Browning on the Final Solution. Benjamin Schwartz, literary editor of the Atlantic, writes in his New & Noteworthy column about Christopher Browning's new book, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, which if anyone feels generous, they can send to me via my Amazon wishlist. Browning, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, is, in my opinion, one of the best scholars of the Holocaust, and this book, the first in a series initiated by Israel's Yad Vashem museum, will no doubt be the culmination of a long career. As Schwartz notes in his column, holocaust studies is a controversial area of history, which has "engendered a highly publicized, sometimes contrived, and increasingly arcane argument between historians in the "intentionalist" camp, who hold that from the 1920s onward Hitler intended to kill the Jews, and those in the "functionalist" camp, who argue that the Holocaust evolved piecemeal, as one set of opportunities and policies led to another."

In the accompanying web-only interview for the Atlantic, Browning emphasises a point that is, but shouldn't be, a problem amongst professional historians, that of dealing with historical events in context and trying to avoid using the benefit of hindsight to make highly contingent and unpredictable events appear as inevitable. Browning says:

The initial or easy tendency in looking at history is to see it through hindsight. We know ultimately what happened, and therefore we go back and look at all the steps that led to it happening but remove all the contingencies. We're very well aware at this moment that we can't predict the future. But we go back and somehow assume that we can impose a deterministic interpretation on the past because of what we know from hindsight. In doing that, we remove the fact that living historical actors at that time, certainly in 1939 to 1941, didn't yet know what was going to happen.

The interview goes on to discuss specifics of the book, the most interesting discussion being about how the Nazis were able to simultaneously characterise Jews as both communist subversives and capitalist exploiters:

The Jew can't be both the capitalist and the communist at one and the same time. But to square that circle, one can resort to conspiracy theory. This is, of course, what the Nazis did—they said that behind these two different assaults on Germany, by the capitalist Jews on the one hand and the communist Jews on the other, was an insidious Jewish conspiracy that was coming to attack in all forms.

It certainly makes sense, from a propaganda point of view, to vary your message depending on the audience. To the poor and unemployed, make the Jews appear to be capitalist money-makers exploiting their suffering, while to the middle class and big business, portray the Jews as Bolsheviks tryingn to undermine communism. To anyone who notices the contradiction, refer them to a (fictional, but like any negative, hard to disprove) massive world-wide Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany. In other words, make the Jews the enemy of whomever is listening.

Browning's final comments are interesting, and reinforce the need to continually study and discuss the Holocaust:

We may, in the end, conclude that the Holocaust has very unique characteristics among genocides. But to be unique in some ways is not to be unique in all ways. The various perpetrators who became involved in the Final Solution and their decision-making processes were not unique. In fact, I would argue that many of the elements in this were a coming together of quite common factors and ordinary people. That, I think, is very important to recognize if we don't want to place the Holocaust apart as some kind of suprahistorical, mystical event that we cannot fathom and shouldn't even try to understand.