Arno J. Mayer - Critical Responses To Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?

Critical Responses To Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?

Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? met with generally unfavorable reviews in 1988. The British historian Richard J. Evans, in summing up U.S. reviews of the book, noted that some of the more "printable" responses by U.S. historians included: "a mockery of memory and history" and "bizarre and perverse". Reviewers criticized Mayer's account of the Holocaust as focused too heavily on Nazi anti-communism at the expense of a focus on antisemitism.

Two critics of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? were Jewish-American historians Daniel Goldhagen and Lucy Dawidowicz. Both questioned Mayer's account of the murder of Jews during the early phases of World War II, arguing the organised and systemic role played by the Nazis was much greater. Both accused Mayer of attempting to rationalize the Holocaust, comparing him to the right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote "... popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much subtle form of Holocaust denial".

Holocaust deniers have often quoted out of context Mayer's sentence, "Sources for the study of the gas chambers at once rare and unreliable", in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? As the authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have noted, the entire paragraph from which the sentence comes from states that the SS destroyed the majority of the documention relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable" One of Mayer's leading defenders, the journalist D. D. Guttenplan wrote in Mayer's defense that he believed that there was much to Mayer's thesis about the Holocaust as a result of the Nazi obsession with "Judeo-Bolshevism", and that Mayer had been unjustly and harshly treated by a conservative U.S. Jewish establishment and by anti-communist historians.

The American historian Peter Baldwin noted certain parallels between Mayer’s views in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? and those expressed by the German radical right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. Baldwin noted that both see the inter-war period as one of intense ideological conflict between the forces of the Right and Left, that World War II was the culmination of this conflict, and both see the Holocaust as a by-product of the German-Soviet war. However, Baldwin went on to note the central difference between Nolte and Mayer in that for the former the Soviets were aggressors who essentially got what they deserved in the form of Operation Barbarossa while for the latter the Soviets were victims of a monstrous regime.

Much of the controversy around Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? was due to the simple fact that through this book the general public first learned of the functionalist view that there was no masterplan for the Holocaust going back to the days when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. In Baldwin's opinion, Goldhagen and others were probably right in criticizing Mayer's view about the timing of the decision to launch the Holocaust; on the other hand, Baldwin considered that Goldhagen missed Mayer's overall point about the connection between the war against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. Another area of controversy centered around Mayer’s claim that most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz were the victims of diseases, rather than mass gassings, a claim that has been cited by David Irving as one of his reasons for embracing Holocaust denial. The Dutch-Canadian architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt has noted that Mayer's book with its claim that there were more "natural" then "unnatural" deaths at Auschwitz is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial. American journalist D.D. Guttenplan, who was otherwise highly sympathetic towards Mayer's theory of Soviets (Jewish and non-Jewish) and Jews in general, as fellow victims of the Holocaust, called this statement "indefensible".