Lucy Dawidowicz - Public Criticism of And By Dawidowicz

Public Criticism of And By Dawidowicz

Dawidowicz’s major interests were the Holocaust and Jewish history. A passionate Zionist, Dawidowicz believed that had the Mandate for Palestine been implemented as intended, establishing the Jewish State of Israel prior to the Holocaust, "the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome". Dawidowicz took an Intentionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust, contending that, beginning with the end of World War I on 11 November 1918, Hitler conceived his master plans, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal, and that he had "openly espoused his program of annihilation" when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1924.

Dawidowicz's conclusions was: "Through a maze of time, Hitler's decision of November 1918 led to Operation Barbarossa. There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination. In the end only the question of opportunity mattered."

In her view, the overwhelming majority of Germans subscribed to the völkische antisemitism from the 1870s onward, and it was this morbid antisemitism that attracted support for Hitler and the Nazis. Dawidowicz maintained that from the Middle Ages onward, German Christian society and culture were suffused with antisemitism and there was a direct link from medieval pogroms to the Nazi death camps of the 1940s.

Citing Fritz Fischer, Dawidowicz argued there were powerful lines of continuity in German history and there was a Sonderweg (Special Path), which led Germany inevitably to Nazism.

Dawidowicz criticized what she considered to be revisionist historians as incorrect and/or sympathetic to the Nazis.

For Dawidowicz, National Socialism was the essence of total evil, and she wrote that movement was the "... daemon let loose in society, Cain in corporate embodiment." Regarding foreign policy questions, she sharply disagreed with A. J. P. Taylor over his book The Origins of the Second World War. In even stronger terms, she condemned the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan for his book, War Forced on Germany, as well as David Irving's revisionist Hitler's War, which suggested Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

Dawidowicz criticized German historians who sought to minimize German complicity in the Nazi era attempt to annihilate Europe's Jews.

In her view, historians who took a functionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust question were guilty of ignoring their responsibility to historical truth.