review. Professor Deak writes as if Lithuanians and Ukrainians engaged in the murder of Jews with great gusto and as if the Nazis had only to channel their enthusiasm into systematic and effective endeavors.

Referring to the pogroms that engulfed Lithuania in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion, Deak writes that Lithuanian partisans emerged from prison and began massacring the Jews; “the arriving Germans needed only to coordinate and expand this activity.” This account is completely belied by German documentation of the time, which shows that the Nazis directed the pogroms from start to finish and often had difficulties getting even their closest Lithuanian collaborators to go along. In his standard History of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer quotes a document relating to the pogrom in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania’s interwar capital. Dr. Franz Walther Stahlecker, the Einsatzgruppe commander in the Baltic region, reported to Reinhard Heydrich on October 15, 1941:

In order to fulfill the tasks of the security police, it was necessary for us to enter the large cities together with the attacking forces…. In the first hours after the entry of the forces we also persuaded, not without considerable difficulties, local antisemitic elements to start pogroms against Jews. In accordance with orders, the security police was determined to solve the Jewish question by every means and with determination. But it was preferable that in the first instance at least, the security police should not openly appear in this action, because the methods employed were extraordinarily harsh, and might have caused reactions even in German circles. It was desirable, outwardly, to show that the first steps were made by the local population on its own initiative…. The commander of the partisans, Klimatas, who was especially recruited for this action, succeeded in organizing a pogrom in accordance with the instructions he was given…. (pp. 184–185)

Later on in his review article, Deak writes: “No doubt the Germans would have had little difficulty in recruiting Poles as camp guards, just as they had no difficulty in recruiting Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Latvians. The fact is, however, that the Germans judged the Poles unworthy of even such a task.” The real fact is that the former peoples were taken as Soviet POWs in 1941–1942 and the Poles were not; and it was from the Soviet POWs, of whom—as Deak notes—some three million perished in Nazi camps, that guards were recruited. And, indeed, the Germans had little difficulty in recruiting such guards. Shmuel Krakowski, in his important study of Jewish armed resistance to the Holocaust, War of the Doomed, recounts how a group of guards found their way into German service:

100,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war had been killed near Chelm Lubelski, where they had been kept out in the open in a field surrounded by a high voltage fence. The prisoners were given no food for several weeks, and many starved to death. The extreme hunger led to cases of cannibalism. Only a few hundred of the very strong survived, and they were given the option of serving the Germans. (p. 264)

As Professor Deak knows better than most, Eastern Europe is a very complicated place and the Holocaust a very complicated moment. Oversimplifications in this matter can be very painful.

John-Paul Himka

Visiting Professor of History

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

To the Editors:

Fifty years later the Holocaust still remains “incomprehensible” to an academic like Mr. Deak—whom I must presume from internal evidence is himself of christian background.

Throughout his review of 16 books concerning the Holocaust Mr. Deak nowhere alludes to the (surely) obvious effect of 2,000 years of anti-jewish teaching conducted by Christianity. The teachings of St. John of Chrysostom, the passion plays, the writings of Luther, the unreformed stereotypes of a Cardinal Glemp, all attest to the anti-jewishness of and anti-semitism of christian teaching.

The Catholic Church shared in this, and at a profound level still does. The separation, degradation, limitation of civil and political rights, the special dress, the ghetto, the yellow star, the stereotyping—all these pre-dated Naziism, although used by them. They were christian inventions. Thus I do not share Mr. Deak’s view that, in regards to the Holocaust, the Church was guilty of “no other crime but the unquestionably grave sin of omission.” The silence of the Church, and in particular of the Pope, was a silence decided upon, committed, not omitted.

King Haakon of Denmark rode through the streets with a yellow star on his breast. Why did the Pope not do the same?

There remains a fearful ambivalence on the part of the Church in forthrightly acknowledging that the root of the Nazi anti-jewish ideology has its parenthood in christian anti-semitism. It is this continuing ambivalence that makes it clear why the current Carmelite convent at Auschwitz dispute is still a dispute. By presenting the Holocaust as a christian martyrdom as well “Not only you, but us” the responsibility is shifted and more importantly, denied.

Given this strong history of anti-jewishness—which the Church is still internally grappling with as manifested by the struggle of the conservatives and “liberals” within the Church—I, for one, do not find the Holocaust at all incomprehensible. I find it totally expectable.

When the Church acknowledges explicitly its own long history of responsibility for anti-jewish hate teaching; when it institutionalizes that teaching vigorously in its teaching; when it vigorously pursues and takes steps to change the lingering anti-semitism in its flock; when it addresses immediately and vigorously the unreformed beliefs of a Cardinal Glemp (publicly and privately); when it expunges the modern performance of medieval passion plays with their messages of hatred; when it reiterates “Nostra Aetate” in less veiled language; when it recognizes the State of Israel; when it rejoices in the return of the sovereignty of Jerusalem to Jewish hands; when it joins the fray against the obscene outpourings of modern anti-jewish hate propaganda dressed as anti-zionism; then, perhaps, another Holocaust might become less expectable.