Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

In any case, it scarcely seemed the sinister, quasi-Revisionist document Lanzmann portrayed it as, even with the subtitles for the Dutch. But, of course, the content of the film was not really the issue at all. Lanzmann is a man possessed by a rage against explanation. It is a rage I find much sympathy for when examining critically the often ludicrous failures of attempts to explain Hitler and the Holocaust. But it seems to me that for Lanzmann it has become a blind rage. Blindness has been elevated from a filmmaking tactic to a cosmic principle. It’s an abstract rage about the crime of the Holocaust that blinded him to the feelings of one of its flesh-and-blood victims, a rage that made the victim rather than the perpetrators the object of his wrath that night. It has blinded him to the possibility that not all who seek answers or attempt to understand are knowing perpetrators of an obscenity.

  I’d been surprised at the unquestioning obeisance Lanzmann’s dictum on this question had received from his academic acolytes, and for a while felt alone in being disturbed by it until I found I had an ally in Tzvetan Todorov, the respected writer, critic, and director of research at the Centre National de Recherches in Paris. In his 1996 work about the death-camp experience, Facing the Extreme, which appeared about a year or so after my encounter with Lanzmann, Todorov remarks that “Primo Levi spent forty years after Auschwitz trying to understand why, so that he might fight the rule that harsh epigram [Here there is no why] conveyed, whereas Lanzmann prefers to make the moral lesson of the SS man his own.”

  But it was Dr. Micheels, that afternoon in Connecticut, who provided me with the most persuasive and eloquent defense of the question why. It was something he came up with after the showdown with Lanzmann had passed, the reply he would have made if he hadn’t been stunned by the tone of Lanzmann’s assault.

  It’s a reply to Lanzmann’s appropriation of the line from the SS guard in Primo Levi’s story: “Hier ist kein warum.” A misuse of the line, Dr. Micheels insists. He reads me something he’s written on the subject: “The word ‘Hier’ is the important one for my argument,” Micheels told me. “It refers to the world of Auschwitz, which has become synonymous with the Holocaust. I have, as others, described this world from my personal experience as so different and so foreign . . . another planet, light-years away. It was inhabited by creatures that had little if anything in common with what we consider human beings. . . . In that world, I agree, ‘ist kein warum.’ However, in the civilized world to which so few of us, including Primo Levi, returned, there should be—da soll ein warum sein. Without an attempt, no matter how difficult and complex, at understanding, that very world, where truth is most important, could be lost again.”

  “Da soll ein warum sein”: There must be a why.

  PART SEVEN

  BLAME AND ORIGINS

  The search for the source of the Final Solution

  CHAPTER 16

  Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer: The Temptation to Blame God

  In which contemplation of Hitler as an actor prompts the leading theologian of the Holocaust to make a “double move”

  I came to Jerusalem to speak about theology with a historian and about history with a theologian. In the time I spent talking with Yehuda Bauer and Emil Fackenheim—respectively the foremost historian of the Holocaust and the preeminent theologian of the Holocaust—I’m not sure which struck me more forcefully: their agreements or their disagreements.

  Their disagreements were, certainly, more dramatic. There was their clash over Hitler’s “normality.” For Bauer, Hitler’s murderousness was “not ordinary” but “unfortunately not abnormal,” not in human history, not in Nazi Germany. While for Fackenheim, Hitler was beyond any previous notion of normal humanness—for Fackenheim, there is a radical disjuncture between human nature and Hitler nature, a radical disjuncture between ordinary evil and “radical evil.”

  Then there was their even deeper disagreement over the theoretical possibility of explaining Hitler. To Bauer, Hitler was, “in principle” at least, “perfectly explicable,” as all men are. To Fackenheim, even the best explanations of Hitler are doomed to failure—only God can account for such radical evil, and he’s not talking.

  Wide as the gulf is between them on these issues, more remarkable to me are those matters on which—coming from such differing perspectives—they agree. Both historian and theologian agree that Hitler is still a mystery, that Hitler has not been explained in practice, as opposed to theory. “That something is explicable in principle,” Bauer told me, “does not mean it has been explained already.” And it hasn’t been—Hitler hasn’t been—this most thoughtful and searching student of Holocaust history insists: the evidence on Hitler’s evolution is too thin to support a confident conjecture about the source of his evil. “I’d like to find it, yes,” Bauer told me, “but I haven’t. I just don’t know.”

  Another surprising point of agreement: the use of the word evil. They agree on the applicability to Hitler of a term that so many are reluctant to use. This might not be surprising coming from a theologian such as Fackenheim, although he has wrestled at great length to try to redefine the nature of evil in the light of the radical evil he believes Hitler’s regime brought into being. But it is somewhat surprising for a historian such as Bauer, a professed atheist, not at all given to unnecessary metaphysical speculation. But Bauer had no hesitation in employing the term contemporary sophisticates are reluctant to employ. “Hitler is not insane,” Bauer told me. “He is evil. What I would call near-ultimate evil.”

  To reach Yehuda Bauer’s office on the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, I found myself crossing Nancy Reagan Plaza, passing by the Frank Sinatra Student Center, before winding down some steps to the more modest edifice that housed the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. The disjuncture between the styling-mousse aura of the Sassoon brand name and the seriousness of the center’s mission (although Sassoon did serve in the Israeli army) disappeared once I found myself in the presence, the fiercely focused, intimidating presence, of Yehuda Bauer, whom I’d come to regard with some awe for the historical and moral authority of his work.

  In addition to being founder and chairman of the Department of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University, Bauer must be considered one, if not the chief, founder of the entire discipline. His work is prodigious in its scope and profusion. At the time we spoke, he was also serving as editor in chief of the scholarly journal he founded, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, serving on the editorial board of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial publishing project, and all the while writing and publishing some dozen books of his own, including The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, American Jewry and the Holocaust, and A History of the Holocaust. It was almost as if Bauer’s remarkable output was in some way a personal response, an embodiment of “the Jewish emergence from powerlessness” in history, a way of regaining control over the history that in the past had made Jews powerless victims.

  But it was not so much the quantity of his work as its intelligence and penetration that impressed me: the direct, unsparing clarity, the surgical precision with which he opened up and examined the most difficult, highly charged questions raised by the behavior of the perpetrators and the experience of the victims; the courage he had to confront such issues without sentimentality; his impassioned commitment to the subject combined with the scholarly dispassion with which he dissected ultimate questions of the relationship between the Holocaust and history, between the Holocaust and Hitler.

  I was drawn initially to Bauer’s work by a couple of powerfully argued polemics in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in which he attacked those he called “mystifiers.” In “Is the Holocaust Explicable?” he speaks of “an increasing number of commentators—theologians, writers as well as historians—[who] argue that ultimately the Holocaust is a mystery, an inexplicable event in human history. Various expressions are used such as tremendum, with its theological connotations. . . . They all indicate a measure of final incomprehension
.” They’ve given up too soon, he says, in effect. It does not diminish the gravity and terror of the Holocaust to say that in some ways it can be compared to other tragedies and that in some ways it can’t. But the fact that in some ways it can’t, that in some ways it’s unprecedented, doesn’t remove it from the realm of human nature or human comprehension; it makes it a new disturbing fact of human nature, not necessarily a metaphysical mystery we must sacralize with the “circle of flame” around it, the barrier to thought Claude Lanzmann wants to erect.

  Although Bauer doesn’t name Fackenheim specifically as one of the “mystifiers,” I had a sense he might have had in mind the man dubbed the preeminent “theologian of the Holocaust,” and I wanted to see what the most searching historian of the Holocaust had to say about some of the issues raised by the leading theologian of the Holocaust.

  A thin, intense, no-nonsense scholar in white shirtsleeves and black-framed glasses, Bauer grew up in post-Kafka Prague (he was born in 1926) until his family escaped to Haifa in 1939. And he might look at home as an actuary in Kafka’s insurance office. His powerful and passionate commitment to historical truth is belied by a dry, dismissive, self-effacing style of discourse. Perhaps it’s the bleak, bone-dry ironies of a desert kibbutznik. (Bauer had made his home in Kibbutz Shoval in the Negev desert since 1953.)

  Bauer was, as usual, busy that day. He confined himself largely to short, compressed answers, ones that nonetheless frequently concealed slow-detonating shocks. It was difficult to draw him out at length on “Hitler-centric” questions because he believes the evidence is too fragmentary for conclusive judgments. But he did register agreement with Milton Himmelfarb’s “No Hitler, No Holocaust” stance—that the tragedy was not an inevitable consequence of unstoppable forces. “Without the driving force of Hitler,” Bauer told me, “there probably would not have been a Holocaust.” Hitler “radicalized” a nation that was otherwise anti-Semitic enough to be complicit with his Final Solution but not enough so to have demanded or forced it themselves.

  Bauer made an important distinction about Hitler: Although Hitler was not “ordinary,” Bauer believes he was not “abnormal,” not “inhuman—that’s the problem we have with them [the Nazis], because they are like us and we are like them” in many ways.

  He did offer a provisional judgment about the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, one he believes is originally traceable “to his Viennese environment that included extreme anti-Semitic ideologies, especially of the sort of half-occult groups like the Ostara group and others.” And while, during his wartime service in the trenches, Hitler exhibited little hostility to Jews, after 1918 with “the trauma of the defeat, with the destruction of his world—he goes back to the explanation he found in Vienna.”

  To Bauer, the locus of the real mystery about Hitler and the Holocaust is the question of when Hitler made up his mind for extermination, when Hitler crossed what Bauer calls “the moral Rubicon” between imagining the Final Solution and ordering and implementing it. He finds the attempts to answer that question frustrated by what he believes was Hitler’s deliberate obfuscation. He believes Hitler issued an oral order to proceed with a final solution in March 1941. But how long before that had Hitler envisioned extermination—did it lurk beneath ostensible plans for mass expulsion that were the public face of Nazi Jewish policy until then?

  “Hitler’s a very careful individual, very circumspect,” with regard to that, Bauer told me. “He proceeds with that in a very crafty manner.”

  “Deliberately covering his tracks?” I asked.

  “Well, maybe there were no tracks.”

  All the more reason, Bauer believes, not to dismiss him as insane, a psycho path. “You can only assume he’s evil if he’s not insane.” And Bauer has no doubt Hitler is evil. Hitler is “what I would call near-ultimate evil.”

  The notion of near-ultimate evil was a bridge to Bauer’s surprising, even shocking remarks about God. For someone who doesn’t believe in God’s existence—he’d told me he was an atheist—Bauer has some strong opinions of his character if he did exist. I’d asked Bauer if he’d become an atheist because of the “near-ultimate” evil he saw unleashed—unchecked by God or man—during the Holocaust.

  “Post factum maybe,” he said. “But I had no room for any relevance of a God, even if he existed, before that.” He grew up in a nonobservant family, he said, his mother an atheist, his father nominally Reform. “I was religious at the age of seventeen,” he said, which would have been in 1943, and he’s still “very interested in religion, because I think it’s a very important phenomenon historically, certainly among Jews, so you could call me a religion-loving atheist.” One who, he says, “looks at religion on the positive-negative scale in terms of what’s good for the Jews or bad for the Jews. Certainly religion was good for the Jews for a very long period of time. It doesn’t work too well today—you know, ‘Where was God during the Holocaust?’—the record of God as far as the Jewish people is concerned is not too overwhelming of late. But you can talk in terms of Hitler’s evil whether you are religious or not actually.”

  “What about certain Orthodox seers here in Israel who’ve said the Holocaust was part of God’s plan, who even describe Hitler as ‘the rod of God’s anger’ at the Jews of Europe who were falling away from strict Torah worship? Or the Holocaust as a way for God to set up the establishment of the State of Israel?”

  “Well, that’s idiotic, isn’t it?” Bauer said with some of the kibbutznik’s contempt for the seers who’d credit their pioneering courage and sacrifice to a God who supposedly needed the sacrifice of six million for his “plan.” “I’ve just written about that,” he told me. “What I say is that there’s no way that Hit—” he stops, correcting an apparent slip, as if he was about to say “Hitler” when he meant to say “God.” But, in fact, the syllogism he goes on to propose envisions God as a figure perhaps even more evil—ultimate rather than near-ultimate evil:

  “There’s no way that there can be an all-powerful and just God. He can either be all-powerful or just. Because if he’s all-powerful, he’s Satan. If he’s just, he’s a nebbish.”

  God as Satan? I’ve rarely heard a more radical formulation of the problem of theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the existence of a supposedly loving and just God with the persistence of evil). What Bauer is saying, to unpack the assumptions compressed in his God-is-Satan-or-nebbish syllogism, is this: An all-powerful God who was just and loving would not have permitted six million innocents to be slaughtered for any reason, any plan. If he’s all-powerful, he could have intervened (as he did on so many lesser occasions of peril in the Bible), and if he’s just, he would have intervened. If he’s all-powerful and permitted near-ultimate evil to prevail, a million children to be slaughtered virtually in front of their parents’ eyes, without intervening, he might as well be Satan. Which leads us to the second element of the syllogism: If God is just, he can’t be very powerful, because if he’s just, he would have wanted to intervene but just wasn’t powerful enough to make a difference—he’s a well-meaning but not very awesome God.

  “A nebbish?” I asked.

  “Well, you know, a poor chap who has to be supported, a God who needs to draw his strength from us, this is [theologian] Irving Greenberg’s idea”—and that of When Bad Things Happen to Good People author Rabbi Kushner.

  It doesn’t work for Bauer.

  “I don’t need a God like that. What kind of God is that, you know, he’s not an all-powerful being, he’s all-present?”

  That latter remark about an “all-present” God was a reference to Emil Fackenheim’s tortured rationale for the absence of what Fackenheim called “The Commanding Voice of God” at Auschwitz, to Fackenheim’s desire to find some presence of God in the death camps, even a silent witnessing presence. Bauer has no patience for a God who merely suffers silently with the victims: “When he’s there, he cries—that’s very nice of him, but it doesn’t help me much. He’s totally superfluous. There’s
no one to pray to in that concept.”

  God as Satan. Or an impotent nebbish. Are these the only alternatives open to us in the aftermath of the Holocaust? In fact, there is a strain of theodicy that attempts to argue that God is neither all-powerful nor impotent but has limited his own power to the extent necessary to give man free will, the freedom to choose good and evil. The most powerful argument for this—a contemporary symbolic-logic version of G. W. Leibniz’s argument that this is the best of all possible worlds consistent with individual freedom (as opposed to determinism or predestination)—is the one made by the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who insists that without God permitting the possibility of evil, of man choosing wrong, of what Plantinga calls “transworld depravity” (that in any world in which there is freedom some will choose evil), there can be no possible world in which free will or moral choice is meaningful.

  But to many, the Holocaust is a challenge to the notion of the best-of-all-possible-worlds-consistent-with-free-will theodicy. Why couldn’t God have created a slightly less depraved human nature? Does the necessity for transworld depravity require a human nature so depraved that hundreds of thousands would collaborate in the murder of millions of children too young to be paying for any imagined sins? Can Auschwitz be reconciled with any best-of-all-possible-worlds theodicy that doesn’t require us to question the character of God’s creation, the character of God’s creative impulse? Or must we resort to what is known generally as an irenic (or “soul-making”) theodicy—that catastrophic evils such as Auschwitz are painful moral lessons that God intends will lead ultimately to a less-depraved human nature? Must we then say, in effect, “Thank you, God, we needed that”?

  Bauer is not satisfied with the alternatives to his syllogism, which merely make explicit the dramatic implications of the indictment of God that Fackenheim and other troubled believers and theologians have been wrestling with in the aftermath of Hitler. Believers like Fackenheim have been acting in effect as defense investigators for a silent, absent client, groping for the explanation of their client’s conduct that he won’t provide himself.