UBC: Unanswered Questions

[truepenny]

I am puzzled, and a little disturbed, to realize that I haven't been blogging my reading about the Nazis, aside from Hitler's Willing Executioners and The Wilkomirski Affair. It's not like this weird swerve in my reading habits is a secret, and it's not that the reading hasn't been thought provoking. I just don't know.

In any event, I'm not going to retroactively blog this stack of books, but here are some things I've been reading:


Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. [Biography of Himmler. iirc, this book is the source of my tag nazis: evil *and* crazy, because I kept reading about the things Himmler believed and having to put the book down and shake my head to make my brain realign.]

Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. [Hitler und die Endlösung: "Es ist des Führers Wunsch", 1982] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. [Painstaking and exhaustive refutation of David Irving's thesis in Hitler's War that the Final Solution was all Himmler's doing]

Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS. [Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, 1966.] Transl. Richard Barry. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Nicholas, Lynn H. Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. [This book is very good at explaining why the Jews "didn't just leave." They couldn't--because other countries would not let them in.]

Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999. [This is an excellently readable book, not about explaining Hitler, but about the efforts to explain Hitler.]

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1990. [The eyewitness glimpses of Hitler are utterly creepifying.]

Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2007. [Weirdly riveting economic history of Nazi Germany.]

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The Last Days of Hitler. 1947. New York: Collier Books, n.d. [Hitler. Also crazy as well as evil.]


And today's UBC:

Furet, Francçois, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989.

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These essays vary widely in quality. Some--Yehuda Bauer's "Jewish Resistance and Passivity in the Face of the Holocaust," for example--are excellent; others are mediocre. Several suffer from bad editing or bad translating or bad writing--it can be hard to tell which. The most interesting/useful insight (for me) came from Shulamit Volkov, "The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism," with the remark that "Nazism was a spoken culture" (UQ 52). Because that's not only true, but it explains so much about how Nazism--and Hitler--worked.

Comments

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I've been picking my way through some Nazi stuff as well, although only a small corner of it, so to speak. The book is called The Rape of Europa and is about Nazi art ideology and the way they set up the systematic looting of the countries they invaded, as well as how it all got home again (well, mostly).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Cruel World is by the same author.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent. *writes down title*

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

I was researching a book about the Nazi persecution of the Romany and found a lot of really absolutely horrible books that were Holocaust denials presented as unbiased historical accounts. Many of them referenced other books that I was reading, but took quotes out of context. It's rare for me to mark up a library book, but I did pencil these up, along with titles-- and sometimes page numbers-- of other books that refuted what was said.

One example: the Nazi party absolutely did not in any way kill large populations of disabled/elderly who were in Hospice care. How do we know this? Because there is no written record of this at all, but it's exhaustively documented that a pneumonia wiped out huge swaths of people. Why would the Nazis lie about this? It was very sad, tragic even, but certainly not mass murder. Ugh.

One thing that's interesting in Romany accounts is how rare it was for oral history of the Holocaust to be passed among the Romany. The reason? Culturally, when you speak of a thing, you give it weight and power. By not speaking of a thing, you can erase it from happening and prevent it from happening again. This is changing as more Romany and activists are actively seeking out personal accounts of what happened, but it's a big reason why there's so much focus on the Jewish experience and very little on the Romany genocide... which had already been happening for generations and, to an extent, is still being carried out in Europe.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

[This is an excellently readable book, not about explaining Hitler, but about the efforts to explain Hitler.]

...that? I would be interested in reading.

*puts on Books to Get List*

[davidpv.livejournal.com]

I am not quite sure what you are wanting to read on the subject of Nazi Germany, but some sources you might find of interest are:

Hawkins, Richard A. ""Hitler's Bitterest Foe": Samuel Untermyer and the Boycott of Nazi Germany, 1933-1938." American Jewish History 93, no. 1, (March, 2007): 21-50.

Casey, Steven. "The Campaign to Sell a Harsh Peace for Germany to the American Public, 1944-1948." History 90, no. 297, (January, 2005): 62-92.

Rogge, O. John. The Official German Report: Nazi Penetration, 1924-1942; Pan-Arabism, 1939-Today. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986.

McDonald, James G. Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G Mcdonald, 1932-1935. Edited by Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Stephen Hochberg. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Niewyk, Donald, and Francis Nicosia. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

US Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, International Military Tribunal, US Department of State, and US War Office. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1947. http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_Nazi-conspiracy.html

Most of my research has been focused on Nazi activities in the USA before and during WWII. Shirer's book is good and for some time he was associated with Rex Stout's (Author of Nero Wolfe books) Society for the Prevention of World War III. The SPWW3 was a pressure group of writers and emigres who favored a hard peace with Germany. According to some writers, Stout was a British agent during WWII.

David

[travellex.livejournal.com]

Apart from the stuff that I learnt studying German at Uni, I've only read "Lying About Hitler" by Richard Evans, who was one of the expert witnesses for Deborah Lipstadt's defence against David Irving. It just made me want to read more, so thanks muchly for the list.