This is not a matter of comparative pain or competitive suffering. It is misguided to attempt to gauge which group endured more. For the victims in all these tragedies the oppressors’ motives were and remain irrelevant. Nor is this a matter of a head count of victims or a question of whose loss was larger. In fact, Stalin killed more people than did the Nazis.{19} But that is not the issue. The equivalences offered by these historians are not analogous to the Holocaust. To attempt to say that all are the same is to engage in historical distortion. To suggest that the disastrous U.S. policies in Vietnam or the former Soviet Union’s illegal occupation of Afghanistan were the equivalent of genocide barely demands a response. These invalid historical comparisons are designed to help Germans embrace their past by telling them that their country’s actions were no different than those of countless others—an effort that at times disturbingly parallels much of what we have seen in this book.
But this is not the only way these historians tried to reshape the past. Unlike the deniers, who seek to exonerate Hitler, some of these German historians tend to blame the worst excesses of Nazis, including the Holocaust, on him alone. Thus Nazism becomes “Hitlerism,” and the German populace is absolved. They also depict the Holocaust as a German response to external threats. As we have seen above, Nolte, echoing David Irving, argues that the Nazi “internment” of Jews was justified because of Chaim Weizmann’s September 1939 declaration that the Jews of the world would fight Nazism. This, Nolte argues, convinced Hitler of his “enemies’ determination to annihilate him.” Klaus Hildebrand, a Nolte defender, praised Nolte’s essay as “trailblazing.”{20} As I noted in chapter 6, this comparison lacks all internal logic. First of all Weizmann had no army, government, or allies with which to wage this war. World Jewry was not a national entity capable of mounting an offensive against the Nazis. Moreover, Hitler did not initiate his oppression of the Jews in September 1939 when Weizmann made his statement. Weizmann’s statement was a reaction to six years of brutal Nazi oppression. In another attempt at immoral equivalence, Nolte contends that just as the American internment of Japanese Americans was justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor, so too was the Nazi “internmerit” of European Jews. In making this comparison Nolte ignores the fact that, however wrong, racist, and unconstitutional the U.S. internment of the Japanese, the Jews had not bombed Nazi cities or attacked German forces in 1939. Even his use of the term internment to describe what the Germans did to the Jews whitewashes historical reality.
In his most recent work, The European Civil War, 1917–1945, Ernst Nolte comes dangerously close to validating the deniers. Without offering any proof, he claims that more “Aryans” than Jews were murdered at Auschwitz. According to Nolte this fact has been ignored because the research on the Final Solution comes to an “overwhelming degree from Jewish authors.” He described the deniers’ arguments as not “without foundation” and their motives as “often honorable.” The fact that among the core deniers were non-Germans and some former inmates of concentration camps was evidence, according to Nolte, of their honorable intentions. Nolte even advanced the untenable notion that the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which Heydrich and a group of prominent Nazis worked out the implementation of the Final Solution, may never have happened. He disregards the fact that participants in that meeting have subsequently attested to it and that a full set of minutes survived. This suggestion implies that if Wannsee was a hoax, many other Holocaust-related events that we have been led to believe actually happened may also be hoaxes. He suggests, in an argument evocative of Butz’s analysis, that the Einsatzgruppen killed numerous Jews on the Eastern Front because “preventive security” demanded it since a significant number of the partisans were Jews. While he acknowledges that the action may have been carried to an extreme, it remains essentially justified.{21} Another of his unsubstantiated charges was that the documentary film Shoah demonstrates that the SS units in the death camps “were victims in their way too.”{22}
Coming from a denier these arguments would have been utterly predictable. Coming from Nolte they are especially disturbing and revealing. Nolte cannot be ignorant of the vast body of research on this topic that has been conducted by scholars of every religious persuasion and nationality, including his fellow German non-Jews. Nor, since he tries to defend them, can he be ignorant of the deniers’ explicit antisemitism. In his writings he has too often referred to the reality of the Final Solution to be accused of espousing Holocaust denial. Yet his recent writings make him so palatable to the deniers that the IHR is seriously attempting to convince Nolte to participate in its meetings and address its conventions. Whether he will do so is not known. (Even if he came and told them that the Holocaust is a fact, he would be welcomed as David Irving was during his predenial days, and as the author of popular, demi-historical works, John Toland, is today. They offer a legitimacy the deniers can currently find nowhere else.)
This attempt to resurrect German history was intensely criticized both within Germany and abroad. The historians’ debate harmed the reputations of the scholars most prominently involved in it, and even the president of Germany eventually spoke out against this trend. Why, then, should it be a matter of concern? Despite widespread criticism, the debate gave the German media and general public the imprimatur to conduct the kind of discussion about contemporary Germany’s relationship to its past that would never have been heard before. Calls for a “sanitized version” of German history appeared in Germany’s most prominent newspapers.{23} Those involved in the current antiforeigner campaign in Germany find this perspective on history particularly inviting. If Germany was also a victim of a “downfall,” and if the Holocaust was no different from a mélange of other tragedies, Germany’s moral obligation to welcome all who seek refuge within its borders is lessened.
These historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of their work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor. Ultimately the relativists contribute to the fostering of what I call the “yes, but” syndrome.{24} Yes, there was a Holocaust, but the Nazis were only trying to defend themselves against their enemies. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but most Jews died of starvation and disease (as is the case in every war) or were killed as partisans and spies. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but the Jews’ behavior brought it on them. Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was essentially no different than an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred. The question that logically follows from this is, Why, then, do we “only” hear about the Holocaust? For the deniers and many others who are “not yet” deniers, the answer to this final question is obvious: because of the power of the Jews. “Yes, but” is a response that falls into the gray area between outright denial and relativism. In certain respects it is more insidious than outright denial because it nurtures a form of pseudohistory whose motives are difficult to identify. It is the equivalent of David Duke without his robes.