Rejoinder to Andrew Ezergailis

Indeed, Andrew Ezergailis’s The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-44: The Missing Center was the first monograph on the Holocaust I’ve ever read, and also reviewed. For the first time we met at a symposium at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum eleven years ago (I was finishing my Masters at that time). Whenever we ended up presenting at the same conferences, we inevitably clashed on various issues. I recall one such encounter at the conference in Uppsala in 2002, at the end of which Andrew said to me he was looking forward to reading my book when it’s ready. Thus, I’m really happy Andrew found time to read and comment on my book. Even though I may disagree with Andrew on quite a few issues, he is a great scholar. No matter what, Andrew’s book remains a standard work on the Holocaust in Latvia. Despite our disagreements, we always remain collegial, and I don’t see why it should be otherwise this time around. Apropos Andrew’s remark of me not fully understanding his book at the time, I tend to be more critical of ‘late’ Andrew Ezergailis as I am of ‘classical’ Andrew Ezergailis if you will.

Let me begin with the famed dictum of sociologist William I. Thomas, who argued that, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” That is to say, no matter how an individual, or a collectivity, perceive a situation, it will determine how one reacts. It doesn’t matter at this point that one’s interpretation of a situation may be incorrect. In short, we believe what we want to believe, thus creating subjective reality. Let me now translate it into the context of Nazi crimes.

It’s not I who superimpose ethnic identification; that’s how the policemen and the population at large saw themselves, namely through the ethnic lenses. The German overseers may not approve of this disposition, seeing it as potentially dangerous, but neither did they rebut it. That’s what gave Estonian agencies a substantial leeway in their actions. The Germans had the final word, but they let the locals believe that they didn’t. From a contemporary perspective, it appears as a mutual delusion but in the context of Nazi occupation it appeared real. More important, it actually worked to the mutual satisfaction of both sides, except that the German occupation authorities gauged local collaboration in real terms and Estonian actors in psychological terms. That’s where I was getting at! Certain segments of the Estonian population more willingly collaborated with the Germans, as compared with populations of many other East European countries, and specifically Latvia and Lithuania, because the occupation authorities had created the psychological environment that projected the sense of dignity and self-worth toward the indigenous population. I emphasize again and again—I’m talking in relative not absolute terms.

# 1. Andrew tends to get into semantics to make his point. I mean specifically the designation ‘auxiliary’. For sure, in real terms Estonian Security Police and Omakaitse (Self-Defense) lacked the decision-making authority and effectively exercised the will of their German overseers. But on the day-to-day level, the Germans had never reminded their Estonian counterparts of that. Indeed, semantics were as important to Estonian collaborators as they appear to be to Andrew. The official name of the Estonian Police was Estnische Sicherheitspolizei (Estonian Security Police); in Estonian, the branch of the police that dealt with the Jews was called Poliitiline politsei (Political Police). The members of the police saw themselves not as German underlings but as conscious Estonians, representative of the Estonian people. More significant, the Estonian population at large—as reports on the population’s mood attest—believed (wanted to believe) that collaborationist agencies defended their immediate and long-term interests. The truth is the eye of the beholder! What do I base my claims on? Well, police investigation file, which project an idea of the Estonian State exercising justice vis-à-vis “subversive elements” who had attempted to undermine its foundation; pronouncements of leading Nazis in Estonia such as Head of the German civil administration Karl Litzmann and Head of the German Security Police in Estonia Martin Sandberger; and police reports on the population’s mood. I understand that I am treading on thin ground when it comes to collective psychology, but Andrew’s critique and his own research doesn’t prove me wrong. Andrew claims that my omitting the adjective ‘auxiliary’ somehow implies that the Estonians and the Germans made a common decision to murder Jews. Well, I did not say that, I did not imply it. Let me reiterate what seems to me common sense: (1) the ultimate decision to annihilate Jews lay with Nazis and (2) outside the context of German occupation, physical destruction of Jews, with or without local participation, is unimaginable. This, however, does not relieve us, historians, from the responsibility to explain motivation to partake in mass murder to the best of our abilities.

Coming to the relationship between the German and Estonian branches of the Security Police. Andrew wants us to believe this was a one-way road, just because the Germans ran the game. I, however, argue that this relationship was far more complex, indeed it was a dynamic relationship. It stays true also when it comes to mass murder of Jews. To illustrate, let me give you two examples. (As I indicated earlier, we are blessed when it comes to primary sources in the case of Estonia.) In the first case we are dealing with police investigation of Miriam Lepp, through and through pro-Estonian an individual. The investigation was opened in January 1942 and continued through July. To begin with—if you think about it—it’s extraordinary. While Jews were murdered in hundreds and tens of thousands with no prior ‘investigation’ whatsoever elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Estonian police spent half a year trying to pin guilt on a Jewish woman, who everyone knew would not walk away alive. So why to bother? Well, it seems to be impossible for the Estonian police to condemn a Jew to death unless they could prove to themselves and their countrymen (not Germans!) they performed justice. In the end, Paul Seyler, head of Department AIV of the German Security Police in Estonia, had intervened, ordering immediate execution of Lepp (I can only speculate, but I can imagine Sandberger and the German Security Police were pretty annoyed it dragged for so long). The Estonian Security Police duly obliged. Here’s another case: the German Security Police dispatched Reet Türno to a concentration camp. However, upon the insistence of Ervin Viks, Head of Department BIV of the Estonian Security Police in Tallinn, the case was reconsidered on grounds that the prisoner might spread rumors while in camp, and thus she was executed. Yes indeed, Estonian agencies did exercise certain autonomy, not only in a psychological sense, and sometimes they used it beyond what was required of them.

# 2. I don’t think I have to repeat my argument with regard to the specific German Waffen- SS units, particularly since they played only marginal role in the context of the Holocaust in Estonia.

# 3. As a paramilitary organization, Omakaitse (or Self-Defense in direct translation from Estonian) is certainly nothing unique in the history of Nazi occupation. However, I am much less interested in administrative or deployment history of Omakaiste—what the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity has done admirably—than in particular circumstances that made it a conduit of Nazi policies of mass murder. I am primarily interested in the mechanisms of self-selection that drew into the Omakaitse ranks individuals who had reasons to fight the Soviets (which involved, among other things, eliminating designated enemy groups). What is remarkable here is that the Germans and Estonians ranked the enemy groups differently. In the case of Omakaitse, as well as the Estonian Security Police, they had to go through a certain mental process to align their hostility toward certain groups with that of the Nazis. I am not arguing with Andrew that the German occupation authorities made Estonian agencies serve their purposes. They certainly did! What I am trying to understand what was the trick that made it happen (again, without filing standard answers such as counter-reaction to Soviet terror or acute anti-Semitism). Andrew keeps pushing his argument as to subservient, involuntary status of the local auxiliaries. It was none of my intensions to push as hard into the opposite extreme, emphasizing the will, indeed the proclivity, to commit violence against particular groups—as Johan Goldhagen has argued in the case of the German people at large. On the contrary, I reject the popular notion of a ‘violent personality’—or ‘sleeper’ to evoke the concept of John Steiner—whose latent, innate aggressiveness can be activated under certain conditions. Therefore, I approach with caution Andrew’s statements to the effect that the Germans “co-opted” the Omakaitse into killing operations, “corrupting” the purposes of the organization along the way. Whereas in the early weeks and months of German occupation a great majority of the men who joined the police and the Omakaitse did indeed do it voluntarily, I argue, it doesn’t follow that they were looking forward to participating in executions. Whenever they did, however, they created their own mental picture of the enemy and why they had to do away with them.

# 4. Andrew says he’s not sure where I stay on the issue of anti-Semitism as a motivational factor for partaking in the Nazi Final Solution. I thought I was quite explicit on that issue in my book, but I am happy to elaborate here. On several occasions, I emphasized that the levels of anti-Semitism in Estonia were low in comparison with other East European countries, including Latvia and Lithuania. Neither did the period of Soviet occupation significantly change for worse the majority population’s perceptions of the Jews (simply because there were just a handful of Jews in Estonia), contrary to what has been consistently argued. This further disproves the notion of the Holocaust as having been perpetrated by the “few bad apples” who always hated Jews and only waited for the right time to lush out against that particular minority. Such a claim substitutes the ideology of organic nationalism for that of anti-Semitism by attributing partaking in the mass murder to individual medical condition if you will. Instead, I talk of structures—multilevel relations between the State, collectivities, and individuals. A great majority of Estonian Jews were condemned to death not as “Jews” but as individuals who had allegedly delivered the State to the Soviet/Russian enemy. Naturally, one can argue whether the policemen who “investigated” purported crimes actually believed what they were saying. This, however, is essentially impossible to establish empirically. To falsely accuse someone of the crime that he/she did not commit hardly fits the conventional notion of revenge. We can call it misplaced aggression perhaps—something that I analyze at length in the book. Again, my critics may pinpoint that collective behavior is notoriously difficult to pin down and therefore all attempts to establish collective traces should be abandoned. I cannot disagree more! For one, just listen to sociological discourses on collective identity and memory politics. Second, giving up on application of a theory just because it’s “dated”—as one of my critics in Estonia in one word dismissed my approach—would amount to intellectual capitulation. Finally, I would insist that my attempt to advance a psycho-cultural explanation with regard to local collaboration in the Nazi mass murder of Jews (Chapter 12 in the book) does enhance our understanding of motivation to partake in violence. To remind you, we are dealing here with subjective reality, as it was perceived by the perpetrators. Yes, it was the Nazis who wanted Jews dead, yet it was left up to the Estonian agencies to decide how to administer the death penalty—however incredible it may sound. Thus, the latter had a choice, and the way they exercised that choice strongly suggests anti-Semitism was a lesser factor. Or else consider police reports on the population’s mood that recorded next to none references to Jews in Estonia after the latter had been all but gone. If anti-Semitism was as potent an ideology as it has been claimed, it would have kept on living even after the last Estonian Jews had been murdered. But it did not. On a whole, Estonians proved to have been much more preoccupied with ethnic Russians than they were with Jews.

# 5. Here Andrew delves even deeper into semantics, advancing his well-known concept of the Nazis having taking into account and masterminding just everything, including the memory of the Holocaust. Ironically, Andrew’s insistence that Nazis were omnipotent in both their life and death corresponds to the Nazis’ self-image. According to Andrew, anyone who stresses the extent of local collaboration in the Nazi mass murder of Jews unwittingly takes the burden of responsibility off the Nazis’ shoulders. That, however, is fallacious inference. Like in Criminal Law, we have criminal mastermind and accessory to murder. The gravity of offense is certainly higher in the former case, but it doesn’t mean the latter did not commit a crime all the same. At the methodological level, Andrew distinguishes between scholarship and “Holocaust literature,” implying that overreliance on survivor’s accounts blurs the perspective, forcing historians to acquire a moralistic tone (apparently it applies in equal measure to me, or so I interpreted Andrew’s remark regarding my “Americanization”). Even though I don’t consider it a form of defense, but for good or bad Holocaust survivor’s accounts are almost non-existence in the case of Estonia (we only have a handful of accounts by Latvian and Lithuanian Jews who had been deported to Estonia in the fall of 1943; obviously, they mainly describe the conditions in 20-odd Jewish forced labor camps that existed in Estonia between September 1943 and September 1944; with a few exceptions, atrocities in those camps had been committed by the German SS). Thus, I had to rely almost exclusively on primary sources. My intension was to put a human face on the dry statistics that tend to camouflage the brutality and violence of the Holocaust. I dealt with both victims and perpetrators in the book, and was conscious not to violate my professional integrity in the process. I don’t just drop words, as Andrew seems to suggest, but engage in painstaking analysis of existing sources; I didn’t mean to study Nazi euphemisms but the rationale behind the deeds of those among the local population who had translated the Nazi lingua into action. Neither do I quite understand why Andrew spent so much time discussing the etymology and historical occurrence of pogroms—an officially organized or tolerated massacres—particularly since there were none in Estonia. Frankly, I find Andrew’s description of a pogrom at the Lietukis garage in Kaunas distasteful. He tells us it was a “theatrical production,” but I feel like vomiting when seeing heaps of corpses and a human being killing in cold blood another human being. However shrewdly and deliberately did Stahlecker and his superiors at the RSHA want to use anti-Jewish pogroms for propaganda purposes, for those Lithuanians who dirtied their hands murdering Jews in a German-staged “open-air performance” it was for real. Andrew finds many fancy words to describe this particular pogrom; for me it’s nothing but a heinous crime. To establish that, one doesn’t even have to hold a degree in history. Andrew keeps repeating that I, and many other scholars, have inadvertently bought into Nazi rhetoric. Why does he then refer to Sandberger’s testimony at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial (it has been since been established that Sandberger lied through and through, something that I examine in detail in the book) to prove his point that pogroms were exclusively a Nazi invention? Having questioned the validity of the Nazis-did-it-all argument of Andrew Ezergailis at several conferences in the past, I cannot help thinking of Andrew getting lost in his own rhetoric. It simply doesn’t convince!

What I’m also missing in Andrew’s critique is specific examples of my shortcomings, as he sees them. For example, he doesn’t specify where exactly did I err when comparing Estonia to Latvia and Lithuania. Andrew claims that I uncritically use Nazi vocabulary but doesn’t provide any examples.

I don’t think I have time to go into a protracted discussion of Richard Evans’s book, or its relevance to what I write in my book. Those interested may want to read [the] heated exchange between Evans and Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books (December 9, 2009; February 11, 2010). (I tend to agree with the thrust of Snyder’s criticism, though find his tone unnecessarily provocative.)

After having read Andrew Ezergailis’s critique, and many of his books and articles, I am still not sure what he thinks is the purpose of studying the Holocaust. It’s certainly not about pinning blame (if “East Europeans were worse than the Germans,” in Andrew’s own words), or exposing the workings of Nazi propaganda (“to clean up the clichés that the Nazis littered in the wake of their imploding and exploding empire,” to quote Andrew again). It’s all about the basic question that has been with us since the beginning of the human race. This question is why: why a human being/group of human beings is capable of physically destroying another human being/group of human beings? It doesn’t really matter what ethnicity and class the perpetrator and his victim belong too, what god they worship and what country’s passport they hold since they all are humans. Although I mainly talk of Jews and Estonians in my book, it’s really about humanity at large. And honest to god, I don’t care if Andrew would describe what I just said as “pathos” or “moralization.” That’s how I see my larger role as a historian.

—Anton Weiss-Wendt