Germany's Special Path to the Holocaust
BY Donald L. Niewyk

Ursula Buttner, Werner Johe, and Angelika Voss, eds. Das Unrechtsregime: Internationale Forschung uber den Nationalsozialismus. Hamburger Beitrage zur Sozial- und Zeitgeschichte, Vols. 21 and 22. 2 vols. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1986. xxxii, 560 pages; vii, 478 pages.

VOLUME 1: Helga -Grebing, Deutscher Sonderweg oder zwei Linien historischer Kontinuitdt in Deutschland? Jerzy Serczyk, Der National sozialismu s und die Tradition der Aufklarung: Einige Gedanken zur nationalsozialistischen Geschichtsideologie. Michel L~monon, Die Verbreitung der Rassenlehre Gobineaus in Deutschland. Walter Zwi Bacharach, Konsequenz und Manipulation der nationalsozialistischen Rassenideologie. Mosche Zimmermann, Aufkornmen und Diskreditierung des Begriffs Antisemitismus. Franciszek Ryszka, Von der Idee zurn Vo1kermord: Gedanken uber den Antisemitismus. Wilhelm Deist, Der militarische Zusarnmenbruch des Kaiserreichs: Zur Realitat der "Dolchstosslegende. " Arnold Sywottek, Einheit der Arbeiterklasse Zur Rettung der Weirnarer Republik? Zur Kritik eines Mythos. Eberhard Kolb, Die sozialdemokratische Strategie in der Ara des Prasidialkabinetts Bruning: Strategie ohne Alternative? Martin Broszaf, Reich szentralismu s und Parteipartikularismus: Bayern nach dern Neuaufbau-Gesetz vorn 30. januar 1934. Wolfgang Benz, Zum VerhAtnis von NSDAP und staatlicher Verwaltung im Dritten Reich. Ganter Moltmann, Nationalklischees und Dernagogie: Die deutsche Arnerikapropaganda im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Bernd Wegner, Die Sondergerichtsbarkeit von SS und Polizei: Militarjustiz oder Grundlegung einer SS- gemdssen Rechtsordnung? Czeslaw Madajczyk, Das Hauptarnt far Volkstumsfragen und die Germanische Leitstelle. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Kirche in der Diktatur: Die deutsche Erfahrung von 1933-34. Ganter Brakelmann, Die Bochurner Bekenntnisse des Jahres 1933: Ein Meilenstein auf dem Weg nach Barmen. G~nther van Norden, Die Barmer Theologische Erklarung und die "Judenfrage." Werner Johe, Das deutsche Volk und das System der Konzentrationsiager. Hans Mommsen, Wilhelm Leuschner und die Widerstandsbewegung des 20. Juli 1944. Franciszek Polomski, Das Vermogen der "Reichsfeinde": Eigentumsrechtliche Sanktionen gegen die Verschworer vom 20. Juli 1944. Joseph Walk Liechtenstein 1933-1945: Nationalsozialismus im Mikrokosmos. Dietric~ Orlow, Der Nationalsozialismus als Markenzeichen und Exportartikel: Das Dritte Reich und die Entwicklung des Faschismus in Holland und Frankreich 1933-1939. Klaus-Jurgen Muller, Betrachtungen zurn Deutschlandbild der franzosischen extremen Rechten. Charles Bloch, Aspekte der Beziehungen zwischen dem Dritten Reich und Frankreich. Antoni Czubinski, Die Haltung der polnischen Offentlichkeit zurn Reich stagsbrandprozess im Jahr 1933. Henryk Olszewski, Der Nationalsozialismus im Urteil der politischen Krafte Polens.

VOLUME 2: Hermann Graml, Zur Genesis der "Endolsung." Werner T. Angress, Die "Judenfrage" im Spiegel arritlicher Berichte 1935. Avraham Barkai, "Schicksalsjahr 1938": Kontinuitit und Verscharfung der wirtschaftlichen Ausphinderung der deutschen Juden. Jeremy Noakes, Wohin gehoren die "Juderimischlinge"? Die Entstehung der ersten Durchfiihrungsverordnungen zu den Niirnberger Gesetzen. John A.S. Grenville, Die "Endlosung" und die "Judenmischlinge" im Dritten Reich. Karol Jonca, Schlesiens Kirchen zur "Losung der Judenfrage." Arnold Paucker, Die Haltung Englands und der USA zur Vernichtung der europaischen Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Jacob Toury, Ein Aufakt zur "Endlosung": Judenaustreibungen uber nichtslawische Reichsgrenzen 1933-1939. Juirgen Rohwer, Judische Fluchtlingsschiffe im Schwarzen Meer 1934-1944. Rita R. Thalmann, Die Emigration aus Deutschland und die offentliche Memung Frankreichs 1933-1939. Ernst G. Lowenthal, Bloomsbury House: Fluchtlingshilfsarbeit in London 1939-1946. Aus personlichen Erinnerungen. Konrad Kwiet, Die Integration deutsch-judischer Emigranten in Australien. Martin Greschat, Weder Neuanfang noch Restauration: Zur Interpretation der cleutschen evangelischen Yirchengeschichte nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. John S. Conway, Die Rolle der Kirchen bei der "Umerziehung" in Deutschland. Ursula Buttner, Not nach der Befreiung: Die Situation der deutschen Juden in der britischen Besatzungszone 1945- 1948. Susanne Miller, Die Behandlung des Widerstands gegen den Nationalsozialismus in der SPD nach 1945. Giinter Bertram, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung durch NS- Prozesse? Individualschuld im "Staatsverbrechen." Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Vom Imperativ des Friedens: Anmerkungen zu einigen Lehren aus der Geschichte des Dritten Reichs.

Werner Jochmann, the distinguished German historian and longtime director of Hamburg's Institute for the History of National Socialism, to whom this Festschrift is dedicated, devoted much of his career to tracing Nazism's origins in the political culture of Imperial and Weimar Germany. It is appropriate, then, that the introductory essay by Helga Grebing relates the anthology to one of the most discussed disputations among German scholars in the 1980s: the cogency of the deutscher Sonderweg-a special German path of historical development that rejected Western political and intellectual values and culminated in the Nazi catastrophe. Widely accepted by the postwar generation of historians both inside and outside Germany, it lately has come under attack, most notably by the British historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley.1 In no important sense, the insurgents argue, was modern German history deflected from the more general Western pattern. The German bourgeoisie, far from being feudalized, entered into the same kinds of symbiotic relationships with the old preindustrial elite that characterized French and British societies in the nineteenth century.

Evidently Grebing is reluctant to concede much to the critics of the Sonderweg thesis, which is, after all, firmly grounded in hundreds of specialized studies. Germany's middle-class liberals failed to carry the day in 1848-1849, caved in to Bismarck in 1866, and quietly accepted the limited role prescribed for them by the Imperial regime. Hence whatever "symbiosis" developed between liberals and the Prussian aristocrats was scarcely one among equals. The failures of German liberalism helped entrench an authoritarian tradition that hobbled the Weimar Republic from the start and finally paved the way to National Socialism. And yet, Grebing is uncomfortable with the one-dimensionality of the Sonderweg view, and she cautions against pushing it too far. If it describes a "black line" of historical continuity, there was also a "white line," a liberal, rational tradition of civil courage, fairness, and tolerance that not even the Nazis could destroy entirely. By no means limited to the liberal middle classes, this white line found some of its most devoted and imaginative practitioners among the supporters of the social democratic movement.

If critics of the Sonderweg thesis downplay the political failures of German liberalism, they also neglect the widespread rejection by Germans of eighteenth-century rationalism in favor of blood-and-soil mysticism. As Jerzy Serczyk points out in his essay on the National Socialist view of history, the association of the Enlightenment and France with "un-German forces" was by no means restricted to Germany's conservative intellectuals. It penetrated widely into the German middle classes after 1866 as they sought their salvation in the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy. The resulting flight from rationality also contributed to the antirepublican climate of opinion that plagued Weimar democracy from the first. Germans of the 1920s who read and believed conservative historians' arguments about the incompatibility of French revolutionary ideas and the German soul may also have been taken in by the legend that the German armed forces were stabbed in the back by Jews and liberals during the last months of the Great War. According to the essay by Wilhelm Deist, even in the 1920s there was ample evidence that what was attributed to treason on the home front stemmed instead from a catastrophic breakdown of discipline and morale among German fighting men, beginning in 1917 and paralleling the demoralization of Germans as a whole. Deist's research casts doubts on contentions still being made that the fighting effectiveness of the German army remained unimpaired to the end of hostilities.2

The central role of culture and ideology in determining the deutscher Sonderweg is affirmed by four essays on racism, two of which explore its intellectual parentage in the nineteenth century. Michel Lemonon denies that Comte Arthur de Gobineau can be considered a precursor of Nazi racism by documenting the minimal attention given in Germany to his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, even after its publication in German translation at the turn of the century. By that time not only had its teachings long since been superseded by Darwinian eugenics, but Germany had produced its own racist mentors. Lemonon is more impressed by the Nazis' indifference to Gobineau-who, after all, was no Jew-hater-than by the uses to which the Pan- German League put his teachings about Aryan superiority in the first decades of the twentieth century, stressed elsewhere by Roger Chickering.3

Among Germany's own nineteenth-century racist mentors was the radical writer and politician Wilhelm Marr, the self-styled "patriarch of antisemitism," who is usually credited with originating the word Antisemitismus with his founding in 1879 of the Antisemitic League. The essay by his biographer, Mosche Zimmermann, shows that Marr adopted the new word rather offhandedly to denote a politically oriented racism as opposed to traditional, religious antipathy for the Jews. To Marr's dismay, it was almost immediately adopted by Jewhaters of all kinds, racists and nonracists alike. Zimmermann underlines the fortuitous circumstances surrounding the initiation of the word, Marr's inability to influence the various anti-Jewish movements in Imperial Germany, and his rejection of what he called "barbaric measures" against the Jews. Ultimately the pitiable and largely forgotten Marr abandoned his antisemitism. The Nazis would repudiate him completely, denying his word (they preferred ludengegnerschaft-opposition to the Jews- and suchlike) and smearing him as a half-Jew. Hence Marr no more deserves to be numbered among Hitler's salient forerunners than does Gobineau. That distinction belongs to Duhring, Fritsch, and Chamberlain. Marr's pilgrimage is a cautionary tale: not everyone who emerged from the tradition of enlightenment rationalism was immune to antisemitism, and not every nineteenthcentury German antisemite was a proto- Nazi.

Where, then, should we place pre-Nazi antisemitism? It has long been a staple of Sonderweg argumentation that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to the political racism that grew up in Imperial Germany, which provided a "rehearsal for destruction" in Paul Massing's memorable phrase.4 This view lately has been reassessed by Shulamit Volkov, who denies that any direct line can convincingly be drawn between pre- and post-1918 Judeophobia.5 This more nuanced approach is represented here by Walter Zwi Bacharach's assessment of National Socialist racial ideology. Germans who supposed that Nazi antisemitism was a continuation of the old racism-and they probably made up the great majority of Hitler's followers-must have taken the regime's early compromises on racial matters as confirmation of their assumption. They would be as astonished by the "final solution" as anyone. Hitler's murderous brand of antisemitism used, but had little in common with, the essentially social and cultural Judeophobia that prevailed before the Great War. Franciszek Ryszka reminds us, moreover, that genocide was committed under cover of war. Most of its perpetrators need not have been influenced by traditional antisemitism or by its modern Nazi counterpart. They accepted small roles in an impersonal murder machine that was "justified" by the brutal war against the Soviet Union. The Nazi state may not have turned Germans into virulent Jew-haters, but it had effectively atomized them and made them tools of the Fi1hrer's will.

The possibility that things might have ended less tragically had the German Left acted differently is explored in essays by Arnold Sywottek and Eberhard Kolb. Certainly no groups were more committed to deflecting Germany from the Sonderweg than its Communists and Social Democrats. Was their inability to end bitter rivalries and unite the workers to meet the fascist challenge a major determinant of Hitler's victory? Both scholars argue that division on the Left was inevitable given the Communist party's revolutionary intransigence, and both doubt that working-class unity, had it been possible, would have changed the outcome in any substantial way. Kolb adds a vigorous defense of the Social Democratic party's toleration of the minority cabinet headed by Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, which governed Germany from 1930 to 1932. Although the radical left wing of the party sought to replace the policy of toleration with one of proletarian unity to smash a capitalist system much weakened by the depression, moderate party leaders realized that to do so would topple Bruning and open the door to Hitler. Although neither scholar offers new information or original interpretations, it is perhaps useful to review the limits placed by circumstances on the Left's power to shape German history.

That some Germans did not cease to fight back once the Nazi regime had designated itself the consummation of the Sonderweg is attested to by a handful of essays on aspects of the resistance. Clearly, not everyone who resisted was unaffected by exposure to antiliberal traditions, as Hans Mommsen's study of Social Democratic union leader Wilhelm Leuschner demonstrates in exemplary fashion. Leuschner, a martyr of the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, shared many of the conservative and nationalistic predilections of his fellow plotters Goerdeler and Stauffenberg. Although stoutly devoted to social justice, Leuschner was no friend of unqualified parliamentary democracy, envisioning a post-Nazi union movement, compulsory and highly centralized, that would seek corporative equilibrium with both big business and the state.

The very different resistance of the churches was even more severely compromised by authoritarian values. Gunter Brakelmarm quite properly lauds the approximately 100 Westphalian Protestant pastors who signed a forthright denunciation of the most blatantly anti-Christian Nazi teachings, including antisemitism. He is not entirely convincing, however, when he argues that this "Bochum Confession" anticipated the main features of the "Barmen Confession," in which Protestant leaders from all over Germany one year later took a position against National Socialist meddling in church affairs. As Gunther van Norden shows, the church leaders at Barmen voted down a motion to include in their broadside an attack on the imposition of the Aryan paragraph. Not only were they unused to considering the social and historical dimensions of spirituality, but their authoritarian sympathies led them to hope that, in the fluid situation that prevailed on the eve of the Blood Purge, Hitler would reject racialist paganism in favor of "positive Christianity."

Norden's somewhat apologetic tone is not shared by Karl Dietrich Bracher, for whom Barmen's silence about Hitlerian racism and the totalitarian pretensions of the Nazi movement constitutes serious failures of insight and imagination. And yet, Bracher's superbly balanced statement credits Protestant resistance, limited as it was, with forcing the Nazi state to reveal its true nature to at least a few churchmen. Unable to absorb the churches, it would await the chance to smash them. Karol Jonca usefully reminds us that individual clergymen, both Protestant and Catholic, defended the right of Jewish Christians to attend public worship services and also aided them with money and assistance in emigrating. His study of the reactions of the Silesian churches to the various stages of Nazi antisernitic persecution also recalls the ease with which the regime neutralized opposition to Nazi policies by removing individuals from office or forcing them to retire.

Other Nazi measures to minimize dissent are explored by Werner Johe and Gunter Moltmann. Johe's study of German reactions to the concentration camps shows that ample information was available about conditions in the camps, spread by word of mouth and, during the war, by personal observations of inmates on work details. But most Germans chose to ignore it. Minimizing the fatalism that must have characterized much popular response to Nazi terror, Johe explains mass support for or indifference to the camps by citing faith in the regime, belief that the victims were scum, and rejection of painful reality. More difficult for the regime was generating popular hatred of the United States during the war. Moltmann finds that anti-American propaganda reached a peak of success in 1943 as a result of the massive bombings by the U.S. Air Force, but that subsequent efforts by Goebbels to make Germans as fearful of the Anglo-Americans as they were of the Russians fell flat. Evidently there were limits even to Goebbels's gifts of keeping Germans on track.

Critics of the Sonderweg thesis who emphasize the ways in which Nazi totalitarianism overturned older authoritarian traditions are likely to draw sustenance from studies giving further evidence of administrative anarchy in the Third Reich. Martin Broszat chronicles the competition between conservative bureaucrats in Berlin, supported by Nazi Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, and radical Bavarian party leaders who attempted to strengthen provincial autonomy while simultaneously whittling away at the authority of the Bavarian bureaucracy. Hitler initially supported the centralists as a means of counteracting the influence of SA radicals. After the Blood Purge, he characteristically let matters slide, with truly chaotic results. The interminable struggles between Bavaria's Reich -Governor, Gauleiter, and Prime Minister were merely high-level manifestations of a generally polycratic and uncoordinated administrative system. Broszat is impressed not only with the number of Bavarian bureaucrats whose outrage over the violations of Ordnungsstaat traditions led them into the resistance movements, but also by the extent to which progressive administrative reform legislation, proposed before 1933 and retained after 1945, was pursued under the eyes of an apathetic Nazi party during the years of the dictatorship.

Another perspective on Nazi Germany's chaotic administrative structures is provided in Wolfgang Benz's analysis of party-state relations in the country as a whole. As was true in Bavaria, the central issue was not just that of party or state primacy. The basic problem was the complex web of rival competencies that cut across the party-state boundary. Benz concludes that only the highly centralized institutions of the SS stabilized the National Socialist regime and checked its tendency toward internal anarchy.

Some indication of the extent of Himmler's power emerges from Franciszek Polomski's brief investigation into the fate of property confiscated from the perpetrators of the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. It was the SS that frustrated efforts by party organizations, and especially the Gauleiter, to seize that property for their own purposes. Instead it went to the families of the bomb victims, suggesting, as does Bernd Wegner's article on SS courts, that Himmler's goal, for the moment largely limited to the SS itself, was to reinterpret traditional concepts of justice on the basis of political motivations. It should not be forgotten, of course, that SS power did not go uncontested. That point is reaffirmed by Czeslaw Madajczyk in his exploration of Himmler's struggles with Nazi party officials and Foreign Office bureaucrats over the jurisdiction of the Central Office for Nationality Questions (Hauptamt fur Volkstumsfragen) and of the Directorate of Germanic Affairs (Germanische Leitstelle), both established in 1941.

Just how special Germany's path to the SS-state was may be tested by comparing Nazism with fascist movements elsewhere in Europe. Dietrich Orlow's fascinating analysis of relations between the Third Reich and fascist movements in Holland and France underlines their different roots. The Dutch National Socialists, largely middle-class Protestants intent upon defending their elite status from attacks by Catholics and Marxist workers, placed particular emphasis on maintaining Holland's overseas colonies, the peoples of which they regarded as Dutch citizens. Fascists in France, however, were more likely to be proletarian, anticapitalist, and antisemitic. Both initially envied and admired the successful Hitler movement; the Dutch fascists even adopted the anti-Jewish planks of the Nazi platform. But disillusionment soon set in over Hitler's persecution of the churches and the Nazi Left, and over foreign policy. The French Right feared for their country's security, while the Dutch Nazis were offended by German overtures to Japan and all they implied for Dutch interests in Indonesia. Conflicting policies pursued by various organs of party and state in Nazi Germany further bedeviled relations with fascists in the neighboring countries. On balance, their associations with the German Nazis did them more harm than good; as an export article National Socialism was not much in demand.

Three articles on related matters are of lesser interest. Klaus-Jurgen Muller's examination of the positions taken by three French right-wing organizations toward relations with Germany suggests that the traditional Right did not share fascist enthusiasm for the Nazi model.

Charles Bloch casts doubts on the arguments set forth by Klaus Hildebrand and Gunter Wollstein that Hitler ever entertained notions of independence for a fascist France in a German-dominated Europe.6 That Liechtenstein, too, developed its own native fascism is the subject of Joseph Walk's history of the Grand Duchy during the Nazi era. But neither the fascist Heimatdienst nor its successor, the largely proAnschluss Fatherland Union, which attempted an unsuccessful putsch in 1939, could shake the independence of Liechtensteiners, who also granted somewhat grudging shelter to limited numbers of anti-Nazi German refugees both before and during the war.

Contributions by Polish scholars Antoni Czubinski and Henryk Olszewski argue that the Nazi path was no more popular in Poland than it was in Western Europe. The Polish Right might applaud Hitler's antisemitism and anticommunism, but it did not mistake his militarism for anything less than a threat to Polish security. Moreover, except for a minority of young right-wing radicals who were captivated by the "magic" of fascism, Nazi persecution of the Jews went too far. More problematic is Franciszek Ryszka's contention that Poles were untainted by racism and played no role in the murder of the Jews. His conclusions minimizing Polish antisemitism and describing Poles as victims rather than persecutors during the Holocaust echo those in recent general histories of Poland during the Second World War.7 They clash dramatically with important accounts by Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Poland that testify to widespread Judeophobia among the Polish population.8 8 Few aspects of the history of this period are more in need of exact research than is this one.

Reports of decline in the debate between intentionalists and structuralists concerning the origins of the "final solution" are distinctly premature, as is clear from Hermann Graml's vigorous attack on the latter school.9 Drawing a direct line from the racial antisemites of Imperial Germany to the Nazis, Graml maintains that murder was the only practical conclusion to their radical postulates. Emigration and expulsion would merely relocate the bases of the international Jewish conspiracy, and the Nazis resorted to them before 1940 primarily to stimulate Judeophobia abroad. Such arguments have been made before, and many readers will be disappointed that here, too, they are based largely on supposition. More acute are Graml's criticisms of structuralist accounts of the immediate establishment of the murder machinery in 1941. The functionaries of the "final solution" were not always mere technocrats; rather, they were often convinced National Socialists who took racism in deadly earnest. Their task could hardly have been one of resettling Jews; for if they planned to decimate Poles and Russians, they could hardly be expected to keep the Jews alive.

Nor can Einsatzgruppen activities be explained as anti-partisan actions to assure victory against the USSR, as some structuralists have claimed; their orders were to kill every single Jew, including the elderly and babes in arm, not just those capable of causing trouble. Circumstantial evidence that Hitler gave a written order (now lost) or else a verbal order to exterminate all Eastern European Jews could hardly be stronger.10

Consonant with Graml's doggedly intentionalist analysis is John A.S. Grenville's account of the fate of the half-Jews and the quarterJews in Nazi Germany. Hitler wanted them dead, too, Grenville argues, but spared many of them from being deported to Poland because he knew it would be unpopular with the German people. What was to be a temporary delay resulted in their survival once events overran plans. Of special interest is Grenville's documentation of Hitler's direct role in ordering the exclusion of Germans with only one Jewish grandparent from deportation in 1941. Hence a process once attributed entirely to stonewalling by bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Interior now appears to be the result of Hitler's express intentions.11 However, Grenville's argument that the dictator gave the order out of sensitivity to public opinion and his conclusion that the murder of the German Jews was therefore dependent upon widespread apathy and antipathy among Germans for less assimilated Jews are less compelling. After all, the same points were made in defense of the half-Jews as for the quarter-Jews, but Hitler made no comparable effort to spare the former as a group from the "final solution."

Other contributors are more cautious about attributing murderous intentions to Hitler before 1941. The examination by Werner T. Angress of how party and state officials viewed the status of the "Jewish question" on the eve of the Nuremberg Laws is more in line with structuralist emphasis on the fragmented decision-making processes and improvised bureaucratic initiatives that often characterized the Hitler state. Party extremists, upset over the German people's failure to adopt radical antisemitism and the Jews' reluctance to emigrate, occasionally resorted to violence that was difficult to control. How were government officials to reconcile radical demands with the need to avoid physical attacks against Jews and their property that would disrupt Germany's economic and diplomatic relations and embarrass the host country during the coming Olympic games? Only Hitler's promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws provided an answer in what all parties assumed at the time was the basis for a final formulation of rules governing relations between Germans and Jews. Jeremy Noakes reminds us that officials in the Reich Ministry of the Interior excluded German Jews who had only one or two Jewish grandparents and who did not belong to a Jewish religious community from the terms of the Laws, fending off party pressures and attempts at intervention. There is no evidence that Hitler cared enough one way or the other to intervene at that point. It is possible that the dictator was awaiting the right moment to strike at them, too, as Graml argues; but it is at least as likely that Hitler had no firm plans for making Germany Judenrein until 1941 at the earliest.

Two essays about Nazi methods of spurring Jewish emigration from Germany fuel the debate by offering new perspectives on the evolution of Nazi antisemitism. Avraham Barkai departs from most standard accounts in maintaining that the majority of German Jews were already deprived of businesses and jobs by the end of 1937 and that the laws subsequently finishing off the remaining sources of Jewish income were the result of a long and carefully planned program. The year 1938, far from being the Jews' "fateful year,"12 merely brought the culmination of an official campaign to destroy the economic basis of Jewish life in Germany. If Barkai fails to be entirely persuasive, it is because his attempt to place Jewish pauperization at an earlier date rests on insufficient data. Moreover, some readers will be less impressed by the systematic way in which the Nazis prepared their last economic blows against the Jews than by the fact that they delayed letting them fall until late 1937 and 1938.

While the Nazis pauperized, they also expelled. Jacob Toury's article on illegal Gestapo banishment of Jews across the borders of neighboring countries shows that it began with individual cases of forcing Jews who had left Germany but returned to go back to their places of refuge. After Anschluss with Austria, it became a more systematic and widespread policy, although Toury does not provide a very clear impression of just how widespread it was at any time. Nonetheless the increase in expulsions was sufficient to elicit negative press reports and protests from foreign governments that led to Heydrich's being assigned the task of "regularizing" Jewish emigration. His policy of sending tens of thousands of Jews abroad with forged papers, or else with none at all, blurred the distinctions between emigration and expulsion and set a precedent for wartime expulsions to the east.

The much discussed issue of rescuing Jews from the Holocaust receives a judicious analysis from Arnold Paucker, who quite rightly laments the tendency to wrench it out of political and military context and saddle it with guilt-laden moral judgments. He has little patience, for example, with critics of Britain for honoring its pledges to the Arabs to control Jewish immigration into Palestine. At the same time he recognizes that disbelief and bureaucratic rigidity resulted in missed opportunities to save some Jews. Efforts to quantify the numbers of those who might have been rescued, such as those presented here, must be considered speculative at best. And yet, Paucker is surely correct to conclude that large numbers of Jews could have been saved by direct measures only by opening doors before 1939. Thereafter only an Allied victory could rescue them.

The Black Sea as an avenue of escape from the Nazis and their allies is explored by Jurgen Rohwer. His documentation of Zionist-Nazi cooperation in smuggling at least 21,700 Jews into Palestine by ship via Romania joins the essays by Barkai and Toury in underlining the seriousness with which the Nazis viewed emigration as the "final solution" before 1941. Equally interesting is his finding that continued Jewish emigration from Romania was approved by German officials in March 1944. They even provided the refugee ships with naval escorts through the mine fields to the open sea, assisting in the escape of more than 1,000 Jews. Was this highly unusual German participation in Jewish emigration to Palestine early in 1944 an independent action on the part of the German navy or the result of a high-level political decision? If the latter, was it designed to placate the increasingly nervous Romanians and Bulgarians, or to salvage whatever remained of Germany's relations with Turkey? Or was it simply a manifestation of a breakdown of administration on the periphery of the German empire as the Red Army approached? Sadly, Rohwer's unprecedently complete chronicle of Jewish escape via the Black Sea sheds little light on German motives.

Refugees seldom experience unrestrained welcomes, as e~gziys about German emigres in three diverse havens testify. Rita R. Thalmann surveys fairly familiar ground in her study of French responses to the plight of fugitives from the Third Reich. Initially the host of by far the largest number of such refugees, France gradually grew less hospitable. The political Right never welcomed German Jews and leftist politicians. Frenchmen of all persuasions sometimes viewed the presence of anti-Nazi fugitives as an obstacle to appeasing Hitler. Thalmann credits German propaganda with successfully playing on French hopes for peace and rapprochement with Germany, resulting in the isolation of the emigres and restrictions on their rights of asylum. The Popular Front government resisted demands for further measures against them, but its ability to assist with jobs and naturalization was limited by less friendly elements in the coalition. Daladier's cabinet was much less understanding. Faced with a new wave of refugees after Anschluss, it tightened controls on immigration still further amid fears that the newcomers included contingents of a potential German fifth column.

Conditions for German Jewish refugees in wartime England are re called in Ernst G. Lowenthal's delightful memoir of work on the Jewish Refugees Committee, centered at Bloomsbury House, London. Himself a fugitive from Germany, Lowenthal was assigned the task of documenting jobs and security deposits for Hitler's victims in order to supply them with papers for residency or for further emigration. He is broadly positive about the assistance they received from the British government and people, in agreement with Arnold Paucker, who observes that Great Britain distinguished itself by granting asylum to 50,000 Jews before the war. And yet, Lowenthal laments that more than half of them were interned or deported as enemy aliens in 1940, sometimes herded together with strongly pro-Nazi Germans, a shortlived but memorable blemish. Konrad Kwiet shows that the same thing happened to the 7,200 German Jews who were fortunate enough to get to Australia between the partial lifting of immigration barriers in 1938 and the end of most emigration from continental Europe in 1940. Kwiet also surveys the obstacles they had to overcome in order to integrate with the larger culture. He concludes that the refugees' success is a monument both to their diligence and to the openness of Australian society.

Volume 2 concludes with essays on postwar Germany that return us decisively to the question of the German Sonderweg. If there was one, has it been abandoned or just temporarily circumvented? Or does it quietly still carry traffic? The capacity of the debate over Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (mastering the past) to polarize scholarly opinion is dramatized in contributions by Martin Greschat and John S. Conway on the role of the churches in post-Hitler Germany. Greschat, a theologian and church historian, decries those who would have us choose either "restoration" of old, conservative values or a "new beginning" of democratic sensibilities as better describing the attitude of the Evangelical church since 1945. Denying any strong line of continuity between the church in Imperial Germany and the church during the second half of the twentieth century, he argues that German Protestants had already begun the long and difficult process of adaptation to the democratic political and social order during the Weimar years. After Hitler they picked up where they were forced to leave off in 1933. Greschat certainly has a point when he warns against oversimplifying church history; the Evangelical church did make its peace with Weimar institutions, and some of its leaders spoke out in favor of modernization and moderation even as the Nazis rose to power. Questions remain, however, about whether those trends extended any appreciable distance beyond the church leaders and whether the leaders themselves were very deeply committed to the values associated with the Weimar Republic. Recent scholarship provides grounds for doubt on both counts.13

Conway belongs to the skeptics. He characterizes most post-1945 churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, as intent upon restoring premodern standards along with the privileged official position of the churches. And in West Germany, of course, they succeeded in reaching at least the latter goal. Clerics who called for a new beginning of democratic rather than hierarchical church structures were buried under waves of nostalgia for old values and of self-pity over the victimization of the churches by the Nazis. Effectively washing their hands of any responsibility for the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power, the churches set for themselves the task of re-Christianizing German society, not democratizing it. Conway concludes that the churches had nothing important to offer to the postNazi reorientation of German society. If Germans were to find alternatives to the Sonderweg, they would have to look elsewhere for directions.

The role of the courts in providing such directions is explored by Hamburg presiding judge Gunter Bertram. Himself a participant in trials of Nazi defendants, Bertram speaks with considerable authority when he describes them as imperfect but, on the whole, effective instruments of Vergangenheitsbewa1tigung. And yet, most of his article is devoted to the imperfections. In many cases too much time was allowed to pass before judicial proceedings were inaugurated; this compounded problems of establishing identities and events. It was always easier to prove cases against the "little men" who carried out criminal orders rather than against their bosses. The latter usually asserted that they were not the originators of such orders, claims that could rarely be disproved. Moreover, the courts chose- properly, in Bertram's viewto take into consideration the criminal nature of the Nazi state itself in determining the choices then available to the perpetrators. All of these considerations produced a mixed record of success and failure. But Bertram is not prepared to fault the courts for "having permitted-all things considered and on the whole-wrongful clemency. Rather, [future historians] will certify their weighing of guilt as firmly rigorous." 14 One might add that the belated trials have had the salubrious effect of bringing the past to light for new generations of Germans, who are showing unprecedented critical interest in the deeds of their parents and grandparents.

That any true reckoning with the past was difficult, and perhaps impossible, in the immediate postwar years is suggested by the contributions of Ursula Buttner and Susanne Miller. Buttner scrutinizes the treatment of German Jewish Holocaust survivors in Hamburg by German officials and British occupation authorities. Local Hamburg authorities, themselves often victims of Nazi persecution, did what they could for the survivors and proved especially helpful in finding them jobs. The British were another matter altogether. Fearful of sparking renewed antisemitism by granting the Jews special privileges, the British insisted that they be treated the same as all other Germans, even denying them assistance from foreign Jewish charities. Those fears were not unreasonable, as became apparent when the German mood changed from sympathy for the Jewish victims to resentment over the few privileges they had enjoyed. Antisemitism increased in Hamburg in 1946. The misfortunes of millions of German refugees flooding in from the east encouraged forgetfulness of painful German Jewish tragedies. Germans preoccupied themselves with personal problems and delayed granting reparations to Jewish survivors, forcing many of them to live on charity. When reparations were forthcoming, Buttner avers, they were paid to improve the national image, not to restore to the victims what had once been theirs. Miller's essay on the Social Democrats' postwar neglect of their role in the anti-Nazi resistance reinforces the impression that pain induced obliviousness. Those times had been too frightful, and the results of opposition too meager to bear recall. When in the immediate postwar years the Communists tried to assume a monopoly on anti-Hitler virtue, the Socialists formed an organization of former SPD resisters. But it was not until the 1970s that German Social Democrats began to do real justice to their own anti-Nazi past. It had taken nearly thirty years for Germany's most consistent antifascists to come to terms with the Third Reich.

The difficult task of assessing the successes and failures of Germans in their search for new paths falls to Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, who ends the Festschrift on a note of restrained optimism. Few will gainsay West Germany's achievements: its acceptance of German division as necessary to peace; its creation of a new army free from the old militaristic spirit and firmly under civilian control; its donning of the burden of West European defense and simultaneous building of bridges to the East. There is good reason for confidence that when these volumes are read in future decades, as the generally high level of their contents will surely warrant, Jacobsen's optimism will not seem misplaced.

NOTES

1. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth -Cen tu ry Germany (Oxford and New York, 1984).

2. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Der Erste Weltkrieg (Munich, 1973), pp. 219ff.

3. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan- German League, 1886-1914 (Boston, 1984), pp. 240-43. See also George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1964), pp. 91, 220-21; idem, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978), pp. 51-58.

4. Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 1949).

5. Shulamit Volkov, "Kontinuitat und Diskontinuitat im deutschen Antisemitismus," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 33 (1985): 221-43.

6. Klaus Hildebrand, "La politique fran~aise de Hitler jusqu'en 1936," in La France et I'Allemagne 1932-1936 (Paris, 1980), pp. 339-71; Gunter Wollstein, Vom Weimarer Revisionismus bis zu Hitler (Bonn, 1973).

7. Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York, 1982) 2:260-66; Jozef Garlinski, Poland in the Second World War (New York, 1985), pp. 163-74; Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation 1939-1944 (Lexington, 1986), pp. 121-81.

8. Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman (Bloomington, 1982); Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, trans. Dafna Allon and others (New York, 1976).

9. The structuralist camp, meanwhile, has unleashed a spirited salvo of its own: Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (London, 1986).

10. On these issues, compare Christopher R. Browning in SWC Annual I and Alfred Streim in SWC Annual 4. The Editors.

11. Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton, 1969), pp. 14548.

12. Shaul Esh, "Between Discrimination and Extermination: The Fateful Year of 1938, " in From Hatred to Extermination (Jerusalem, 1959), pp. 107-21. The standard work remains Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrangung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Gottingen, 1966), esp. pp. 120-76. Karl A. Schleunes echoes Genschel's verdict that the period from November 1937 to November 1938 brought a dramatic increase in Aryanization and Jewish impoverishment: The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (London, 1972), pp. 156-68.

13. J.R.C. Wright, "Above Parties": The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership 1918-1933 (Oxford, 1984); Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1977) 1:3-274; Daniel R. Borg, The Old- Prussian Church and the Weimar Republic: A Study in Political Adjustment, 1917- 1927 (Hanover and London, 1984).

14. Das Unrechtsregime 2:439.