Answer to an Answer

At the outset, I want to congratulate Anton for making a mess of my arguments!

I shall forgo to deal with Anton’s reference to “my indifference” to the victims of the Holocaust. There is a time and place to remember the victims and I’ve done my share of it. It was a low blow from a high horse.

I agree that it is important for a historian to answer the “why question”, but not if one has to sacrifice the truth question. By answering the latter the answer to the former becomes superfluous.

I want to return to the problem of Nazi language, a topic that Anton treated with scorn. In spite of his indifference, I do declare that the highest stage of the Holocaust history as of all history is its verbal structure. Fortunately, homo sapiens are locked unto verbal structures. It is in the choice of words where the “why question” and the “truth question” merge.

The Holocaust is wrapped in two Nazi linguistic screens and if Anton doesn’t see it, he has a problem. They are: Nazi ideological screen and their “public relations” (call it propaganda) one. For example take the Nazi slogan: “Jews are Communists”. Is it good history writing if you take the Nazi slogan and paste it on the back of every Pole, Ukrainian and Estonian, go with the flow, so to say, or is it a historians duty to discriminate and challenge the Nazi “truths”. The Nazi concept of “voluntary” is another example! Do you accept the Nazi assertion that the occupied people were crazy about voluntary work, including military and police assignments? Or do you investigate? When in doubt, or lack evidence, which sucker gets the break? Do you agree with the Nazis or the opposite?

In saying some of the things I said in the original statement, I wanted to pre-warn Anton about the perils of agreeing too closely with the current crop of German historians, who, admitting there are exceptions, have come to explain the Eastern European participation in the Holocaust with Nazi logic and even language. Many German historians have gotten in the habit of excluding whole regions of evidence that would give them dissenting opinions. Almost as a rule they distrust sworn evidence assembled in legal procedures, regardless of the venue or country. Evidence assembled in the Einsatzgruppen trial is distrusted. All leaders of the Einsatzgruppen who carried out and organized the first massacres are declared to be liars. And that includes Ohlendorf, Sandberger, Stahlecker et al. No doubt that Sandberger’s lengthy testimony contained some hedging as almost all testimonies do, but to dismiss it wholesale as did Anton, indicates that he has caught the German bug.

To cite Anton: “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.” I would not always use the word “unwitting,” and it is not always a question of a “burden“ but the quote shows that Anton has understood what I am talking about. It is a simple comparison: make list of your words and compare them with the Nazi ones. I have no objection if a historian describe the crime of the accessories as long as the narrative keeps some kind of balance between the perpetrators and the accessories. It is a continuum: one can err on either end of it. The more common danger is to make the Holocaust in Eastern Europe German-less. For example K. Stang, in his work Kollaboration und Massenmord, badly errs by omitting the German role in describing Lithuania; so did Evans in describing the Lietukis massacre in Kaunas; so did Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, in The “Final Solution” in Riga, and so did Ruth Bettina Birn in an article about Auxiliary Estonian Security Police. Where does Anton Weiss-Wendt stand on this scale? Well, although not far from the margin, the German still exists in his narrative. It is plenty good to me, although I would not be surprised if some other historians would judge him to be too kind to the Germans.

Andrew Ezergailis

Andrew Ezergailis is Professor Emeritus of History at Ithaca College, author of The Holocaust in Latvia (1996), The Stockholm Documents: The German Occupation of Latvia (2002), and Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Latvia (2005).
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