Rethinking the Holocaust (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The objectivity of the historian becomes an issue with subjects besides the Holocaust, but a historian dealing with the Holocaust cannot avoid the issue..." (more)
Key Phrases: redemptive antisemitism, eliminationist antisemitism, other genocides, United States, Nazi Germany, Working Group (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this latest contribution from Bauer is slightly misleading; as valuable as it is, the volume is not really a rethinking of the Holocaust but rather a revisiting of the major problems and interpretations in Holocaust studies. Bauer, director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, begins with a short discussion of what exactly historians do. He quite rightly departs from standard practice when he asks such moral and "what if" questions as what could have been done? and what should have been done? Contrary to what he calls Elie Wiesel's "mystification" of the Holocaust, he insists that the catastrophe was a human invention and therefore historically and "rationally" explicable. Separate chapters deal with Jewish armed and unarmed resistance, and with rescue attempts--he examines, for instance, the case of Gisi Fleischmann, a Zionist leader who worked to get as many Jews out of Slovakia as possible, which Bauer uses to discuss issues of gender, arguing that women did not fight for the status of women separately but for collective and individual survival and for honor. Most fascinating for non-Jewish readers are the chapter on Jewish theological attempts to explain the Holocaust and Bauer's valuable synthesis and reexamination of some of the major interpretations of the Holocaust. Bauer ends by looking at how the Holocaust is related to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (he rejects, for instance, the notion that "a guilt complex" on the part of Western countries led them to vote for partition of British Palestine). (Jan.)Forecast: This book will become a staple of Holocaust literature and should enjoy a long, if quiet, life in print.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

"Bauer's book . . . reaches beyond issues of rescue, offering a strong introduction to many of the analytic debates on Nazi genocide." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300093004
• ISBN-13: 978-0300093001
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,601 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A profound reconsideration of the Holocaust, December 5, 2005

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This work is written by one of the major Holocaust historians. In it he summarizes the work of a lifetime. He in this work attempts to understand the unprecedented character of the Holocaust. His conclusions are that the Holocaust is truly unique, distinguished from other genocides in that those involve real disputes, usually by neighbors over land and territory. The Holocaust , the murder of the Jews of Europe, the murder of over one third of the Jews of the world, was unique in that its perpetrators had the goal of eliminating the Jews wherever they were, every place on earth.. A Jew simply by being born was a target of the Nazis.
Bauer points out that there was a strong ideological component in the Shoah, and that the Nazis dream was to create a new order of the world free of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and a whole variety of others they considered inferior races.
Bauer points out that thre was a strong irrational element in Nazi Ideology. The Jews in Germany had not been enemies of German culture but rather had made most significant contributions to it. The insane hatred of the Nazis for the Jews, their determination to murder all Jews ,was pursued even when it undermined the German war effort.
Bauer provides many stories that point out the enormous cruelty of the Shoah.
In his concluding chapter which is an address he gave to the German Bundestag he speaks forcefully about the importance of education in preventing a similar evil coming to the world.

20 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Rethinking "Rethinking the Holocaust", October 9, 2004

By	Rachel Robinson "Rachel Motte" (California, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In his "Rethinking the Holocaust," Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Hebrew University, examines different interpretations of the holocaust and attempts to understand the event for himself.

Bauer begins his book with an attempt to determine what the holocaust was. He argues that genocide and holocaust are not the same thing, and that the holocaust was not necessarily a unique event; though it could have been avoided, it could also happen again. Bauer points out that "Although the Holocaust has no precedent, it could become one." The holocaust, he concludes, stemmed out of different motives than genocide and proves that man is capable of unspeakable evil. Pretty good, so far.

Chapters four and five examine several different interpretations of the holocaust. These chapters, both entitled "Overall Interpretations," might be more aptly named "Rethinking the historians whose theories I find stupid." I was generally unimpressed by the quality of scholarship in this book, and these two chapters particularly bothered me. While Dr. Bauer's determination to examine so many of the popular interpretations is admirable, his methods and conclusions leave something to be desired. For example, I found it quite ironic that in a book riddled with poor grammar, bad punctuation and many typos, Dr. Bauer saw fit to criticize a colleague for "consistently" misspelling another historian's name. I was disappointed that he did not spend more time interacting with conflicting ideas; instead, he described and quickly rejected holocaust theories that differed from his own.

In chapter nine, Bauer examines various theological attempts to understand the holocaust. I do not understand why he saw fit to spend a full twenty-six pages examining various approaches to the problem of evil, only to reject them all and state, "The theology of the holocaust is fascinating, but it is a dead end." One wonders why he bothered with this subject at all.

I have already mentioned that Dr. Bauer's book is full of typos, poor grammar, and bad punctuation. He is a terrible writer. His consistent use of passive sentence construction, unnecessarily long words, and words that were not needed at all was distracting. I had a hard time figuring out what he was trying to say. Given his writing style, I assume that English is not his first language. That's fine, but an editor could have very quickly and easily cleaned up Dr. Bauer's writing by simply cutting out unnecessary words, using simple instead of complicated terms, and restructuring sentences.

The book was published by Yale University Press. I am confused--I had expected better quality from Yale. This book was badly written, but most of the errors could have been easily fixed. Why did the publisher not take care of this? As it is, the language used is sloppy and gives the impression that Dr. Bauer does not really care about his subject. Also, he frequently repeats ideas and contradicts himself. This confuses the reader and, again, gives the impression that Bauer's ideas are not well thought out and that he did not really care much about his topic.

I would like to publish a book someday; perhaps I will contact the publishers at Yale. The quality of Dr. Bauer's book indicates that they aren't very picky.

21 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Information Along with an Exclusively Judeocentric View of the Holocaust, August 14, 2006

By	Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Unlike much of the west's media, Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer has the basic integrity of repudiating the phrase "Polish death camps" because of the absurdly false connotation that Poles had anything to do with them (p. 285). He presents a wealth of seldom-discussed information, such as the existence of Jewish Gestapo agents throughout Europe (p. 148), the killings of fugitive Jews by Soviet partisans (p. 138, 141), and the beliefs of some Orthodox Jews that the Holocaust was God's punishment for Jewish sins (pp. 193-194, 207).

Bauer comments: "Testimonies taken down after decades are not necessarily less reliable than those taken immediately after the war...in the immediate postwar period many people still suffered from the shock of their experiences, whereas now some can view them with greater detachment. Thus, the present testimony may be more truthful than the former."(p. 24). This contradicts Jan Thomas Gross, who would like to discount recent testimonies because of the fact that these are more likely to contradict his Polonophobic thesis on the Jedwabne massacre.

While acknowledging the fact that Christian society never led to genocide of Jews (p. 105), Bauer contends that the Nazis incorporated the Jews-as-Satan view of Christianity while rejecting Christianity as a whole (p. 43). In actuality, traditional Christian theology saw Jews not as Satan but as sinners who had rejected their Messiah but who nevertheless could still be redeemed by the grace of God.

Bauer contends that the genocides of non-Jews had pragmatic motives while those or the Jews had none. In doing so, Bauer seems to be replacing the omnipotent-Jew myth with the innocuous-Jew myth. In actuality, Jews and Germans were rivals in many ways. Among Europeans at least, the Jews and Germans were variously first and second in economics, industrialization, and in many scholarly and cultural endeavors. In addition, the irrationality of Nazi anti-Semitism begs the question about the irrationality of other German actions. For instance, in what sense was poor, backward Poland rationally a threat to Germany? If the real issue had been Danzig (Gdansk), the Polish Corridor, and surrounding areas with large German minorities, why not just conquer those areas and leave the rest of Poland alone?

Bauer is a strong exponent of the view that the genocide of Jews (for which uses the term Holocaust exclusively) was an absolutely unique event because it was the only time in history that an ENTIRE group was deliberately targeted for extermination (p. 27, 49, 56, etc.). He does not, however, discuss the practical implications of this supposed fact. Does it mean, for instance, that the 5-6 million Jews are entitled to 100 times the attention of the 2-3 million murdered Poles, in the American educational system, or only twice as much?

Bauer (p. 164) points out that western European Jews were not confined to ghettos. Does this not in itself point to the fact that the killing of western European Jews was not as serious a Nazi undertaking as the killing of eastern European Jews? In addition, Bauer undermines his position by acknowledging the sparing of the remnants of the Lodz ghetto (p. 132), of Jewish husbands of German gentiles (p. 37), and of those Jews protected by the Kastner-Eichmann deal (p. 239). The "Not all of the Victims of the Nazis were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis" argument is fallacious in other ways. Finland's (Germany's ally) Jews were never molested, and Bulgaria's Jews were only pursued halfheartedly. The neutrality of Switzerland and Sweden was consistently respected despite their Jewish populations (notably the famous escaped Danish Jews sheltered by the latter). Known Jewish Allied POWs were spared. Thousands of European Jews were used by Germany for forced labor and, with some exceptions, were not killed in the latest days of the war. In fact, Bauer estimates that 200,000 such Jews emerged alive (p. 246). As for permanent acceptance of known Jews by the Nazis, thousands of full-blooded German Jews were arbitrarily declared Aryans, and thereby spared (the Schutzjuden). While a variety of factors were involved in these events, the central fact remains that all the foregoing Jews were allowed to live as a deliberate choice of the Nazis.

To further propound the notion of the unique victimhood of Jews, Bauer not surprisingly tries to de-universalize the genocides of Armenians, Gypsies and Slavs. Bauer (p. 298) cites a German source that speaks of the intent to starve 30 million locals (Jews and Slavs). Otherwise, can it seriously be supposed that exterminatory German attitudes and tactics would have been the same had there existed a few hundred million European Jews but only a few million Slavs? Bauer (p. 57) cites Erhard Wetzel, who stated that Poles could not be liquidated in the same manner as Jews because, among other things, it would be a standing accusation against Germans. Obviously, Wetzel's statements refer to tactics and matters related to international politics, not long-term goals. Ironically, as recently as May 1940, Himmler had repudiated the idea of physically destroying nations (Poles OR Jews) because "it was a Bolshevik concept unacceptable to Germans."(p. 4)! Finally, Bauer ignores strong evidence, from the repeated statements of various Nazis, that the Poles and other Slavs were in fact targeted for eventual extermination.

In conclusion, Bauer's thinking seems to be rather limited in scope. Imagine a situation where equal attention was paid to the genocides of Poles and Jews, for instance. That would be a REAL rethinking of the Holocaust!