SPIEGELONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Israeli historian Saul Friedländer, winner of the 2007 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, spoke to SPIEGEL about the importance of victims' accounts in researching the Holocaust and the failure of efforts in Germany to draw a line under the issue.
SPIEGEL: Professor Friedländer, in contrast to other accounts of the history of the Holocaust, in your book "Nazi Germany and the Jews, the Years of Extermination," you give us ample opportunity to hear from the victims through diaries and letters. Why didn't you limit your focus to the history of the perpetrators?
Saul Friedländer: Because that's not enough. We basically still needed a book that went beyond an analysis of German politics and included the environment -- in other words, the churches, the elites, the general population in Germany and in other countries -- and incorporated the voices of the victims, of those who were murdered.
SPIEGEL: Were you interested in the educational effect here, since the horror becomes more vivid this way?
Friedländer: No, many aspects only become clear from an examination of the victims' sources, not from official documents. For instance, the fact that the Jews in Germany and Western Europe didn't know what was going on -- and in Eastern Europe they didn't want to believe what they saw. Take my parents -- after their deportation from France in 1942, a friend wrote to my grandmother, who lived in Stockholm, to say that my parents had been sent to Germany or to a Jewish reservation in Poland. He had no idea that they had been murdered.
SPIEGEL: Would it have changed anything if the victims had known what was going on?
Friedländer: It does makes a considerable difference whether the Nazis murdered millions of people who didn't know what was going to happen to them or killed people who had already assumed the worst.
SPIEGEL: Because it explains why the extermination process went so smoothly?
Friedländer: Yes.
SPIEGEL: The opposite position was held by the recently deceased Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. "The best way to grasp the reality of the situation," he said, "is to reconstruct events from the perspective of the perpetrators."
Friedländer: I have great respect for Hilberg. He was the classic expert on the machinery of extermination. But he only worked with documents left by the perpetrators and thought that the victims had gone to their deaths like lambs to the slaughter. If you read between the lines, you can even sense the rage with which he writes about the Jews' lack of resistance. But they simply didn't know what was happening. ’The Holocaust Won’t Disappear’ (more)
Mark Alexander
