Book Review: Mayer's "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?"

I'm starting a new job next week, so I don't know when I'll have time to blog again soon. With hope, I'll be in a new course in September and will blog regularly then; in the meantime, I'm offering the below.

The first course I took when I went back to school in 2015 was a hisoriography course, for which the below was one of my assignments, i.e., a review of one of the books I would be including in my term paper for the course, which I posted earlier. Figured I'd post this now, since my academic studies have taken a bit of a pause.

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Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. New

York: Pantheon, 1988.

This book[1] makes a curious, albeit mostly baffling, contribution to the intentionalist-functionalist debate. Mayer, who is currently professor emeritus of history at Princeton and holder of an endowed chair, began his academic career specializing in World War I and its aftermath, writing his dissertation at Yale on the relationship between the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. He went on to publish a book on the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles and volumes on European revolution and counter-revolution before trying his hand at the Final Solution. The result commits the dual errors of advancing a thesis even too radical for most functionalists and of failing to substantiate his argument with sufficient primary and secondary sources and documentation. The result is a text that ultimately has greater worth as a curiosity than as an addition to either the history or the historiographical debate.

The problems with Heavens begin with Mayer’s nomenclature and compound from there. First, Mayer elects to eschew the two most common terms to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, Holocaust and Final Solution, in favor of “Judeocide,” a term unused by historians before Mayer and largely ignored since. While his complaint about the term “Holocaust,” i.e., that it has religious connotations and that its emphasis on survivor memory incurs fundamental problems with critical analysis,[2] is well-worn ground, but his rejection of the term “Final Solution,” particularly given the predominant use of the term among functionalists emphasizing the Nazi government’s agency over the victims’ perspectives, seems poorly founded. In addition, Mayer proposes and applies a three-fold paradigm of anti-Semitism, with “Judeophobia” connoting personal prejudice, “anti-Semitism” connoting institutionalized prejudice against Jews, and “anti-Judaism” connoting hostility toward the Jewish faith.[3] That he relegates his explanation to a footnote rather than offering a more incorporated explanation of his terminology for his reader seems frankly hostile.

Moreover, on a macro scale, Mayer chooses to present the “Judeocide” within the broad context of what he calls the “Second Thirty Years War,” covering both world wars and the interwar period. In a lengthy prologue that strays far from the central subject matter, Mayer draws broad analogies between the period from 1914 to 1945 and that from 1618 to 1648, the “First Thirty Years War.” Sharing in common the explosion of widespread violence in central Europe in the context of a general social and economic crisis, Mayer clearly sees strong similarities between the periods, but his discussion of the Thirty Years War – not to mention his discussion in the same prologue of the first Crusades – seems more like a justification for an historian specializing outside the Nazi period to write about the Final Solution than an ideological framework, which it ultimately is not. That the three periods – the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the first half of the twentieth century – involved the commission of grave acts of violence by German-speaking people against civilian Jewish populations is not in dispute; rather, the relevance of the similarities feels strained, particularly when this framework is not sustained throughout the work, except for in the repetition of particular contrived terms.

The result of this decision to use non-standard terminology adds a level of density to an already challenging read. Mayer frequently uses German terms without translating them, and although his vocabulary in English (which is not his first or second language, it bears noting) is extraordinary, both of these points communicate a certain hostility toward the non-specialist. These choices by the author are particularly stunning given Mayer’s highly controversial choice to eschew the use of footnotes entirely, even in cases of direct quotations. According to historian Richard Breitman, when challenged during a symposium on his non-use of standard citation methods, Mayer defended himself by claiming that he had no need to “prove his manhood.”[4] With three words, Mayer somehow managed to offend women, conscientious historians, and, it must be pondered, tenured professors, given Mayer’s presence at Princeton for 27 years by the time this book appeared.

Beyond the problems of nomenclature and shoddy scholarship, Heavens has the additional problem of some statements that Mayer makes that simply cannot be justified in the context of the available scholarship. In perhaps the best-known of these statements, Mayer writes about the Nazi concentration/extermination camp Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, where one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews, “[F]rom 1942 to 1945, certainly from Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than ‘un-natural’ ones.”[5] Given the established fact that the majority of Jews killed by the Final Solution were dead by the end of 1942, this statement seems particularly ludicrous. Similarly inane is Mayer’s contention that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads deployed against political operatives and civilians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “killed few Jews in the buffer zone, and even once they penetrated Russia’s [sic] pre-1939 borders, they initiated their infamous butchery only upon reaching towns and cities captured after heavy fighting.”[6] In fact, the Jewish casualties in the areas abutting the 1939 border were enormous, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, where the Nazis faced virtually no resistance from the Soviet Red Army, which had fled in the face of the invasion.

All of these significant shortcomings of Heavens relate in some fashion to Mayer’s highly controversial thesis, which is that the “Judeocide” of World War II was not ultimately so much an expression of anti-Semitism (or “Judeophobia”) as the result of the conflation by Hitler and the Nazis of Jewish identity with Bolshevism, i.e., Judeobolschewismus. In short, had the Nazis’ not primarily targeted the Soviet Union among their war aims and had they not primarily done so because of their intractable hatred of Soviet communism, then Jewish casualties would have been significantly fewer. It should be stipulated that the latter part of this proposition – that the Nazis turning toward extermination as a policy toward Europe’s Jews was intimately linked to the fortunes of the military campaign against the USSR – is a fundamental assumption of functionalism. That the Nazis’ anticommunism outweighed their hatred of Jews is not.

While it is not unusual, particularly in the functionalist camp, for a thesis greatly at odds with the prevailing scholarship to be introduced, for it to be introduced in the absence of justification among the pre-existing literature is unheard of. In this sense, the errors of Mayer’s technique and the outlandishness of his central thesis are fundamentally connected. For example, less than twenty pages after making his statement about natural vs unnatural causes of Jewish deaths, Mayer writes, “Seemingly discontinuous with the intrinsic social amalgam and tactical ambiguity of the Nazi project, as well as uninformed by precedent, the extermination sites [the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno] defy explanation.”[7] Yitzhak Arad’s seminal study of the Aktion Reinhard camps – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – was published in English in 1987,[8] and it was incumbent upon Mayer as a responsible historian to be aware of the major scholarship in the field and to revise his own writing accordingly. That Mayer failed to acknowledge the very explanation of the Reinhard camps that Arad provided is almost criminally negligent.

These very large negative aspects of Heavens notwithstanding, Mayer, as a self-described Marxist, is an able historian of European anticommunism and anti-Sovietism, and while these passages of the book are similarly unsourced, they are nevertheless not at odds with the established scholarship. Moreover, the framing device of the Second Thirty Years War is potentially enlightening, but as noted above, Mayer does not sustain this framework sufficiently to qualify his book as an essential reading on those particular grounds. Readers in search of a radically functionalist point of view have a rich literature to consult that can both communicate the functionalist thesis and serve as bases for further research. Heavens sadly does neither.

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[1] Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

[2] Ibid, 16.

[3] Ibid, 5, footnote.

[4] Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 26.

[5] Mayer, 365.

[6] Ibid, 270.

[7] Ibid, 377, emphasis mine.

[8] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Unz, Roberts, and Irving

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.

The publication of Hitler's War, however, seems to indicate a kind of Rubicon. Along with the book in HTML form, Unz has also published an accompanying essay entitled "The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving." In that essay, Unz muses on his own relative ignorance of WWII historiography before encountering Irving's work and asks, "All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?" He continues, "Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question."

From here, Unz launches into a short history (as he understands it) of the Lipstadt case as emblematic of, as he calls it, the work of "zealous ethnic-activists" (read: Jews). As he describes the events culminating in the London lawsuit, "This development [i.e., Lipstadt labeling Irving a Holocaust denier] eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court." The next paragraph is worth quoting in full:

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

Well, most importantly here, Irving was not "defending himself"; he had brought the suit himself, against one of the world's largest publishing houses. He had also been stupid enough to do so in the U.K., where the law required him to pay the costs of the defense should he lose. Instead, the way Unz presents it, Big Bad Deborah Lipstadt victimized poor old David Irving, dragging him into a court with her millions of dollars, and bullied him into bankruptcy. Whether Unz knows this is the exactly opposite of what actually happened in Irving v. Lipstadt or is merely ignorant, I can't say, but the necessary conclusions we must draw are, respectively, that Unz is lying for devious purposes or he was so careless as to not familiarize himself with the merest details of the case.

This lying by omission or frankly catastrophic ignorance carries over to his treatment of the findings in the case. Unz writes, "[T]he worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short 'racially insensitive' ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a 'racist.'" He draws this conclusion, it seems, on reading (perhaps) Lipstadt's own version of events in her book History on Trial, rather than the book distilled from the expert testimony of Richard Evans (Lying About Hitler), who was the primary historian-witness at the Lipstadt trial refuting both Irving's version of historical events and his historical methods. Evans's book details how Irving systematically misrepresented primary sources or ignored them altogether as part of an overall project to exculpate Hitler for crimes, misdeeds, and mistakes.

Finally, Unz tells us that, adding insult to injury, Irving was jailed in Austria after being convicted of denying the Holocaust there on a trip in 2005. I commented on this turn of events at the time, and I remain convinced of the opinion I expressed then. That point notwithstanding, it's clear that Unz has published Hitler's War at least in part in admiration for Irving's free speech battles -- as he understands them. The conclusions we must draw are clear: Unz is either actively shilling for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism now or is a useful idiot contributing to their cause.

What about Roberts? His defense of Unz is both more amusing in its blunders and more consistent with his previous pieces. Here is Roberts's version of events:

Zionists destroyed David Irving’s livelihood with slander and libel, because he made public a letter from the former chancellor of Germany, Hitler’s predecessor, to Winston Churchill, a letter that Irving found in the American publisher’s file of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, and which the publisher prevented Churchill from publishing in his history. The former chancellor of Germany, who escaped the Nazis and lived in England, wrote to Churchill that two of Hitler’s financiers were Jews who managed two of the largest banks in Germany. One was a Zionist leader. The letter exists, and there is no reason to doubt its honesty. However, for making an important historical document public, Irving was labeled by a vicious propaganda campaign an “anti-semite” and “holocaust denier.”

Putting aside the fact that the charge of libel was disproved in court, the story of the former German chancellor (here he refers to Heinrich Brüning, the second-to-last chancellor before Hitler) is one I hadn't heard before. The lack of dates provided by Roberts makes it difficult to discern the particulars of the story of Irving being destroyed for daring to publish this letter, although it is possible, I suppose, that Irving was first to locate this information. I do, however, also note that Irving has published the letter in question at his site, and he makes no mention in doing so that he suffered any consequences regarding the letter. I know enough about David Irving to know that no opportunity to bemoan his own persecution would go unexploited.

Roberts continues

Another Irving honesty, the one that destroyed him, was that after 10 years of research he could not find one document that provided evidence for the claim that Hitler personally conducted the holocaust or that he even knew about it. Irving did find and report documents that he made available in which Hitler issues orders prohibiting extermination of Jews.

I've already written extensively on one of these pieces of evidence. Roberts as least has the sense (or lacks knowledge) to avoid referring explicitly to the Lipstadt case. He also, like Unz, does not state his own particular set of beliefs about these matters. Both men are apparently still too attached to whatever support, monetary or otherwise, that they receive from people who disdain Holocaust denial to plainly state what they seem to be strongly suggesting is their point of view.

Therefore, I invite Messrs. Unz and Roberts to clearly state their own points of view. They live in a country where they cannot be punished for doing so. Rather than coy dancing around the point, let them be the brave defenders of history and truth as they apparently see them. Then, let them defend those points of view in discussion and debate.