Particularist and Universalist Interpretations of the Holocaust: a Complex Relationship

Chapter 19 Particularist and Universalist Interpretations of the Holocaust: A Complex Relationship

Dan Michman

Were one asked to compose a team of the best and most influential Holocaust scholars, Chris Browning would surely be one of them. It is impossible to imag- ine any comprehensive dealing with the Holocaust, whether in research or university teaching, that does not at least relate to his magisterial study The Origins of the Final Solution and usually also to his thought-provoking Ordinary Men,1 even when disagreeing with some of his interpretations.2 Browning entered the field of Holocaust research in the 1970s with his PhD thesis on the German Foreign Ministry and the Final Solution. In the wake of that excellent work Yad Vashem requested him to write a comprehensive study on the emergence and implementation of the Final Solution (1939-1944), within the framework of the major project of a Comprehensive History of the Holocaust.3 This project was conceived in 1977 by Saul Friedländer (then at Tel Aviv University), Israel Gutman (in charge of scholarly activities at Yad Vashem and history professor at the Hebrew University), Yehuda Bauer (history professor at the Hebrew University) and Yitzhak Arad (then chairman of Yad Vashem). The fact that these eminent scholars – all of them Holocaust survivors, except for Bauer (who had emigrated to Palestine from Europe in 1939), who themselves had done considerable research on the topic, who were Israelis and whose perspective was “Jewish” – put their trust in a young, non- Jewish American scholar to write the probably most demanding volume in the series, is quite unexpected, and in hindsight amazing. Browning’s interest in the Holocaust stemmed from a source very different from theirs: as a young

1 Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); idem, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 2 See Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16-18, 70-72, and Christopher R. Browning’s review of my book in American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (2012): 627-28. 3 The agreement between Browning and Yad Vashem was signed on 24 April 1983; Yad Vashem Administrative Archive, AM 3/413 II.

American, his experience and critique of the Vietnam War.4 By deciding to invite him, two different points of departure regarding the Holocaust – the Jewish particularist and the universalist ones – found a scholarly common ground. Those two approaches towards the Holocaust have existed from the 1930s until today, both in historiography and in public memory. However, the meaning of “particularism” and “universalism” has not been static throughout this period, the causes for embracing one approach or the other have changed, and the relations between the two have seen ups and downs. In the following I explore essential parts of this history.

During the Period of the Third Reich: Interpreting the Evolving Event

Institutionalized persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany, called for by Hitler and the Nazi party as from 1919, commenced immediately after the as- cendance of Adolf Hitler to power on 30 January 1933. Indeed, all Jews were targeted as such, and their persecution clearly had several special features.5 These features caused many leaders of different German Jewish factions to point to a distinctiveness of the Jewish situation.6 Yet a variety of other groups too were persecuted by the Nazi regime in the very first years. Initially some of them, such as communists and socialists, apparently were treated more harshly than the Jews if these measures were seen through certain contem- porary lenses (i.e., if the number of arrests, kidnapping and incarceration in concentration camps is seen as a yardstick),7 or more lethal, such as Hitler’s

4 Ernie Mayer, “Along the Twisted Road,” The Jerusalem Post Magazine, 15 December 1989, p. 6; James Chappel and Thomas Stammers, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men – A MACAT Analysis (London: Macat International, 2017), Module 1. 5 See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997); Christopher R. Browning, “The Nazi Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2010), 406-25. 6 Indicative in this respect is Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s 1935 Passover eve (17 April) sermon “Jüdische Situation – Heute”, in which he said: “Dass wir im Ghetto leben, das beginnt jetzt in unser Bewußtsein zu dringen”; see Wolf Gruner, ed., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945, vol. 1: Deutsches Reich 1933-1937 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 426. 7 Kim Wünschmann, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 29. However, as Wünschmann demonstrates, among communists and socialists many were Jews, and their fate in the camps was often worse than that of other inmates.