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  SPIEGEL Interview with Israeli Historian Saul Friedländer: 'The Holocaust Won't Disappear'

SPIEGEL Interview with Israeli Historian Saul Friedländer 'The Holocaust Won't Disappear'

Part 2: 'Without Hitler -- No Holocaust'

Friedländer: During the war, the Wehrmacht occupied areas in which millions of Jews lived. The plan was to deport them, just as they had begun to do in Germany, from areas under German control, and to send them to a Jewish reservation. At first, this reservation was supposed to be in Lublin, then in Madagascar, then, after defeating Stalin, in northern Russia.

SPIEGEL: But that's not what happened.

Friedländer: Yes, from October 1941, we can observe a transition. Hitler ranted almost every day about the Jews. The offensive on the eastern front was bogged down, and then on Dec. 5, the Red Army launched its counteroffensive. Stalin hadn't been defeated -- he continued to fight. And a few days later, the US was at war with Hitler's allies, the Japanese. And since Hitler knew that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to convince the American public to go to war against Germany, for psychological reasons he wanted to beat him to the punch, and so he declared war on the US, although that actually wasn't the original plan. As a result, Hitler was fighting a total war on two fronts, just as he'd experienced during World War I.

SPIEGEL: And the fate of the European Jews was sealed?

Friedländer: In 1935, Hitler said that if it came to another war on two fronts, he would be prepared to take drastic measures against the Jews. That was the lesson that Hitler learned from World War I. The country could not afford another stab in the back from the supposed enemy at home, the Jews, who had allegedly betrayed Germany back in 1917/18. In contrast to the Slavs, who the Nazis saw as passive "Untermenschen," Hitler feared the Jews as an active enemy. Consequently, it was not enough to kill the Jews -- he wanted to obliterate everything that was Jewish in the world. I think the decision to do this was made in December 1941.

SPIEGEL: How do you then explain the fact that immediately following the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen killed Jewish men at first, but then also shot women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The absolute determination to annihilate the Jews was thus clearly present at an earlier date.

Friedländer: This is a case of cumulative radicalization, as my colleague Hans Mommsen has called it in other contexts. This results from the notion of a total war, like the one Hitler was fighting in Eastern Europe. It has its own dynamics and the radicalization emerges on its own.

SPIEGEL: And this led to women and children being shot?

Friedländer: On the German side, there was the widespread mythic idea that the Jews would help the Red Army. And then there were the beginnings, albeit very modest, of a partisan war on the part of the Soviets. So the Germans saw women as a potential threat, for example, as messengers. And they shot the children because they weren't prepared to feed all the orphans. But that was not yet the decision to annihilate all the Jews in Europe. The partisan war was also directed against the Slavs. In their villages the Germans killed all the inhabitants when a partisan had been discovered or there were suspicions of partisan activity.

SPIEGEL: Some of your colleagues see Hitler as a dictator surrounded by henchmen who were pushing for the Holocaust. What is your assessment of Hitler's role?

Friedländer: Without Hitler -- no Holocaust. But Hitler of course could never have committed the crime alone. It was the population, it was the elite, some 200,000 perpetrators in Germany alone -- there was a willingness to go along with it, also for very practical reasons, because individuals hoped to gain a material advantage.

SPIEGEL: In that sense, you agree with your colleague Götz Aly when he says that Hitler killed the Jews so he could distribute all their possessions to the Germans?

Friedländer: Aly is exaggerating. Hitler definitely used the property and belongings of those who were murdered to help keep people quiet, but that was not the main objective.

SPIEGEL: You recently wrote: "All murderous impulses and ideological delusions evidently lie dormant in the nature of mankind." Do you see a danger that this could happen again?

Friedländer: A few years ago, I gave a lecture at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. And someone in the auditorium asked a question that still bothers me today: "If something so extreme as the Holocaust was possible, don't we have to revise our perception of the nature of mankind?" I couldn't answer that question. There's no doubt that an extreme political party with a violent ideology can, given the right circumstances, commit horrible acts, as we have seen to some extent in Rwanda and Cambodia. Nevertheless, I can hardly imagine that a movement comparable to Nazism could be successful again in a modern country. Today, the counteracting forces that failed back then are too strong to allow this to happen.

SPIEGEL: You've been closely following political developments in Germany over the years. How will it feel to stand on Sunday where Peace Prize winner Martin Walser stood in 1998 and complained about the "endless exhibition of our shame" in the media?

Friedländer: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently speculated that I would answer Walser, but I don't intend to do so because I honestly don't care what Martin Walser thinks.

SPIEGEL: Walser represents many people who say that it's time to move on and draw a line under the debate about the Holocaust.

Friedländer: I vaguely remember the debate over putting the matter to rest in the late 1950s, and very clearly the debate in 1985, which again focused on drawing a line under the issue. Every 20 years, there appears to be a wave of sentiment, in other words, another generation grows up and calls for the matter to be put behind us. But then just the opposite occurs. The debate in the mid-1980s led to the "Historikerstreit" (an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany over how the Holocaust should be interpreted). And nowadays when people in Germany talk about the systematic bombing of cities and the refugees and displaced people, then the Holocaust only seems to disappear, but in actual fact they are approaching it from another angle. What we're dealing with here is the Allies' response to the Holocaust, in other words, the Germans were also victims. Dresden is compared with Auschwitz and not with anything else.

SPIEGEL: The Germans can't get the Holocaust out of their system?

Friedländer: That's how it looks to me. But it's not just the Germans. Take the spectacular success of a totally unknown author like Jonathan Littell in France with his novel "Les Bienveillantes" about a fictitious SS officer who is responsible for organizing the "Final Solution." There is something about the extreme nature of the Holocaust which is now firmly anchored in the West's perception of the world -- and which is reflected in this novel. I can't explain it exactly, but one thing is certain -- the issue of the Holocaust won't disappear.

SPIEGEL: Does the current debate about German "victims" make you feel uneasy?

Friedländer: No. When I traveled to Bonn in the early 1960s to work in the archives, I kept getting these horrible panic attacks. Today I feel the same way in Germany as I do in any other country. I have a grandchild here and my daughter is married to a German and lives in Berlin.

SPIEGEL: Then you presumably have not been overly concerned as you follow the debate surrounding TV presenter , who praised the family policies of the Nazis?

Friedländer: I've read about it. Ms. Herman apparently doesn't know any better.

SPIEGEL: And Cardinal Joachim Meisner who spoke of ?

Friedländer: I've also read about that and thought that the man is narrow-minded. You probably take these things more seriously than I do because they are happening in your country. I understand that very well. But I'm more upset about US politics.

SPIEGEL: Next year a feature film will be released about the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, with superstar Tom Cruise playing the lead role. Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck says that he expects this major Hollywood production to do more "to enhance Germany's image than 10 World Cup championships" could have done. Do you believe that?

Friedländer: Hardly anyone in the US has ever heard of Stauffenberg -- some of my students in Los Angeles don't even know who Lenin was. It's plausible to assume that a film with a superstar could give the impression that Stauffenberg was a "good guy." But the vast majority of Americans don't have a clue about German history, and this film is not about to change that.

SPIEGEL: Thank you for this interview, Professor Friedländer.

Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe.