A thought on historical evidence

I just did a new post at The Blue Voice about a recent column by the middle-brow hack Victor Davis Hanson in which he grumbled about the Democracts making reference to Hitler and Nazi Germany.  This is a joke, because flabby historical analogies are his stock-in-trade.

I recently recalled an essay by Holocaust historian Christopher Browning: "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered" in his book The Path to Genocide (1992).  It talks about what the current state of the research was at that point on the question of when Hitler made the gruesome decision to kill all the Jews in Europe.

I heard Browning give a lecture at Stanford University several years ago; I believe it was in 1997.  He said that the book Hitler's War by David Irving, now notorious as a Holocaust denier, was an important impetus to specific research on this decision-making process.  In that book, Irving first entered the Holocaust-denial scam, by arguing that Hitler himself had not made the decision to kill the Jews.

Browning said that, of course, that argument wasn't taken seriously, because it would scarcely have been possible to carry out such a think without the dictator's knowledge and approval.  But he said it stimulated historians of the period to look more closely at the time frame of what actually happened to try to pinpoint the decision in time.

As Browning explains in that essay, that decision evolved over a period of time.  Before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the decision had been made to systematically kill Jewish men, and the staffing was provided to do that, in the forms of the Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police.  By October 1941, the decision had been concluded to kill all Jews under Nazi control, women and children included.

It's often assumed that the Wannsee Conference was the occasion for concluding the decision on the Final Solution.  But that is not the case.  The Wannsee Conference was more in the nature of an implementation conference, deciding on the means by which to carry out the task.  The decision to do it had already been made.

But there is no piece ofpaper with Hitler's signature saying "Kill all the Jews." Nor is there any sworn testimony from awar crimes trial detailing the personal delivery of such orders by Hitler to one of the key players.  What there is, is a large body of circumstantial evidence, as outlined by Browning in the essay above.  Browning describes the various meetings and reports that show how the decision process unfolded to pin down when the decision was made.

Since 1992, there has been further research on this issue.  In 1999, a document was released from Soviet archives, the datebook of Heinrich Himmler, which shows his notes on a meeting with the Führer in December 1941 that indicate Hitler had directed that the Jews should be "als Partisanen auszurotten" (to be extermined as partisans).  But even that may well have been a direction on the propaganda cover for the killings; the decision had been made earlier.  And even that document does not show Hitler ordering the Final Solution.

The following two exerpt from Hitler and the Holocaust by Robert Wistrich (2001) give a good flavor of the kind of historical evidence used to reconstruct this sequence:

Hitler's September 1941 order for the "removal" of Jews from the Reich to the east went beyond the geographically limited killing of Soviet Jews toward a pan-European solution of the "Jewish question." Heydrich, at a conference in Prague on 10 October 1941, spoke of "the Fiihrer's wish that German Jews be deported to Lodz, Riga, and Minsk by the end of the year, if possible." This formula of "the Führer's wish" (des Führers Wunsch), deployed by both Himmler and Heydrich, came to assume a life of its own during the Holocaust, as one of those key code terms (like evacuation, resettlement, transport to the east) that covered or disguised the horrible reality of mass murder. The circular of 23 October 1941 from Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller (issued in Himmler's name) banning "all further Jewish emigration, with immediate effect," was one more decisive pointer to the emergence of a new phase. For where would the Jews go if they could no longer emigrate or stay where they were?This question was all the more acute as the Russian winter set in and heavy German losses were for the first time being sustained at the hands of the "Jewish-Bolshevik" enemy.

There were also other significant indicators regarding a decision for genocide around September and October 1941. The brutality of face-to-face mass shootings on the eastern front were beginning to take their psychological toll on the Einsatzgruppen, and Himmler (after witnessing one such execution) had become more "sensitized" to the needs of his troops and the desirability of a so-called humane method of killing.  By September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C was in possession of a truck that used exhaust gases to kill trapped Jewish victims.  In October 1941, plans for the construction of gassing apparatus had been discussed by Adolf Eichmann, Alfred Wetzel (the Jewish expert of the Ostministerium), and Viktor Brack, the supervisor of the euthanasia program in the Fuhrer Chancellery.25 They agreed that "there is no reason why those Jews who are not fit for work should not be removed by the Brack method [i.e., gassing].... The work-worthy on the other hand will be transported to the East for labour."

Now, serious historians have no doubt that Hitler ordered the Holocaust to be carried out.  There is honest disagreement among them about exactly how the decision developed.  But there is no question that Hitler ordered the Final Solution.  Even though there is no document signed with his hand ordering it, and no eyewitness testimony to his giving such an order.  The lack of this kind of evidence was the hook on which Irving hung his original argument that Hitler had not ordered the Holocaust.

I thought about Browning's essay in particular as I was reading Bob Somerby's careful analysis of the meaning of "Downing Street Memo" and other related British documents (in the Daily Howler, over a period of several days).  He's been looking at them with particular reference to the account given by Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack.  Those sources, along with the various official and journalistic reports about the state of prewar intelligence on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," and accounts by people like Richard Clarke about the prewar discussions, seem to me to leave no serious doubt that theBush administration had determined to go to war with Iraq well before 2003. Possibly even before the summer of 2002.  And that they were deliberately hyping the intelligence far beyond what any responsible interpretation of the available information would support.

I'm not a professional historian.  But it certainly seems to me that the evidence that the Bush administration was lying in the fall of 2002 about its intentions to attack Iraq, and that it was grossly exaggerating the available intelligence estimates, is at least as firmly established in the information now publicly available as the fact that Adolf Hitler ordered the Final Solution.

I'm not saying this to make a gratuitous comparison to Hitler.  In fact, I'm not making a comparison to Hitler at all.  What I am comparing is standards of evidence.  And given the strength of the evidence, the idea that the Downing Street Memo is not even newsworthy - the argument that much of what we still generously call a "press corps" has been making - is just pathetic. (See A press coverup by Joe Conason Salon 06/17/05)

It may be the triumph of Republican Party postmodernism.  If the Party isn't declaring it as its official narrative of the moment, then the evidence represented by something like the Downing Street Memo has to be minimized, if not ignored.  Nothing recently has highlighted the sad state of our national press as their treatment of that story and its implications.

Paul Krugman describes the importance of this issue succinctly (The War President 06/24/05 CommonDreams.org; original in New York Times):

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.