The Destruction of The European Jews - The Holocaust As A Historically Explicable Event

The Holocaust As A Historically Explicable Event

This problem underscores a more fundamental question: whether the Holocaust can (or to what extent it should) be made explicable through a social-scientific, historical account. Speaking against what he terms "quasi mystical association," historian Nicolas Kinloch writes that "with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s monumental book," the subject had risen to be considered "an event requiring more, rather than less, stringent historical analysis." Citing Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer's statement that "if the Holocaust was caused by humans, then it is as understandable as any other human event," Kinloch finally concludes that this "will itself help to make any repetition of the Nazi genocide less likely."

One danger, however, from this attempt to "demystify", argues Arno Lustiger, can lead to another mystification proffering "clichés about the behaviour of the doomed Jews their alleged cowardliness, compliance, submission, collaboration and lack of passive or armed resistance." He goes on to echo the early critics of (the no longer marginalized) Hilberg, stating that: "it is about time to publish researched testimonies of the victims and survivors documentations and books, based solely on German documents."

An altogether different argument challenged that since the Nazis destroyed massive sets of sensitive documents pertaining to the Holocaust upon the arrival of Soviet and Western Ally troops, no truly comprehensive, verifiable historical reconstruction could be achieved. This, however, argues Hilberg, demonstrates an ignorance as to the structure and scope of the Nazi bureaucracy. While it is true that many sensitive documents were destroyed, the bureaucracy nonetheless was so immense and so dispersed, that most pertinent materials could be reconstructed either from copies or from a vast array of more peripheral ones.

From these documents, The Destruction proceeds to outline the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi State through a succession of very different stages, each one more extreme, more dehumanizing than that which preceded it, eventually leading to the final stage: the physical destruction of the European Jews.