László Karsai:

Historians, executioners, victims. Debates in Holocaust Studies

A few years ago Michael Marrus appreciatively tapped his own shoulders and those of his colleagues in Holocaust Studies. He was of the opinion that in the last couple of decades Holocaust Studies had become a special new discipline, where specialists of other historical eras could also feel at home. Handling sources in the same way and using the same consciously precise methodology, Holocaust specialists were trying to find answers to all embracing, comprehensive questions, Marrus boasted.

The discussions on whether the right term was Holocaust, Shoah, Judeocidium, or G‚nocide des juifs have contributed to the development of Holocaust Studies as well as have the comparisons of the Shoah with mass murders committed by other regimes in other ages. There have been sharp and very fruitful debates among Holocaust specialists over the judgment of Jewish Council (Judenrat) leaders who cooperated (collaborated) with the Nazis; on whether the term resistance fighter was reserved exclusively for the young Zionists who took arms in the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943, or whether it could be applied to those who by various means, like smuggling food, teaching, or working illegally in Jewish religious and cultural organizations, helped the persecuted maintain their human dignity and social cohesion.

The debates between the intentionalists and the functionalists have yielded serious results. The former are historians who hold that Hitler and his followers were consciously making efforts to physically annihilate all the Jews in Europe, while according to the latter, the Nazis, driven, as it were, by the inner logic of their own system, slowly created a blind alley, which by 1941 left them with no other way out but the Holocaust. When Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book appeared in New York in March 1996, it exploded like a bomb in the book market already inundated with books on the Holocaust. For weeks on end, the daily press, radio stations and television channels were cramming Goldhagen down the throat of the public. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington organized a half-a-day long symposium on the book, with CNN covering the event live. In the debate, the work of the young (36 at the time of the publication of his book, and, according to expert female opinion, remarkably handsome) Harvard professor was taken to pieces by such aces as Konrad Kwiet, Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning, Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, whose publication lists stretch from New York to Jerusalem.

As one of the participants of the symposium later said, the debate highlighted the gap between "academic history" and "popular history", as well as the passions that accompany discussions on the Holocaust. Peter S. Schommer (Norwich University) even sent the query to the busy Goldhagen centre on the Internet on whether the job of the historian was merely to collect funds for his researches, to teach a few students, and to write obscure and often illegible books.

It was probably difficult for outsiders, "civilians", i.e. non-Holocaust-specialist historians to understand what had infuriated the great old men of the profession. It cannot be ruled out, of course, that some of his critics were motivated by plain jealousy. Others toil for decades, searching through archives, writing serious, heavy volumes published in a few hundred or, at best, a few thousand copies, getting appreciative or deprecating reviews and that's it. Goldhagen, on the other hand, became famous and, what is synonymous with it in the United

States in most cases, rich in the matter of a few weeks. His book sold like hot cakes in English speaking countries, the German edition also selling over 160 thousand copies before the end of 1996.

On the other hand, it is professionally somewhat difficult to understand the elemental uproar, gnashing fury and the barrage of criticism directed at the young historian. For Goldhagen has said nothing new, he has merely warmed up old intentionalist theses on the uniquely special character of German historic development (the late German Sonderweg theory) and dished it out in his own, far from modest style. Instead of arguing, or refuting the claims of those he disagrees with, Goldhagen merely declares that they bungle and falsify history. He attacks with all the fury of Old Testament prophets historians who hold views different from his, and like the same prophets, he goes on repeating rather than proving his statements. He comments on the work of a colleague that it "is inadequate as an historical work," which may be true, but minimal professional decency would require that such a grave charge be supported by at least a few quotations and some analysis. It will help to understand the following if we know that Goldhagen's theses are not heretical at all in today's literature on the Holocaust; he is among historians like the astronomer who claims today he has "discovered" that the Sun is circling around the Earth.

Goldhagen's claims I

All Germans are antisemites

Goldhagen claims already in the introduction of his book that he can explain why the Holocaust happened. He says nobody, except his father, has been able to adequately answer that question. Thus, with a little exaggeration one could say that it is "thanks" to his daddy, Erich Godhagen, that D. J. Goldhagen has written this book. He dedicates his book to his father and teacher, and is indebted to him that he has been able to write it. Although in the introduction he admits that his father has not published much (the grateful son can cite merely two articles by him on the Holocaust), he has emphasised the main point of his son's book in his course lectures at Harvard, where both of them work now, and discussed the topic at length with his son.

Daniel J. Goldhagen regards his own book as a radical revision of what has been written on the Holcaust. (Erich) Goldhagen's answer to the question why the Germans slaughtered the Jews by the millions is that they were antisemites bent on mas murder. All Germans, without exception, have been fed with their mothers' milk a centuries old, "demonic," "eliminationist," antisemitic culture, and it was the products, the creations of this culture that did the killings in the death camps in the occupied East European territories and in the hinterland as well -- D. J. Goldhagen keeps belabouring in his book. He regards the "discovery" of his father so important that he compares himself to an anthropologist disembarking on unknown shores inhabited by a preliterate people (possibly of savage, judeophagous Germans -- L. K.).

It seems that D. J. Goldhagen believes that following the guidance of his father he has indeed "discovered" the German antisemites that "caused" the Holocaust but, as we shall try to show below, he is rather like the wanderer in the desert who, on the verge of the final exhaustion and death by thirst, sees the mirage of an oasis on the horizon.

One of the semantic innovations of Goldhagen is that hardly ever using the words "Nazi" or "fascist" in his book, he writes about Germans only. He wants to say Germans and Germany

even where contemporary documents have Nazis and the Nazi Reich. Goldhagen would even have Chaim Kaplan's famous Warsaw Diary rewritten. Where Kaplan, to Goldhagen's true dismay, writes about "Nazis," our author remarks: "Kaplan's use of 'Nazis' should be read as 'Germans'."

The claim that German society has been essentially antisemitic since the early Middle Ages should be proved in the first place. What Goldhagen does, however, is declaring it, and then repeating it over and over again. He himself admits that he has conducted no research of his own in that field, and merely culls from the literature on the history of German antisemitism, quoting the passages that apparently support him, and ignoring everything that might refute his main thesis.

Goldhagen's starting point is that one is either an antisemite or not. And, according to his peculiar argumentation, an antisemite is also, potentially, at least, a murderer, or can become one any time. One suspects Goldhagen hopes that his readers will not know Professor Jacob Katz's history of European antisemitism. Professor Katz, who, unlike Goldhagen, discusses not only German antisemitism, paints a wide European panorama of various antisemitic trends, movements, and ideologies. Unlike Katz, Goldhagen irritably rejects even the thought of the possibility that antisemitism might have had, or may have "Jewish" causes: Jewish isolationism, religious intolerance, Jewish expansion in the economy and culture, too fast, too zealous assimilation, the overrepresentation of Jews in left wing parties and trade unions, and so on.

Goldhagen has no answer to the most important questions: why were the Jews emancipated if antisemitism was indeed as tremendously strong, pervading every social group and class in Germany as he claims? If antisemitism was rampant in everyday life, why did the Jews remain in Germany? Why did the antisemitic parties disappear after a short period of popularity? Goldhagen does not mention that the largest party in Germany around the turn of the century was that of the Social Democrats, i.e. the millions of German workers were not affected by v”lkisch antisemitic ideology and propaganda. The antisemites, on the other hand, were affected by the fact that of the 58 Jewish members returned to the Reichstag between 1890 and 1914, 39 were members of the Social Democratic Party.

Goldhagen similarly declines to say anything about the post-emancipation period, the integration of the Jews, and their economic, political, and cultural achievements.

Although the proportion of Jews in Germany between 1871 and 1933 was never higher than 1.09% of the population (in 1933 the Jews living in Germany numbered approximately 500,000), 12% of university instructors were Jews, and the antisemites kept in mind the fact that 7% of the professors were converted Jews. While in most of Germany everyday Germans simply did not have the chance to meet Jews, who were concentrated in big towns and not standing out with their appearance or dress in the crowd, antisemites, concerned for German culture on account of the Jews registered that, for example, in 1931, out of 234 German theatre directors 167 were Jews; others, after World War I, were worried about the fact that out of 150 bank owners in Berlin only eleven were not Jews. Contrary to Goldhagen's claim, Germany was an intellectually and politically open society, with a high degree of religious tolerance. Einstein, Ballin, Zweig, Rathenau as well as hundreds of thousands more less famous but integrated middle-class German Jews in pre-World War I Germany knew very well that they were living much better than they would have been anywhere else in Europe save England. In the United States, before and for a long time after World War I, Harvard,

Goldhagen's own university and a number of other institutions of higher education had an open quota system (numerus clausus). In certain neighbourhoods Jews were not allowed to buy homes, there were holiday resorts they were banned from, they were discriminated against at work every day, street atrocities, Jew-beatings were frequent, synagogues and cemeteries were often vandalized. The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed the support of a number of popular Southern politicians in its campaign against Blacks, Catholics and Jews.

Although the list of German antisemites from Marx to Wagner would be impressively long, a great number of eminent Germans including Hegel, Lessing, Schelling, Goethe, Mommsen, Humboldt, Virchov, Engels, Thomas Mann, Max Weber and others, were not antisemites. It was not only the v”lkisch ideology, the nationalist, racist, antisemitic views that attracted many followers, but the German liberal traditions and conservative and Christian humanism also existed and exerted a strong influence against sordid antisemitism.

Goldhagen's definition of who can be regarded as antisemite is too wide, and, therefore, he can label everybody 'antisemite' who proposed to limit the immigration of East-European Jews -- poor, unemployed, Orthodox people from Galicia, dressed in caftans and speaking Yiddish -- to Germany in 1928. The fact, on the other hand, that the same proposal was made in most European countries and in the United States, and that many Jewish religious and political leaders looked down with distaste on their "backward," "too religious" brethren is ignored by Goldhagen.

Critics of Goldhagen emphasise that his book is methodologically ahistoric, completely devoid of comparatism. Robert Wistrich stresses antisemitism was much stronger in Austria than in Germany even before 1914; the antisemitic Karl Lueger, one of the role models of Hitler was very popular as mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1914. Two-thirds of the voters in the 1911 Austrian elections voted for parties that had antisemitic points in their programs. France was shaken by the Dreyfus affair, the Jews were systematically persecuted in Rumania and Russia, horrible pogroms occurred regularly in those countries. The (other) reason why D. J. Goldhagen ought to have written about Austrian antisemites was, says Professor R. Wistrich, that although Austrians were merely 8% of the population of the Third Reich after 1938, they made up 14% of the SS, 40% of the staff of the death camps, and 70% of Adolf Eichmann's detail.

Nor is it a coincidence that Goldhagen carefully avoids comparisons of German antisemitism to that raging in other countries. Had he made those comparisons, he would be compelled to admit that in 1933 Germany was far from being the most antisemitic country in Europe. Now, if he admitted that, he would also have to admit that the main argument of his book, i.e., all Germans were antisemites, and, therefore, (potential) murderers, and that is what caused the Holocaust, does not hold water.

Adolf Hitler himself even complained in Mein Kampf that in Germany in 1918 "there could be no question of systematic antisemitism. I still remember the difficulties one encountered if one so much as uttered the word Jew. Either one was stupidly gaped at, or one experienced the most violent resistance."

Contrary to what Goldhagen claims, before the Depression the parties that put the Jewish question in the centre of their programs never got a significant portion of the votes in Germany. Neither is it possible to prove that the Nazi Party got millions of votes between 1930 and 1932 just because it was antisemitic (among a number of things). All that Hitler said

about the Jews, the inequality of races, eugenics, and the Lebensraum due to Germans was not exactly unpopular in various orchestrations in a number of European countries either, but the French, the English, etc. regarded their own respective peoples as the embodiment of the most civilized, most magnificent, superior race.

One has to distinguish, unlike Goldhagen, between what Hitler said in public and what he really thought, or meant. Prior to 1939, nobody talked more about the importance of peace than Hitler. From the beginning of his political career in 1920, one of the most important aims of Hitler was that people should not think of the German Socialist Workers' Party as an antisemitic Party "only". Hitler won the masses not by denouncing the Jews, but because he could play on nationalist emotions better than anybody else. He was perfectly justified in condemning the peace dictate of Versailles as unjust, and on that basis he could stand up as the champion of the equality of peoples (of Germans, first of all) saying that all peoples, including Germans, had the right to live in one state. Hitler proclaimed to fight against defeatist politicians who divided the people, and he could make people believe that the rule of the Nazis would bring a new national awakening and concord, and, of course, that everybody would have work. Capital would produce, profiteers and speculators would be punished, young people would not be left alone, and everybody would have meaning for their lives. Hitler, of course, remembered that your average Burger always likes to have a strong military to defend the borders of his country, and a tough police force to protect his life and property.

The Jewish question was not at all a central issue in the parlamentary election campaigns and in the propaganda of the Nazi Party. In his great speeches, especially in those made before lower middle-class audiences, Hitler hardly mentioned the Jews. In a sensational interview he gave The Times in the autumn of 1930, he firmly declared that the Nazi movement was strictly organized, and it "discountenanced violent antisemitism." Our doctrine, said Hitler, was "Germany for the Germans," and everything depends on how the Jews relate to that. "[We have] nothing against decent Jews," he said.

Goldhagen is unable to show that the existence of half a million Jews was the most important, everyday problem for every German. When he talks about eight million members of the Nazi Party, he forgets to mention three important facts: (1) not only antisemites joined the Nazi Party, albeit these people were not disturbed by the antisemitism of the party; (2) in 1929, the number of the members of the NSDAP was below 100,000, it reached 850,000 in 1933, the year they came to power, and the members numbered eight millions in 1944 only; (3) in the elections in March 1933, i.e. two months after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, the Nazis got no more than 43,9% of the votes.

Goldhagen does not discuss in effect the special causes, the important historical and political events that contributed to the strengthening of antisemitism all over the world, to its becoming a mass movement during World War I and the few years after the war. The world-wide judeo-bolshevik-plutocrat conspiracy seemed an ostensible explanation of the debacle in Germany, too. The bolshevik revolutionaries as well as their comrades in Hungary and Germany included too many persons of Jewish origin for the brochure entitled The Protocol of the Elders of Zion not to seem to be a work describing fulfilled prophecies. Even the victorious great powers, save the United States, had been weakened in World War I, and millions of disillusioned people turned their backs to liberal, democratic ideologies all over the world. Hitler would never have had a chance without the Depression in the relatively stable, Wilhelmian antebellum Germany.

The historians that I have called intentionalist above hold that Hitler decided as early as around 1918 and 1919 to have all Jews killed when he had the chance. There is nothing novel in Goldhagen's statement in that respect either when he claims as fact supported by evidence that for Hitler the only fitting punishment for Jews after August 13, 1920 was death. Nobody can know, of course, when exectly Hitler decided on the physical extermination of European Jews. It is a fact, however, that even in 1933 he declared he would be glad to give every German Jew a boat-ticket and a thousand marks if the Americans were ready to receive them.

"Hitler, who wanted to kill the Jews," Goldhagen says casuallly, ignoring the fact that this can be proved with documents and data only from the second half of 1941 only, and that at the time of the context under discussion (1928) all he probably wanted to do was to have the Jews emigrate or at least have their rights limited.

In addition to extremely exaggerating the power and the influence on the public of German antisemitism prior to 1933, Goldhagen regularly distorts and suppresses the facts concerning the Jewish policy of the Nazis after their coming to power. He keeps quiet about the fact that after Goebbels and his followers had proclaimed the boycott of Jewish businesses "for all times" on April 1, 1933, the boycott had to be stopped after one day precisely because of the (from the Nazis' viewpoint) unfavourable response of the German customers. The latter, despite SA-troops standing "guard" in front of the Jewish shops and harrassing those who entered, simply ignored these antisemites in many towns. A multitude of sources and documents prove what difficulties the Nazis encountered when they tried to severe the (economic) relations between the Jews and their Aryan customers. Traditional relations involving buying up goods and extending credit stubbornly survived in important rural areas in many cases until 1938. Obviously, the Jewish merchants managed to keep most of their customers with their lower prices despite the hostility of the official antisemitic policy.

All Goldhagen says in connection with the photograph on the front cover of his book is that it was taken at an antisemitic rally in Berlin, on August 15, 1935. He fails, however, to add that this particular rally was left by a great number of people, who expressed in this way their indignation at the offensive, Jew-baiting, vulgar speeches of Julius Streicher and his likes. Many stayed, it is true, but they did express their contempt and disgust by not applauding at the end of the meeting. We know for a fact how Stericher and his friends were disturbed by how few and how quietly people were applauding.

Goldhagen also forgets to mention that after the first wave of antisemitism was over, thousands of Jews returned to their "homes" in Germany in 1935-1936, fleeing, among others, from French, Belgian, English, American, etc. antisemites.

If all Germans were savage antisemites, it is difficult to understand why it was necessary to pass the racist Nuremberg laws in 1935. Why was it necessary to forbid sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews if every German had been fed the hatred of Jews with their mothers' milk? Nor can Goldhagen convincingly explain why the Nazis waited until 1935 to pass the racist acts, and until 1938 to "Aryanize" Jewish property.

Goldhagen falsifies the story of Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) the night of November 9-10, 1938. He suppresses, among others, as one of the antecedents of that monstrous pogrom, the important fact that when in February 1936 a young Jew killed Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff in Switzerland, the public received the news indifferently, despite the great press campaign. The authorities did not permit mass demonstrations in the year of the Berlin Olympics,

anyway. In November 1938, contrary to what Goldhagen says, the sight of burning synagogues and ransacked shops disgusted most people. Furthermore, far from being spontaneous, the pogrom was a Judenaktion organized by the Nazi Party.

The diplomats accredited in Berlin, the American ambassador and the British charg‚ d'affaires in Berlin, as well as the British consul in Frankfurt and the American consul in Leipzig all reported that people, scandalized all over the country, condemn the vandalism of the Nazis. Hungarian diplomats experienced the same: Jen“ Ghyczy, councillor at the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin writes in his report of November 22, 1938 that within the government of the Reich "...there must have been great differences of opinion over the way the Jewish question was solved on November 10. This is indicated by the fact that nearly every German we have talked to in the last few days have condemned in the most emphatic possible manner the destruction of businesses on November 10." Goldhagen does not quote the confidential directive of November 24, 1938, of the Imperial Propaganda Ministry, which says that the majority of the German public is not antisemitic enough, and should be "enlightened" by means of a thorough press campaign.

Goldhagen himself is compelled to admit, when describing Kristallnacht, that a significant part of the population disapproved of the licentious brutality, but this does not keep him from claiming elsewhere that all Germans before 1945 were sadist mass-murderers capable of any brutality. To be sure, most Germans looked on indifferently, without sympathy as the Jews were gradually, by "legal" means pushed out from economic and social life. Nor did they care about those tens of thousands of Jews that the Nazis "managed" every year to force to emigrate from Germany -- the total number was 360,000. But there is a great difference between not minding that the Jewish shopkeeper next door emigrates with his family and actively taking part in destroying, ransacking his business, beating up his familiy members, and raping his daughter.

Contrary to what Goldhagen claims, there was no straight road from Martin Luther through Hitler to Auschwitz. Even the Nazis shaped their Jewish policy hesitantly, cautiously in the beginning, with an ear to the foreign and domestic situation, and to the mood of the public. Hitler sometimes spoke of expelling the Ostjuden [Eastern Jews] only, at other times all Jews. In December 1928 he said that the Jews were tolerated in Germany as aliens only. Most remarkably, the Nazis had minutely elaborated agrarian and foreign policy programs as early as the end of the 1920s, but they had no Jewish program. All this has been extensively treated in the literature. To pick out just one, characteristic episode: On September 9, 1939, Van der Venne Arnold, Hungarian consul general in Vienna wrote a lengthy report marked "confidential" for Foreign Minister Istv n Cs ky. At the beginning of his report (Goldhagen could use it if it were not about Austrians...), he points out: the antisemitic atmosphere in Vienna is intensifying. "Now it was not the persecution of Jews organized by the National Socialist Party that reared its head again, but the people in the street expressed spontaneously their hatred against the Jews," the consul general writes, then goes on to reveal that the head of the Vienna Gestapo has told him that "he has been made personally responsible, he has received the strictest instructions to prevent all antisemitic demonstrations, etc. If he should establish that anyone from the party was making preparations for such demonstrations, that person or persons must be arrested immediately without respect to their person or status... The Jews must have got some information concerning this order since the great anxiety and fear they have been displaying lately, manifested especially in their attempts to leave the country, has abated somewhat since yesterday."

Goldhagen mentions the "systematic elimination of Jews" as the Jewish policy of the Nazis as early as between 1933 and 1938, only to admit on the following page that the assault of the society against the Jews was uncoordinated.

Many had written before Goldhagen about how the Germans had reacted to the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazis. It is impossible to give an exact answer to this query since the available sources are rather scant in this particular field; in many cases, on the other hand, like the "reports on morale" by the Gestapo and other official organs, are biassed and project a distorted picture. The literature on the subject describes the reaction of the German public opinion to the persecution of the Jews with the adjectives "apathetic," "disinterested," and "indifferent". This is usually explained not only by the effects of the official antisemitic propaganda, which flooded Germany after 1933, but by many people fearing, not without good reason, to express their solidarity with the victims during the Nazi terror.

Goldhagen triumphantly mentions that tens and hundreds of thousands of Germans had demonstrated and fought against the regime before 1933. What he does not see is that there was some difference between demonstrating against the state authority of the democratic Weimar Republic and trying to do the same, say, in 1938. And when he writes about the only occasion that thousands took to the streets for the sake of arrested Jews, he simply falsifies the data. According to Goldhagen, on February 27, 1943, after the Jews who had "Aryan" wives had been arrested in Berlin the night before, 6,000 wives demonstrated in the streets. In reality "only" two thousand wives demonstrated, but four thousand sympathisers marched along with them, too.

Incidentally, the Nazi leaders were rather put out by the great number of Germans trying to intervene on behalf of their Jewish friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. On January 23, 1942 (three days after the Wannsee Conference!), Hitler complained to his confidants (Lammers, head of the Chancery, and SS Führer Himmler) that whenever he thought of "shifting [i.e. deporting from Germany -- L. K.] the Jew, our bourgeoisie becomes quite unhappy" asking "What will happen to them?" [i.e. to the Jews -- L. K.] Himmler, in a speech he made at Posen, on October 4, 1943, claimed that the Germans were coming, "all the 80 milion of them," and each of them has at least on decent Jew. Two days later, in another speech, he reminded his audience, how many, "even party members", were beseeching him to spare their Jewish friends. These people, fumed Himmler, admitted in general that Jews were guilty, but they claimed that their friends were decent people. If, Himmler said, the number of Jews claimed by Germans to be decent and honest were added up, it would turn out that there were more of them than there were Jews in Germany.

Goldhagen says that during World War II approximately ten thousand Jews were hidden by Germans, but he finds that considerable number too low, and mentions it as evidence of the antisemitism of Germans.

Goldhagen does not understand totalitarian regimes either: he pretends to seriously believe there was no risk in opposing the Nazis. Raul Hilberg mentions the case of Dr Kurt Prelle, NSDAP member, notary by profession. Prelle was summoned before a party court in 1938 because his wife, although without his knowledge, had purchased stamps for 10 pfennigs in the shop of a Jew. Prelle was expelled from the party, and at the request of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy he was forbidden to practise his profession as well, because doubts had arisen during the investigation of his case whether he was ready under all circumstances to support and protect the National Socialist State.

Goldhagen expects general solidarity, active resistance from Germans even when (especially between 1939 and 1945) this involved serious risks. He fails to understand that dauntless courage is absent from most people, and many would choose passivity even to keep their jobs.

In 1941, about 200,000 Jews lived in the Third Reich. When the Nazis started deporting the people branded with the six-pointed star in the fall of 1941, these manoeuvres had to be done late at night, or early in the morning in the utmost secrecy. If all Germans were savage, sadist antisemites, it is difficult to see why Germany was not "dejudaized" in broad daylight, accopmanied by a noisy press campaign. Shlomo Frank, an inmate of the ghetto in Lodz, on October 23, 1941 wrote about the Jews from Frankfurt, who arrived in the ghetto on that day. The German Jews were all well, greeting the locals with happy "shalom", and telling them that their neighbours in Germany had brought them cakes and other provisions when they had learnt they would be deported. There were probably a number of reasons for the "happiness" of the Jews from Frankfurt: they had no idea whatsoever at what place they had arrived, and they had probably not been molested by their German guards on the way. On October 28, Shlomo Frank entered in his diary that he had received a letter from Cologne, his friend telling him they had to leave their home (Heimat in the original). His friend remarked of the locals: "They are very sympathetic to us."

If slaughtering the Jews was an activity that enjoyed wide public support, why were the various Nazi authorities anxious to use coded language when referring to it ("protective custody" for arrest, "special treatment" as the synonym of execution, killing)?

Some of Goldhagen's ideas are indicative of a vivid imagination. When trying to find the answer to why Hitler did not give orders before June 22, 1941 to massacre the millions of Jews in the Eastern territories of occupied Poland, he says the Führer was afraid that the Jewish-Bolshevik Soviet Union might start a war in that case. The author does not add, however, that this is (again) merely a research hypothesis and not a fact, supported by data and documents. Judging by what we know of Stalin's regime, it seems highly unlikely that Moscow would have got the Red Army rolling at the news of the genocidal assault upon Polish Jews. In addition, Goldhagen again ignores a serious amount of literature, whose authors fairly convincingly argue that in the first half of 1941 Hitler was still considering resettling the Polish Jews in the East, and not killing them. Goldhagen in this case again dismisses the historians who hold that Hitler decided only in September-October, 1941 to physically exterminate European Jews; he simply declares that Hitler made that decision in late 1940 or early 1941.

Goldhagen merely asserts that the establishment of the large Polish ghettos already served the planned, calculated starving to death of Jews, the policy of decimation. Nor does he finds it necessary to argue with the historians who hold views different from his.

Goldhagen is usually satisfied with explaining events with one single cause. The reason he thinks Germans found so many hiding Jews in the Polish Generalgouvernement was that they hunted them down with great zeal. It might have been worth his referring to the fact that the Germans also hunted for the hiding partisans of the Home Army with no less zeal, but with much less success. Significant masses of the Polish population were not unaffected by an antisemitism supported by massive Catholic, anti-Judaic traditions, and the horrifying German terror might have scared even those who would have been willing to help. The Nazi occupying forces massacred whole Polish families for hiding Jews. Most of the hiding Jews (80%) spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, many speaking Polish with a clearly

recognizable accent. Those who insisted on following orthodox religious rules even in mortal danger were betrayed by their clothes or their beards.

Sometimes Goldhagen forgets about elementary facts. Once he remarks that the Gestapo exposed 4,960 cases of forbidden sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers in Germany between May and August 1942, and a year later 4,637 such miscegenous relationships were laid open. "These figures [were] wholly unimaginable for Germans and Jews," he writes. He is right. In 1942-1943, it is indeed difficult to imagagine this between Germans and Jews, not the least because every German Jew had been compelled to wear a yellow star after September 1, 1941, not to mention the fact that by the spring of 1942 hardly a few tens of thousands of Jews had remained in the Third Reich. Most of them were squeezed into ghettos, in houses marked with yellow stars, waiting, terrified, to be deported. On the other hand, millions of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Hungarian and other labourers and POW's were working in Germany at that time. In view of that, those thousands of exposed cases do not seem too much.

Once, only once Goldhagen admits that whetever he writes about the power, the mass influence of antisemitism in Germany before 1933 cannot be proved because "[t]he proper data simply do not exist."

Because even he has been obliged to admit this, the only way he thinks he could prove the main thesis of (Erich) Goldhagen is to point at the six million victims of the Holocaust and keep repeating that this could be perpetated only by people grown up in a genocidal, eliminationist, antisemitic culture.

Goldhagen's claims II.

All Germans are murderers

If Daniel J. Goldhagen's book has an editor, s/he can also be blamed for the publication of this superficial, incorrect work. The author makes the job of the reader more difficult not only with an inaccurate and incomplete index. It is also disturbing that he repeats one of his quotations. Beyond the formal deficiencies, however, what is really remarkable is how poorly informed the author is in connection with the history of World War II and, within it, the general history of the Holocaust. He does not know either Hitler the man, or the Führer the general. He does not know what hesitations, fears, and hysteries took hold of him in decisive moments (in the spring of 1940, at the time of the landing in Norway, then before the battle of Dunkirk, in the summer of 1941 during the battles around Kiev, etc.). Speaking of Hitler, it is possible, indeed, it did happen that he started something, then interrupted it, backed out, made compromises. Goldhagen's knowledge is also wanting in other fields of military history. He believes that in the summer of 1941, when the Nazis started to slaughter the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, hardly any bombs were dropped on Germany yet, so the murderers could not justify themselves after the war saying they had killed the Jews out of revenge for the bombings. In fact, the English had been regularly bombing German cities from the summer of 1940, and fear as well as the desire to revenge must have been widespread all over the country.

Since he concentrates too much on the Jewish policy of the Nazis, Goldhagen cannot analyse the facts indicating that the Nazi regime was not only antisemitic, but racist, "race-protecting," "eugenic" as well. The Nazis deemed it important to create a healthy, well-

disciplined, new people. This is why they exiled and/or locked up in concentration camps their political opponents. This is why they persecuted homosexuals, vagrants, and wandering gypsies. This is why they killed approximately 90 thousand mentally ill persons in their so-called euthanasia program in 1939 through 1941, long before they started the systematic program of physically annihilating European Jews.

It may be attributed to superficiality that the map showing the number of the victims of the Holocaust has 48,000 dead Bulgarian Jews. In fact, Bulgaria was the only country where the number of Jews increased during World War II. The Bulgarian authorities deported the Jews (some 11 thousand people) during the first years of the world war "only," from the Thracian and Macedonian territories acquired but in the spring of 1943, due to domestic and international protest, they finally abandoned the idea of deporting Jews of Bulgarian nationality.

There is a more serious problem, namely that Goldhagen reiterates, practically without arguments, the old intentionalist tenet that the most important goal of the Nazis during World War II was the wholesale massacre of European Jews. The historians that, like Goldhagen, hold the same view cannot provide a convincing explanation as to why the Nazis did not try to deport all the Jews in France even after November 1942, i.e. the occupation of the territory under the rule of Marshal P‚tain's puppet regime. It is impossible to understand on intentionalist grounds why the Nazis did not press harder the leaders of Hungary and Rumania during 1942 and 1943 when both Antonescu and Horthy refused to deport their "own" Jews to Auschwitz, pointing especially at Mussolini's "Jew-protectin" policy.

As mentioned above, Goldhagen consistently refuses even the idea of trying to analyse the Holocaust on a European scale. He carefully avoids comparisons, as a rule, and when he does not, the result is lamentable. He compares Germany to Italy and Denmark without mentioning that Italy had 50-60 thousand Jews only, and the number of Jews in Denmark during World War II, including refugees, was less than ten thousand. D”me Szt˘jay, Hungarian ambassador in Berlin was perfectly justified saying in his letter of October 14, 1943 to Foreign Minister Jen“ Ghyczy that the persecution of Jews in Denmark had completely turned the population against the Germans. "Denmark does not know the Jewish question, because the Jews make up merely one thousandth of the population. Therefore, of course, nobody understood the necessity of the measures taken by the Germans, which resulted in the increase of anti-German feeling."

The Jewish communities both in Denmark and in Italy consisted of completely assimilated, integrated people. Goldhagen is about as justified using the examples of Denmark and Italy as, using the analogy of Istv n De k, an Icelander would be censuring a white person living in Harlem for not liking Blacks. It is no coincidence that Goldhagen does not write in effect about the countries where masses of the population actively participated in massacring the Jews. Mention of the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Rumanians might confuse the author labouring to prove the thesis of Erich Goldhagen because it would be obvious that there were many others besides Germans during World War II who "killed with pleasure / and willingly, not merely under orders."

As one of his critics has correctly pointed out, Goldhagen, perhaps unintentionally, is obscuring precisely one of the unique and peculiar characteritics of the Holocaust. One of the most important features of the Holocaust was, as Yehuda Bauer says, that for the first time in history the leaders of a state decided to physically annihilate a religiously defined group of

people, the Jews. The Nazis wanted to kill all Jews, including the old, the impotent invalids and infants. This industrially organized and bureaucratically controlled, massive extermination is unparallelled in human history not because of its magnitude, or because of the number of the dead (the Nazis killed more Russians than Jews) but for the uniqueness of its goal and execution.

Goldhagen directs attention from the Jewish millions killed by the bureaucratic police machinery of the Nazis, by members of the SS and the Wehrmacht to the tens of thousands who were murdered either by police battalions, or on the death marches following the evacuation of the camps in the last months of the war. This is exactly what explains the great success of Goldhagen's book. The killers in this book have faces, we can see them as husbands, friends, comrades-in-arms. We can see that many of them indeed enjoyed being able to kill Jews every day. Goldhagen, however, seems to forget that brutal mass-murderers, torturers of defenseless people have existed in many countries throughout human history, and the ethnic, nationalistic and tribal conflicts in Africa and Yugoslavia in our times are proof that the tendency for genocide is not a German speciality. Ch. Browning himself has reminded Goldhagen that during World War II people from Luxemburg were, for example, enlisted in certain German regular units that committed mass-murders. These men were not the products of the demonic, eliminationist, antisemitic German culture, and still they killed.

Goldhagen describes the suffering of Jews with what amounts to mazochistic pleasure, wallowing in the detailed analysis of various brutal murders, espacially if the victims are children. He uses a number of gruesome photographs to try, not without success, the reader to understand the everyday hell of the Holocaust.

The literature on the Holocaust even before Goldhagen discussed copiously the possible motives of the perpetrators of the genocide. Goldhagen, however, sweeps aside all that has been written on these issues in a tone unusually rude and personal even in the literature on the Holocaust, where authors do not always refrain from, shall we say, arguing ad hominem.

Goldhagen himself feels the danger: if the murderers killed because they were (German) antisemites, his explanation will be simplistic, monocausal. Thus, with confused sophistry, he remarks, what he has discovered in antisemitism is "only" the "crucial motivational element" which moved German men and women to kill Jews, and with regard to that, "a monocausal explanation does suffice."

Goldhagen published an essay on the mass murderers of the SS in 1978, that is, at the age of 18. It seems he has realized gradually that those who tortured and killed Jews were all Germans, and that Germans were all savage, Jew-eating antisemites since only antisemites can kill Jews. With regards to how many exactly participated in the massacres, Godhagen is inconsistent, and his estimations are sometimes as bold as bordering on the ridiculous. In the introduction he merely says that Hitler's "willing executioners" numbered tens of thousands. A few pages later he estimates the number of mass murderers to have been "many thousands," adding that antisemitism "would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned." Two pages later, but still in the introduction, he puts the number of the perpetrators to "five hundred thousand or one million." When talking about his own researches, he admits that going through the court records of 35 police battalions he was unable to identify more than 19 thousand persons by name.

In the chapters (III-IV) that he wrote on the basis of his own researches, Goldhagen discusses Germans who killed tens of thousands of Jews with their own hands between 1941 and 1945. His choice of topic is not new; years before Goldhagen, in 1992, Christopher Browning published a monograph on one of the genocidal police battalions. Goldhagen simply denies that Ch. Browning has pointed out that these average people were influenced by the antisemitic propaganda that flooded Germany after 1933. But that was not the only reason why Jews were killed. It is true, and it is not Goldhagen's "discovery" either, that the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not merely obedient cowards, despite the statements they made out of self-justification before a West German court. Browning, however, unlike Goldhagen's monocausal antisemitic explanation, emphasises peer pressure, conformity, and siege mentality, which latter in times of war appears even in the relatively safe hinterland (in this case in alien, hostile occupied Poland). Some of these reserve police officers killed Jews because (among others) they were afraid their comrades would regard them as cowards if they refused to obey the order. Others were simply accustomed to killing. Individual responsibility must have seemed reduced anyway in the Nazi sytem, particularly during World War II.

Goldhagen does not mention that the number of policemen, soldiers and officers who killed women, children, and old people day after day included many who did not enjoy their "job". There were many who became alcoholics, got nervous breakdowns, etc. In June 1942 a confidential report from the Eastern front found its way to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, too. According to the informer, discipline has become loose, there are escapes, and, therefore, it can be heard in some German circles that the groups that have been working for a long time on the Eastern front, and "...have become accustomed to mass-murdering the Jews and the other Russian population not only on the front but in the parts behind it, and have, as a result, become more or less completely insensitive with respect to private property and law will not be brought home at the end of the war."

Average Germans were (potential) murderers, and Max Dietrich was their typical representative, at least according to Goldhagen. In 1933, at the age of 20, he was the member of the SS, served in the concentration camp at Dachau from 1934 to 1938, went on murdering Jews in other camps during the world war. By 1942 he was a habitual alcoholic, a sadist, a demented pervert, feared even by his own comrades -- that is, your typical average German...

In Goldhagen's view, millions knew in Germany that masses of Jews were being slaughtered "in the East." This is true, but very few had precise information on the death camps. It is true that Hitler repeatedly declared in public that the world war would end with the extermination of Jews, but Goldhagen fails to add that very few believed him, not even those who were much better informed than the German-in-the-street. One could hear sporadic news from the front that many Jews had been killed in several places. These pieces of news could be fitted into the picture people had of the brutal war. But it was very difficult to believe that this was a case of all Jews being systematicaly slaughtered. Even the Jews themselves refused to believe this, as did the military and political leaders of the antifascist powers.

At the end of 1944 and at the beginning of 1945, when the Germans retreating before the Red Army started to evacuate the concentration camps, the Germans, according to Goldhagen, forced the Jews to march in order to kill them.

Goldhagen probably has never served in the military; if he had, he would not be satisfied with such a monocausal explanation again. The guards of the Jews knew very well that if they had no prisoners, they would have no pretext either to move toward the hinterland, and they would

have to go to the front. Another reason of marching the Jews may have been that the obedient Germans followed the last order. It would be naive, to say the least, to expect precise time schedules, concerted, organized evacuation in the disintegrating Nazi Reich.

According to the leitmotif of the book, the approximately 550 members of the above-mentioned Reserve Police Battalion 101, which took part in the slaughtering of Jews, provide a representative cross section of the whole German people. It is difficult to accept the author's arguments. In the first place, no women served in this battalion. Most of the genocidal policemen were recruited from the occupational subgroups of urban, unskilled workers, lower and middle civil servants. Most of them came from the Lutheran, Protestant districts of Hamburg, and 32.5% of them were members of the Nazi Party, which is 12.5% higher than the national average. In addition, organized industrial workers, members of the middle and high classes, peasants and highly qualified professionals were absent from this battalion.

Goldhagen makes the job of those who wish to argue with him rather difficult. He wants "a superior approach," and "many cases" before he is convinced that his position is wrong. In his view, "good" Germans, i.e. those who protected, helped, sympathised with, Jews, were like "lonely sober figures in the midst of a macabre, orgiastic carnival." Their deeds, like little candles, throw their beams far in the deep antisemitic darkness. Below, with the help of a less known documentary material, i.e. hundreds of little candles, I shall endeavour to show that (Erich) Goldhagen is mistaken.

Hungarian Jews on pro-Jewish Germans: the DEGOB records

In my researches so far I have found exactly 232 Hungarian Jews who spoke of, according to my judicious estimate, tens of thousands of Germans and Austrians, who had been friendly to, saved, helped or taken pity on, Jews. And they did it in 1945, when the memories of their sufferings were still fresh. They were Hungarian Jews, who had been deported in the spring-summer of 1944 from different parts of the country, most of them to Auschwitz. From there, they were taken to various factories, plants and mines. They survived the murders of most of their relatives and friends, as well as the death marches. In 1945, when everything seemed much simpler, and all Germans seemed Nazis, these Jews could not be expected to say anything "pro-German." 4,600 of the Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust made statements about their memories, the experiences they thought were most important in the Budapest offices of the National Committee for Looking after the Deported (Hungarian abbreviation: DEGOB, from Deport ltakat Gondoz˘ Orsz gos Bizotts g). Today approximately 3,700 depositions, records are available for researchers, all taken in 1945.

When discussing the history of Reserve Police Battalion 101, Goldhagen nearly exclusively uses the material from their trial in the mid-1960s. Indeed, ignoring the testimonies of both the accused and their lawyers, in many cases he is satisfied with quoting the indictment. He is proud to have read the documents of the trials of 35 police battalions, some of them several thousand pages long. I have so far co-edited the publication of the materials of two people's court trials, each of them several thousand pages long. For the last two years I have been studying the trial documents of nearly 900 war criminals in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Interior and in the Budapest Archives. My experiences have taught me to be careful: trusting indictments without reservations would be naivity, whether they be documents from the Hungarian People's Attorney's Department or records of inquiry taken at the Hungarian political police directed by the communist G bor P‚ter.

Humane workers

Goldhagen believes that the main goal of the Germans during World War II was eventually to kill all Jews, causing them as much suffering as possible in the process. He believes the Jews were not worked, their labour power was not taken advantage of. Goldhagen holds that it "almost never happened" that Germans and Jews established friendly relations at workplaces or that Germans regarded Jews as humans at all.

We have altogether 102 DEGOB records testifying that in dozens of factories and plants in various parts of Germany Jews were provided with living quarters and food fit for humans. After Auschwitz the Hungarian Jews felt they were in the clover if they found themselves "merely" in normal, human conditions. G.L. worked at G”rlitz, in a plant manufacturing parts for aircraft. When they arrived there from Auschwitz, "each of us was given a spoon, a plate, a cup, two blankets, a separate bed, and we all felt like we were humans," he said.

After Auschwitz, S.A. felt she was "in heavens" together with other women when at their quarters everyone was issued three blankets. R.M., along with three hundred Hungarian Jewish girls, was lucky to find herself in a plant at Lippstadt manufacturing aircraft spare parts; they lived in stone buildings, everyone had their own beds, and "We had hot water nearly every day," she added. K.F. was only fourteen when she was deported. In the ammunition factory at Gebhardsdorf they were given clothes, underwear, sometimes even meat, with potatos, and the daily ration was a pound of bread per head. Z.S. and his sister E. worked in the ammunition factory at Torgau, at noon they were given a litre of soup, for dinner they had jam, margarine and salami, and they got a whole bread every third day. B.K. and her sister Zs. came to Burgau from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in horrible condition. In their new camp, he remembers gratefully, "they fed us well. Twice a day bread, soup, and even meat, and a little butter every day. On Sundays cottage cheese, knackwurst, they did not beat us, and the Appel [Appel: literally line-up, a roll-call lasting hours in the camps -- L.K.] lasted for fifteen minutes."

M.A., along with 1,200 other women, was sent to a little village near Reichenbach, where they manufactured radio broadcasting stations. They were put up in a manor house and were treated well. "The sick received proper medical treatment, indeed, the more serious cases were taken to the Reichenbach hospital," she said.

Thanks to normal living and working conditions, the mortality rate was also low in dozens of factories and camps. ™.I. mentions that the work in the L”renz radio factory was hard, but the treatment was good. "We were one thousand in the lager, and only three of us died during the five or six months we were there." According to M.S., eight of the three thousand prisoners died at Salzwedel, where "I can say, we were not badly off in any respect." K.J. spent nearly one year at Bunclau, where they had proper living quarters, those who worked well got special bonuses, cigarettes, extra food, the workers treated them decently, and thanks to it all "only three persons died during the whole year." Ern“ Schwartz, originally a tinker and mechanic, worked in a little locksmith's workshop at Türkheim, and as he remembers, during the four months "we had only four dead." M.Ź. and his fellow female prisoners grew "terribly" thin in the aircraft factory at Schoppau(?), but none of them died from November 11, 1944 to April 12, 1945. The reason was that "the civilian workers treated us very well. They brought us apples, bread and sometimes even bread and butter. They did not dare to talk to us because that would have been severely punished, but left the parcel somewhere and then we picked it up."

Contrary to Goldhagen's claim, we know of a great number of cases when Jews were employed to do important, meaningful work. H.J. says that in Monowitz "our treatment was very good because we were all skilled workers." Working in military factories, skilled workers did the same jobs as their German colleagues, and were treated alike. I.D. worked in a woodenware factory at Bunzlau. "We were respected as skilled workers, even the German craftsmen treated us decently," he says. Besides the "excellent" housing and food (compared to "normal," i.e. concentration camps) these Hungarian Jews also mention that many of their German fellow workers tried to help them. H.M. worked in the Argus aircraft factory at Reinichendorf from August 1944 to February 1945. "We were not Jews there but workers, and our treatment was not very different from that of the others".

R.S. says that in the arms factory at Salzwedel "the workers often helped us, slipped a little food in our hands, this was strictly forbidden, but we often got a little bacon in that way." S.J. was caught by a female SS taking a little bread from a German civilian. Although she beat her with a truncheaon demanding who else had got food in such a way, she would not tell her that all eighty of her fellow women prisoners had.

In addition to selfless philanthropic behaviour, there were cases when the workers, who were "very nice" otherwise too, helped the Jews in return for "a little extra work or other small favours." Sz.N. worked for three months in Gelsenberg(?) removing ruins. There "some of the workers behaved quite decently with us, but others were rather rude and used abusive language." K.N. and her sister L. were making grenades in a plant of the Krupp Works at Wüstegierdorf. Here the workers also slipped them food sometimes. "Among the workers mostly the young were great followers of Hitler, and even our Kommandant, who was otherwise a very decent man and treated us well, believed in German victory till the last moment." K.B. and her four friends were often beaten by the women inspectors, but in the arms factory at Malchow "the civilian German girls behaved very decently with us." S.B. and her fellow women prisoners were first received malevolently by the workers, "but later we made friends and they became very tame." On the other hand, H.M. and her friends were initially treated well by the workers in the electric bulb factory at Weiswasser, "they became rude towards the end, when they saw the unavoidable end approaching."

Z.S. and her friends survived in Torgau in the spring of 1945 only because when the ammunition factory received an order from Buchenwald to shoot all the Jewish prisoners, the answer was sent back, "the factory owner needs us." According to the deposition of S.A., the owner of the electric bulb factory at Weiswasser treated each Jewish prisoner individually, "he even saw to it that siblings stayed together, and he went as far as taking the sister of the selected working woman, too, even if she was not quite adequate." A.Sz. says about the same man, that when one of his women labourers got sick, he gave her special vitamin tablets and immediately took her to the doctor. In that factory he gave orders to the SS, and he would not tolerate maltreatment of the prisoners. L.K. remembered with gratitude the German craftsmen in the factory at Fallersleben, who did not allow the SS women to hit very hard.

Many Jewish survivors met German communist workers, too, in the various factories and plants. In the Max Gerhart aircraft-parts factory at Penig only the communist workers were friendly to the Jews. "Whenever it was possible, we wrecked the machines and wasted the material. There was a German craftsman who encouraged us to do as much destruction as possible. He even gave us bread," says K.Ü. W.S. worked at Reichenbach in the Telefunken factory, and the foremen (Vorarbeiter) there were mostly communists, "and they were very

good to us. They brought us bread, fruits, one of them even gave me a pair of stockings," she remembers gratefully.

Many of these people established close, humane relations with their German colleagues. G.T. remembers his Viennese foreman called Wirst, who "often gave me his own quicklunch." Mrs B.M worked in the Argus factory in Berlin-Sch”nholz. Most of the craftsmen there were communists; one of them ("uncle Peter") sent her apples when she was ill, distributed biscuits among them on his own birthday, and each of them was given two pieces of cake at Christmas.

S.E. and her fellow women prisoners arrived in Neustadt bei Coburg after Auschwitz and Ravensbrück on August 16, 1944. The workers in the local factory received them with suspicion believing that the newcomers were criminals. They had not heard about Auschwitz, but when they were told everything, "they were stunned, full of sympathy. First they were listening to me incredulously, later I completely won their confidence, and we became friends."

K.K. at Venusberg was encouraged by her German foreman, who comforted her by saying "this horror cannot last much longer."

Jen“ Ligeti, a journalist from Szeged, one of the oldest survivors of the Holocaust (born in 1875, he was 69 in 1944) was a prisoner in Weitra-Schützen(?) from July 17, 1944 to April 19, 1945. He calls Mih ly Semper, the local Nazi district leader, whom he remembers being a convinced antisemite and Hitlerist, the "charitable man" of their camp. "This man lived in a little village in the neighbourhood, where he had a little garden, and from there he walked to work every morning. He brought his breakfast and lunch every morning in his bagpack, and he faithfully shared his meals with a young Jewish woman and her daughter. In addition, he brought in his bagpack things he grew like apples, pears, in the winter potatoes, which he distributed among the Jews... I asked him how he can square swastika and antisemitism with what he was doing, and he said he hated Jews as a people in general, but individuals were different. After all, they were human beings just like the others, and had a right to live, especially if they were honest people as we were."

Humane guards

I have found 63 DEGOB records that contain data about humane SA and SS guards, benevolent camp inspectors, "normally" behaving Todt-member foremen. S.G. and her mates were guarded by SS women, and she says, "they treated us reasonably well." Henrik Ackermann, tinker-plumber worked in a railway construction brigade; they were 503 [just like Reserve Police Battalion 101... L. K.], travelled all over Germany, and as he says, "both the food and the treatment were tolerable." If, like Goldhagen, I went on analysing this one brigade, Germany would appear to have been a veritable paradise in 1944-1945.... E.L. is also well aware that often it was a matter of pure chance what SA guards one got. As he says, "there were places where the SA overseers shot people without any reason.... In Moschendorf... we were treated reasonably well, under SA supervision.... The food was also acceptable. There was no strictness at work, we could say there was no control at all."

Forced labourer T.E. and his comrades arrived in Schattendorf in late autumn 1944, where they were finally taken over by the SA. "The SA men treated us very nicely, in all respects they were better than the Hungarian guards. They fed us properly and put us up in schools."

The guards of G.S. were all elderly people and this is obviously why they treated her and her fellow prisoners well in Bunzlau. G.R. and her fellow women prisoners did some extra sewing besides their work, and so they were given SS meals and had no reason to complain of the treatment either. B.L. and her sister K. says that as long as SS men guarded them at Bromberg, the treatment was good, but two weeks later their guards were replaced by SS women, "who were wild beasts in human shape. They beat us without any reson."

Forced labourer Andor L”bl also sees the differences among the various SS units. In the beginning he and his comrades were digging trenches and tank traps near BŁcsŁ. "The treatment was fairly good although were posted unnder the SS. There were no beatings, tortures, or undeserved punishment. The reason obviously was that the SS commander, and Austrian engineer had forbidden any cruelty." Later, in the spring of 1945, they were marched over four hundred kilometres. "On the way we came to know the real SS, those animals who had shed the last vestiges of humanity, who beat up Jews without any pretext, and who knew only one kind of punishment, shooting to kill."

According to Goldhagen's description, Jews were literally slaughtered in every camp and at every place of forced labour. Of the counter-examples, let me cite the case of S.P., who says that in Schattendorf, where he worked from end of January to March 29, 1945, thanks to the humane treatment, out of the 1,200 prisoners "we had only 26 dead, and they had arrived from Hungary in very bad shape."

The Hungarian Jews who survived deportations, concentration camps and death marches occasionally remember humane gestures. Mrs Zsigmond Goldstein encountered very nice guards at Edelstett, "some of them gave us their own bread."

Blacksmith S muel Fischmann and his friends were brought food by their German colleagues, but he has no complaints against their SS guards either. Indeed, "there was an SS guard we called 'our father', he brought us bread he bought for his own money." An occasional compassionate SS guard could be of great help. Mrs. Mih ly Reich says, that in Bergen-Belsen, "the Appels, thanks to one kindhearted SS soldier, went quite well."

Dr Erzs‚bet Schenk, a physician, met a humane SS woman guard at Gelsenkirchen. In August, 1944 this woman was escorting her and nine other women prisoners to the hospital at Horst. "as I was crossing a street, we met a little old woman, who was carrying fruit cakes in a baking pan on her head. When she saw us, the took the pan from her head and distributed the cakes among us. The guard told her she must not do this, but she did not care, scolding the woman that she should not be so cruel, couldn't she see how hungry these poor women were, and the good God would reward her for the cakes. The SS woman did not report this later in the camp, I know that for sure. The SS woman was called Maria Reich, and on another occasion she knelt before one of the feeble and sick h„ftlings and laced her shoes. This woman was later posted somewhere else."

E.R. had a compassionate camp commander at Allendorf, S.B. at Summerdach. Mrs. L.H. was prisoner at Türkheim, and she knows their Lagerführer had been posted to that camp not long before. "He had the French Jews executed. Hard to know why, he was good to us, he beat none of us and he was relatively fair." T.M. even knows the name of that camp commander, he was Karl Hoffmann, and he was very good to them, "forbade beatings,... although he had killed many people before in Auschwitz and Dachau." Thanks to this commander, S.B. and her fellow women prisoners were also put up in clean barracks, they could wash, were issued

warm trousers, their coats were not confiscated, were given shoes, and their provisions were better, too. Very probably Hoffmann treated his prisoners well so that they could testify to his benevolent activities after the war. Jen“ Wellisch and his comrades even signed a document that "he was good to us, but later it turned out that he had had many French soldiers executed in France, so the Americans shot him." R.E. and her fellow women prisoners were supervised at Lanzberg by an Oberschaftführer who had "worked with dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, the lives of a great many people burdened his conscience, and as if he had wanted to make good his mistakes [sic!] he saw that were were clean and treated us well."

In many places the camp commanders could prevent the guards from being cruel to the prisoners. W.E. was in Auschwitz from May 27, 1944 to January 18, 1945, i.e. the closing down of that ill-famed camp. With four hundred othrs, he was learning in a brick-layer school. "The treatment [was] fairly good, here even the SS and the kapos were forbidden to beat us. Once, however, a Hungarian speaking SS hit somebody, and the man reported the case to the Lagerführer, that is, that he had been hit without reason, and the SS was locked up for two weeks....Only the healthy were allowed to work by Lagerführer Schwartz, and he had new clothes and boots issued for those who had bad clothes and boots.." G.B. was imprisoned at Donnerskirchen from December 24, 1944 to April 6, 1945. For one and a half months the commander was a sadist, murderous SS sergeant. "This murderer was taken from us because he became ill. Then a new commander came. He had those who were alive brought in from the hospital. The situation changed completely. It was easier to slip into the village to get food. The population was very kind, they tried to help us."

It would probably seem more logical to posterity that during 1944 and 1945 more and more Germans realized that sooner or later the war would be lost. There must have been Germans who, like Hoffmann, were lead by this realization to treat the Jews leniently hoping that they would be paid back after the war. Yet, T.A. and her fellow women prisoners experienced that their Women SS guards were "good" to them only as long as they believed in victory, "but when they learned that the end was coming, they were enraged and became unutterably evil."

Forced labourer N.I. worked near Bruck with many others guarded by the SA. They were "normally" fed, and they had "no complaints [against their guards] in general... They set up a revier [infirmary], the sick were allowed to remain in, they were medically [sic!] treated."

S ndor Brenner was less lucky. Von Thomann, camp commander at Neukammen was a "strict but indifferent antisemite," who "did not want to send as many as possible unfortunates to their deaths. The SS were also tolerable, but we suffered a lot from the Vorarbeiters, capos, Blokkersters [block commanders -- L.K.] and Stubediensts [room commanders -- L.K.]. These showed their sadist tendencies not only at work but in the camp as well."

Many owed their lives to SS soldiers and officers. S.R. and her sister S.S. were sent to Auschwitz together. When they were separated at one of the selections, one of them (the testimony they gave together does not tell precisely which of them) ran to the wire fence with high voltage in it. "there the guard caught me and asked me if I did not want to live any more; I told him that they wanted to separate me from my sister, and he took pity on me and took me back to the block to my sister." B.L. and his comrades suffered a lot from the cruelty of their own Hungarian guards. These started to murder them wholesale at Zombor when, fortunately for them, an SS arrived on horseback and this man " forbade further killings, and he even promised we would not be driven as hard as we had been so far." According to W.A., the local population at Schattendorf also behaved very well to the Hungarian forced labourers,

and the SA guards looked the other way when the Hungarians went into peasant houses "to have meals". W.A. adds, "Contrary to orders, the sick were not shot, but distributed in peasant houses where they were treated until the Russians came in." S.H. and his comrades were marched from Buchenwald to Dachau in the spring of 1945. On the way, at a village called Undorf, SS Sergeant Spiess ordered the guard to execute the whole brigade. Out of the 60-men strong SS guard only eight was ready to do the slaughter. "Then the sergeant declared he would take care of us in Dachau." S.H. was told in Buchenwald in the spring of 1945 by a German soldier that "the SS had been called to volunteer to kill the Jews.... They had been issued handgrenades, they would have had to kill 600 Jews with those. However, very few had volunteered, and thus it came to nothing." K.R. provides a logical answer to why her fellow women prisoners, who had wanted to escape and been caught, were not executed at Horneburg: "The girls ought to have been shot, but the SS escorting the march knew us already, sympathized with us, and did not want to do it. Therefore, they [the SS] were replaced."

E.I. relates that when an exanthematic typhus epidemic broke out in their regiment of forced labourers, the SA guards decided to shoot the sick, but the commander, Major Binder "did not allow the mass slaughter, and this is why I am alive."

K.P. and her fellow women prisoners were marched from Dachau for three weeks in the spring of 1945. They were escorted by SS soldiers, and "there were good people among them, who got us food on the way."

Endre Blum and his comrades were started off on foot towards Gunskirchen on March 29, 1945. His 60-year old uncle was too weak, collapsed, and he tried to drag him along, but being very weak himself, he could not even lift him. "One of the escorting SS saw us, came to us, helped the old man to his feet, encouraging him just come on, come on." L.A. and her women comrades were marched for five days from Grünberg to Guben before the advancing Russians. "We hardly got food on the way, often all we had for a whole day was black coffee. Those who could not walk were put on wagons, but they were not harmed because we had a very good Oberschaarführer." G.S. and her fellow women prisoners were marched from Grünberg to Bergen-Belsen in deep snow, in biting cold weather in March. "The SS got clothes from the local population, but we could not get shoes, so we rolled our feet in rags. The guards got a cow on the way, and had it slaughtered it for us."

The guards of K.P. and her companions, in the spring of 1945, "did not mind what we were doing, they allowed us to get food for ourselves" when they were marching them for four days from Malchow.

Mikl˘s Szalai also met an SS Obersturmführer in the spring of 1945 who wanted merely to survive the war, and was rather more interested in saving than killing Jews. He was first taken to Mettenheim, then, in early April, he was entrained to be taken towards Innsbruck, to an extermination camp, "but our commander, an excellent SS Obersturmführer always ordered the whole train to go back and forth, and handed the whole train over to the Americans."

Humane soldiers

I have found 29 records that contained mentions by Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust of Wehrmacht officers, soldiers, and guards who behaved kindly towards them. Sometimes it was a matter of simple gestures. M.J. and her fellow women prisoners were

warned by a Wehrmacht soldier to try to escape if possible because the factory had been undermined by the SS. M.L. and her companions were treated well in the aircraft factory at Barth by the supervisors and the Wehrmach soldiers, "but the Polish Aryan women constantly battered us," she added.

™.I. and A.L. were among the fortunate few Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz who were found fit for work, and, after a couple of days, they were transported from that death camp. All ™.I. says was that they were taken to Breslau, and "the members of the Wehrmacht escort were very good." A.L. remembers travelling two days and one night to Guben withoutbeing given anything to eat. "Fortunately we had very good Wehrmach soldiers for an escort, who not only behaved very decently, but even bought us some black coffee for their own money, and they gave us that to drink." The Wehrmacht guard even obtained bacon and bread for G.T. and his friends in Laurahütte. K.T. and his fellow forced labourers in Herzbruck near Nuremberg suffered particularly much from the "mean" Ukrainian guardsmen, "but the Wehrmach soldiers -- unfortunately, they were too few -- behaved very well, even giving us food if they could."

P.I. served in the Ukraine as a military forced labourer. Once their company commander, Antal Sallai had the horses unharnessed from the wagon on a steep section of the road and, sitting on the driver's seat himself, forced the Jews to pull the wagon, "cracking his whip, up the hill. The commotion caused the German officers quartered in the houses along the road to come out. One of them became so scandalized that he pointed his revolver at Sallai. 'A sadist animal like that deserves nothing but to be shot! These are harmful to society, so they must be exterminated!' Had it not been for the escort and other soldiers, he would have shot Sallai."

Cs.Gy. and his fellow forced labourers were relatively well off as long as they were overseen by Wehrmacht soldiers. But when the SA took over guarding them, "they murdered people." F.I. mentioned with emphasis that when on March 26, 1944 he joined his unit of military forced labourers at Acquincum, "the German commanders [at the Wehrmacht] were good, and treated us in the politest possible manner. We never heard anything but 'Bitte sehr, danke sch”n', and every day we were issued four leave passes, and on Sundays everyone could go on leave."

The soldiers of the Wehrmacht even got into a brawl with the SS at Wolfsberg because they did not allow the SS to slaughter M.D. and his fellow prisoners. W.L. and about forty of his fellow deserters from the army were captured and turtured at Nyˇrpuszta by Hungarian gendarmes. Their execution was prevented by a German lieutenant who took them over as unskilled labourers. Gyula V‚szi (Weil) and his comrades were received by an Austrian sergeant called Borban Scheidl, who "told us not to be afraid, we would not be harmed, and if we had any complaints against the Hungarian escort, just tell him, and he would look after us. It is thanks to this man that we have been able to survive despite the behaviour of the camp commander and the escorting troops."

Humane policemen

I have found three depositions that mention gendarmes and a Gestapo sergeant who saved Jews.

S ndor Eisler and his comrades were marched to Germany late in the autumn of 1944. "We always went on foot, six weeks in a row, we had no food at all, we even ate snails on the way.

On a Saturday, one of the SS shot 150 men on the march, he stopped at the roadside and mowed down the boys with a light machine-gun. We had to pick up the corpses lying in the ditch and load them on a lorry. Fortunately, an Austrian military policeman arrived there by motorbicycle and asked the SS at whose orders he was shooting the men. He answered he just felt like doing it. But then, at orders from the policeman, he stopped shooting."

D.D. escaped in a very romantic manner. On April 7, 1945, he sneaked away from the transport, which he had been forced to join at the evacuation of Bergen-Belsen. He spent one night in a barn, but in the morning was found in the straw by the farmer's wife. He was fed by both the woman and her daughter, and then the farmer accompanied him to the neighbouring village to the gendarmerie. "The German gendarme commander was a very good man, asked me to take a seat, which I didn't because I was dirty and full of vermins. He said to me, I can see you are a decent man, go out into the courtyard and sit down there. In a few minutes his wife gave me a big bowl of mashed potatoes, with butter, and coffee and bread-and-butter, and later gave me cigarettes, too." After all that, the gendarme commander escorted him to the next village and handed him over to another gendarme, who, upon hearing, after walking a little, that the Americans were already in Munich, set him free.

In the spring of 1945, Ferenc Farag˘ and his comrades were marched from Kalch towards Mauthausen. On the way their SA escort began to slaughter them. Before they got to Eisener, a Gestapo sergeant went into the village and called the local gendarmes, who then ordered the SA to stop the slaughter.

Humane Germans

We have 61 records testifying that simple German peasants and burgesses, seeing the sufferings of the Jews, tried to help them, or at least made them understand that they felt for them. This was not without risks at all. D.S. and her fellow women prisoners were supervised by brutal SS guards in Baumgart, who "battered us for little things.... For example, if a civilian threw us a little raw beetroot during work, were were beaten for it." E.H. worked with the Holzmann Polensky firm for eight months at Ebensee. Once he was caught doing business with a "Meister", who promised him 3 kilos of potatoes for 5 cigarettes. The German worker was locked up for four weeks. D.S. and his comrades were helping a German woman at Fehring around the house for two days, chopping wood, etc, "and we were slipped some food for that in secret. The woman was reported and she was arrested." Dr. Sz.L. was prisoner at Landshut in the spring of 1945, and that is where he first got in contact with German civilians. "They were Bavarian Catholics, and not Hitlerists at all. When they heard that we would be taken somewhere, they threw food to us on the way. A woman brought food to us out there, and when the SS prevented it, she started yelling at them in a horrible way, calling them 'SS dogs'. That woman was then taken away." Imre Berger and his comrades were marched from Eberau toward Mauthausen at the end of March, 1945: "whoever stooped to pick up anything, rape or a snail, was shot. But they shot a Christian man, too, who out of pity threw a piece of bread to the men." T.B. and his fellow prisoners were being driven at the same toward Gunskirchen from Mauthausen. According to his testimony, several other death marches had passed that way before them, and thus it was understandable that "the local Austrian inhabitants were very indignant because they could hardly keep up burying the corpses. If an Austrian risked giving a little bread or boiled potatoes to the Jews, the SS shot at their own brethren."

P.J. saw in Wells, that "the local Austrians tried to help us with food.... when they handed us food out of the window, the SS shot in through the window."

M.G. was in Auschwitz when for eight days in August 1944 people were burnt alive in large pits. She says that "one of the German SS officers did not want to do it any more, whereupon he was burnt in the same way."

K.F. and his fellow prisoners were transported from Magdeburg to Buchenwald for eight days on the rails. "We were given nothing to drink or eat. The civilians on the way wanted very much to give us food, but the SS soldiers escorting us did not allow that."

Andor Krausz was taken to Engerau(?), where he and his fellow forced labourers were digging dug-outs and approach trenches. As he says, "We were always hungry and cold. The locals were very kindhearted. In the beginning they brought us food to trade, but later they were forbidden to, under pain of death, yet they found ways to send us a parcel ocassionally. Wherever we went, a parcel was thrown in front of us from a window or from a gate." Jen“ Wojticzki and his comrades were driven from Graz toward Mauthausen in March, 1945: "The Austrians were fairly compassionate but were marched through in so large masses that they were unable to satisfy us. They were especially nice to us in Styria, in many places people even wept for us. They gave me a sackful of potatoes, this is what saved me from dying of starvation." Andor Gerlei marched from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen in April, 1945: "We marched through towns where the inhabitants watched our sad group with tears in their eyes, they stood in the gates, held out jugs of water for us, they offered us warm food. But the escorting SS prevented us from accepting these." Dr. Imre Szer‚nyi and his fellow prisoners were marched from Hannover to Bergen-Belsen for four days: "On the way people fetched water before the gate[s], but we could drink stealthily only because if the guards saw it, they punished us."

The Hungarian Jews who were taken to Türkheim were relatively lucky. Not only the local camp commander treated them kindly (as we have shown on a number of examples), but, as T.M. remembers, "the village was famous for not being Nazi at heart. On Sundays families came to visit even before the liberation, threw food into the camp and waved to us."

In some cases the change of guards meant decisive changes in the lives of the prisoners as well. K.B., a forced labourer at Fert“r kos was first guarded by Sudeten Germans, but luckily, at the end of January, 1945, "these mean Sudeten Germans were relieved by Bavarians. The Bavarians treated us humanely."

S.G. marched for six weeks from Magdeburg guarded by compassionate SS guards; on the way they obtained food from peasants. S.H. had similar experiences in the neighbourhood of Torn. J.V. saw in Mühldorf that, in contrast to their brutal guards, "the local inhabitants behaved very nicely, they often brought us food to the workplace." K.E. also found himself with benevolent Austrian peasants at St. Martin, near the Hungarian border, who fed their Jewish labourers properly. He remembers a woman, who "was waiting for us every morning at the workplace with bread, baked potatoes, cakes and apples." The philosemitic peasants at Schattendorf have been mentioned above. W.E., a chemical engineer, worked in the village from December 3, 1944 to March 28, 1945: "The inhabitants were unimaginably friendly. Every peasant dined ten-fifteen Jews every evening. We were sitting in a warm room, at a table, and had enough food. We were provided with everything, and we did not ask for it but they willingly brought and threw the parcels in front of us, although the Gestapo had

threatened them." L szl˘ Wallerstein saw in Siegendorf that "the locals did their best to alleviate our hard lot." E.E. saw in Bruck that they had enough food not only at their workplace, but "the locals also provided us with everything." L szl˘ Falus felt at the same place that "the people in the town behaved very decently, if we met and they had some bread, they distributed that among us, or they left out breadcrust and waved to us to take it."

Gyula Glasen also heard political news in secret from the people in Bruck. He mentions gratefully that the Austrians "constantly encouraged us and we hoped we would be free soon.... The local civilians tried to help us with food, but later the Hitlerjugend made this completely impossible."

Jen“ Ligeti says about the workers and the residents in general of the little Austrian town of Weitra-Schützen that "with few exceptions they were very charitable and very good to us, that is, perhaps not to us, but they simply hated Hitler."

Some of the survivors owed their lives to German and Austrian doctors and nurses. K.J. was taken to hospital in Gy“r in December, 1944, where "there were German doctors and nurses, but they treated us very well and they loved us." Mrs. Imre Marton, n‚e Otti Kov cs was prisoner in Lichtenw”rten from November 9, 1944 to April 13, 1945. She remembers thankfully Dr. Hans Dimel, the physician of the camp, who "practically stole medicines to help the inmates of the camp.... The doctors admitted everyone they could, and the nuns tended the Jews selflessly, doing their best to nourish them. Of course, Jewish deportees were allowed third class treatment only, but the nuns secretly gave us treatment like in a sanatorium and many deportees owe their lives to them only."

Epilogue

Daniel J. Goldhagen has tried to use his documentary material to prove his forced preconception rather than to reconstruct past history as precisley as possible. The DEGOB records cited above also support what we have known all along, namely, that there were a great number of people among Germans during World War II who were able to remain human beings in that world of inhumanity and devastating insanity. Often it was the same Hungarian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, giving accounts of brutal, sadist, antisemitic Germans that remembered gratefully a humane German guard, worker or peasant. The genocidal deeds of mass murderers do not obliterate, cannot overshadow the fact that there were thousands, ten of thousands of Germans who helped, or tried to help persecuted Jews, or at least earnestly felt for them. The behaviour of the German perpetrators of the mass murders cannot be used as grounds for general conclusions on Germans, on German culture, nor can philosemitic Germans be regarded as the representatives of the "real" Germany.

. Marrus, Michael R.: "Good History" and Teaching the Holocaust (in: Perspectives. American Historical Association Newsletter, May-June 1993, Vol. 31. No. 5., pp. 1, 6-12.)

. Katz, Steven T.: The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. 1. The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, New York--Oxford, 1994.)

. Trunk, Isaiah: The Typology of Judenr„te in Eastern Europe (in: rescue Attempts during the Holocaust. Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Ed. Y. Gutman and E. Zuroff. Jerusalem, 1977, pp. 17-30.), and Trunk, I.: Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (The Macmillan Company, New York-London, 1972);Weiss, Aharon: Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland: Postured and Attitudes (Yad Vashem Studies 12. [1977], pp. 335-365.) - in Hungarian: Schmidt M ria: Kollabor ci˘ vagy kooper ci˘? A Budapesti Zsid˘ Tan cs [Collaboration or cooperation? The Budapest Jewish Council] (Minerva K., Budapest, 1990.)

.˙Bauer, Yehuda: Forms of Jewish Resistance (in: Niewyk, Donald L (ed.): The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. (Lexington, Mass., DC. Heath, 1992, pp. 129-145.)

.˙For a summary of the debate between the intentionalists and functionalists, in Hungarian, see: Tomka, B‚la: A Holocaust genezise [The genesis of the Holocaust] (Val˘s g, 1992. No. 10. pp. 40-48.); in English: Michael R. Marrus: The Holocaust in History (Penguin Books, London, 1989, pp. 31-54.).

.˙Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah: Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996.) -- Henceforth: Goldhagen, 1996.

.˙Information curtesy of Dr Éva Kelemen.

.˙For the summary on the Internet by Maria Mitchell and Peter Caldwell of the Goldhagen debate of OSHMM, see H-German-H-Net-List on German History, April 11, 1996.

.˙HTTP://H-NETZ2.MSU.EDU-H-German. Subject: Goldhagen. Debate & Role of Historians.

.˙Dr Yaacov Lozowick, director of the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem described the style of Goldhagen's book as arrogant, conceited, rude and disrespectful, adding that it is a work written "in rage." Lozowick, Yaacov: Written in Rage (Yad Vashem Magazine, Vol. 2. June 1996, pp. 12-13. Robert Wistrich underlines in connection with Goldhagen's work that its polemic style does not bear doubts or nuances, and the author has difficulty hiding his smugness. Wistrich, Robert S.: Helping Hitler (Commentary, July 1996, No. 1. pp. 27-31.).

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 11-12.

.˙It is characteristic of Goldhagen's self-assurance in one place, pointing out that the literature on the subject has reached conclusions conflicting with his own, he declares he does not fell obliged to cite these works. Goldhagen, 1996, p. 512. n. 1.

.˙The work in question is Zur Geschichte der Ordnungpolizei 1936-1945, and Goldhagen does not even mention its editor or the exact date of its publication. Goldhagen, 1996, p. 527. n. 1.

.˙Erich Goldhagen, survivor of the Holocaust, professor at Harvard, historian also specializing in the Holocaust.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 604.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 480. n. 33.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 9.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 15. He must have liked the comparison because he repeats it two more times (pp. 28, 45.).

.˙Goldhagen quotes the December 17, 1941 proclamation of Protestant Evangelical Church leaders, in which the Jews are called "geborene Welt- und Reichsfeinde", which he, in turn, translates into English as "born enemies of the world and Germany". (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 112. Emphasis mine -- L.K.) Incidentally, the above proclamation was not issued by the German Protestant church leaders, but by individual DC and so-called national Christian church leaders ("einige deutschchristliche" -- DC -- and "beziehungsweise nationalkirchliche Kirchenf�hrer).

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 583. n. 53.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996. Part I. Chapter 1. Recasting the View of Antisemitism: A Framework for Analysis pp. 27-48; Part VI: Eliminationist Antisemitism, Ordinary Germans, Willing Executioners; Chapter 15.: Explaining the Perpetrators' Actions: Assessing the Competing Explanations pp. 375-415.; Chapter 16.: Eliminationist Antisemitism as Genocidal Motivation pp. 416-454; Appendix 1. A Note on Method pp. 463-468.; Appendix 2. Schematization of the Dominant Beliefs in Germany about Jews, the Mentally Ill, and Slavs pp. 469-471.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 34.

.˙Katz, Jacob: From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700-1933 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1980.)

.˙"[T]he Jews were dominating the culture of a people which denied them both the right and the capacity to do so. The newspapers in the capital were about to become a Jewish monopoly; almost all directors of the Berlin theatres were Jews; so were many actors. German musical life without the Jews was almost unthinkable, and the study of German literature was also to a large extent in Jewsih hands. Everyone knew it; only the Jews pretended it was not worthy of notice; for what mattered, they claimed, were their achievements, their cultural and humanistic achievements. This [...] was a dangerous fallacy, for 'the others do not feel that we are Germans'," wrote Moritz Goldstein in his article "German-Jewish Parnassus" in the periodical "Der Kunstwart" in March, 1913. Quoted in> Laqueur, Walter: Zionism and Its Liberal Critics (Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 6., 1971., N. 4., p. 167.)

.˙In 1898 the small antisemitic parties in Germany got 284,250 votes, in 1907 of the 397 members of the Reichstag only sixteen ran originally with antisemitic programs, by 1914 all antisemitic parties had disintegrated, the antisemitic press was lying in ruins. For all this, in detail, see: Gordon, Sarah: Hitler, Germany, and the "Jewish Question" (Princeton, 1984) Chapter 1.

.˙Gordon, op. cit. pp. 10-14.

.˙Gordon, op. cit. pp. 46-48.

.˙Gordon, op. cit. p. 26.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 109.

.˙There were Jewish leaders in Germany already before World War I who suggested that further Jewish immigration be stopped arguing that the newcomers were causing increased antisemitism. The new immigrants were not allowed to vote in many local Jewish organizations, and there were significant everyday conflicts even within the Jewish community. For this, see: Gordon, op. cit. p. 10.

.˙In the debate of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum mentioned above Yehuda Bauer blamed not D. J. Goldhagen but his supervising professor for such a shoddy work coming into existence in the first place. 'Dany,' he turned to his younger colleague, 'you wouldn't have been able to defend this dissertation at our university!' (Oral information courtesy of Professor Istvan Deak, Columbia University, New York.)

It is difficult to see why in 1994 this dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association's Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. In his book, Goldhagen repeatedly refuses to discuss the history of antisemitism in other contries than Germany. See his arguments concerning this: Goldhagen, 1996, p. 77.

.˙Wistrich, 1996, p. 29.

.˙Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf. (Translated by Ralph Manheim. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1971. pp. 560-561.) Quoted in Dawidowicz, Lucy: The War against the Jews, 1933-1945 (Bantam Book, New York, 1986, p. 151.), with the remark that Hitler was exaggerating as usual. On December 1, 1941, Hitler remarked in one of his "table" talks: "Ten years ago our intellectual class hadn't the least idea what a Jew is." Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944 (Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, 1953, p. 115.)

.˙The identical elements in the propaganda of today's right-wing demagogue politicians and Hitler is pointed out through a subtle analysis in: Goriely, Georges: Extr‚me droite et droite extr‚me dans l'Allemagne des ann‚es 30 (L'Europe, �t‚ 1996, pp. 29-47.)

.˙The Times, October 10, 1930. Quoted in: Baynes, Norman H. (translation, ed.): The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922--August 1939 (Howard Fertig, New York, 1969, Vol. I. p. 727.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 32.

.˙Kater. Michael H.: The Nazi Party. A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919--1945 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, p. 263.) In 1919 the NSDAP had 55 members, in 1921 3,000, in 1924 55,287, in 1925 (Hitler in prison!) a few hundred, and in 1927 approximately 25,000. Kater, ibid.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 424.

.˙Baynes, op. cit. p. 727.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 109.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 90. On the boycott of April 1, 1933, see: Stokes, Lawrence, D.: The German People and the Destruction of European Jews (Central European History, June 1973, pp. 172-173.) In the Hungarian literature on the subject, the description of M ria Ormos is also unequivocal: "However, this first antisemitic provocation failed because the majority of Germans not sympathise with it." Ormos M ria: Hitler (T-Twins K., Budapest, 1993, p. 210.)

.˙Kershaw, Ian: The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich (Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1981, pp. 266-267.)

.˙Kershaw, op. cit. p. 269.

.˙Kershaw, op. cit. pp. 273, 276.

.˙Gordon, op. cit. pp. 175-176.

.˙Jen“ Ghyczy's report No. 176/pol-1938. [November 22] to the Foreign Ministry. Hungarian National Archives (henceforth: OL) K63 - papers of the political department of Foreign Ministry (Henceforth: K�m. pol.) 1938-43. subject: Germany, file 191, p. 68.

.˙Stokes op. cit. p. 175.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 99.

.˙"Jews, conceived of in Germany as being evil and destructive to the moral and social order, were supposed to suffer and die," writes Goldhagen (p. 169.)

.˙Once, and once only (p. 122.), Goldhagen admits that an antisemite can become a philosemite. He thinks that those who applauded the persecution of Jews became philosemites when it came to their "own," well-known Jewish neighbours.

.˙For one of the most comprehensive treatments of the Jewish policy of the Nazis before World War II, see: Schleunes, Karl A.: The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Nazy Policy toward German Jews, 1933-1939. (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1990.) See also: Burrin, Philippe: Hitler et les Juifs (Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1989.)

.˙Andor Van der Venne's report (74/pol.-1939. [September 9]) to Foreign Minister Istv n Cs ky OL-K63.-K�m.pol. 1939-21/1. subj: Germany, internal politics, f. 192., pp. 43-44.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 90.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 91.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 382.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 119.

.˙Gordon, Op. cit., p. 196.

.˙Hitler's Secret Conversations p. 193.

.˙Gordon, op. cit., p. 195.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 123.

.˙Hilberg, Raul: The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes and Meier, New York-London, 1985., vol. I. pp. 98-99.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 103, 106. For a more detailed description of the Germans' indifference, see: Gordon, op. cit., p. 5.

.˙Quoted in: Adelson, Alan and Lapides, Robert (eds.): Lodz Ghetto. Inside a Community under Siege (Penguin Books, New York, 1991, p. 175.)

.˙Adelson-Lapides, op. cit., p. 176. Rabbi Leo Baeck reported that when the Jews in Germany had to wear yellow stars after September 1, 1941, the inhabitants of Berlin and Hamburg treated them very decently. (Quoted in: Gordon, op. cit., p. 191.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 144.

.˙Browning, Christopher, R.: Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939-1941. (German Studies Review, October 1986, pp. 497-519.): Browning, Ch. R.: Nazi Ghettozation Policy in Poland 1939-1941 (Central European History, 1986, No. 4., pp. 343-368.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 146-147. The author in this issue adopts the analysis of I. Trunk, but the impressive documentary material that Ch. Browning lines up in his works mentioned above and uses to refute Trunk's thesis, is not deemed worthy even of Goldhagen's criticism.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 201.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 117.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 47. D”me Szt˘jay, Hungarian ambassador in Berlin remarked in connection with the reports of the general consuls in the autumn of 1941, "I read with interest the subsequent reports of General Consuls Miske [-Gerstenberger, Jen“] and Kvassay [L szl˘] on the mood of the population in Munich. The significant contradictions in these two reports show in themselves how risky and difficult it is to form a unified picture of the public mood in a country on the basis of observations made among the inhabitants of that country, or indeed, of a town or of a region." The report of D”me Szt˘jay (146/pol-1941. [october 31]) to Foreign Minister L szl˘ B rdossy. OL-K63.-K�m. pol.-1941-21/1. subj.: Germany, internal politics, f. 199. pp. 37-39.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 234; 551-552. n. 65. Sometimes he forgets what he has written earlier. In one place, he carefully says that in one of the camps a ten-year-old child "is said to have shot and killed his own mother." Fifteen lines later he gives it as fact: "The Germans induced a ten-year-old boy to kill his own mother." Ibid. p. 309.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 521. n. 76. claims that anyone who says that Hitler could, after some time, stop the slaughtering of the Jews, knows nothing about Hitler the general and the antisemite.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 537. n. 23.

.˙On November 12, 1940, the negotiations between Molotov and Ribbentrop in Berlin were disrupted by an air raid alarm. When down in the air-raid shelter Ribbentrop began to talk about England having lost the war already, Molotov is said to have interrupted him, saying, "Well, then why are we sitting in this air-raid shelter, and who are bombing Berlin?" Quoted in: Karsai Elek: A berchtesgardeni sasf‚szekt“l a berlini bunkerig [From the eagle's nest at Berchtesgarden to the bunker in Berlin] (T ncsics K, Budapest, 1961, p. 258.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 413.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 158, 399.

.˙Cohen, Asher: Pers‚cutions et sauvetages. Juifs et Fran‡ais sous l'Occupation et sous Vichy (�d. Cerf, Paris.)

.˙Report of D”me Szt˘jay to Foreign Minister Jen“ Ghyczy, 327/pol. 1943. [October 14] OL-K63-K�m. pol.-f. 206. Germany-21. subj.: Berlin., p. II. p. 942.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 390, 406, 408.

.˙De k Istv n: Could the Hungarian Jews Have Survived? (New York Review of Books, February 4, 1982, pp. 24-27.) Professor De k originally argued with those who tried to compare the conditions of the Hungarian Jews (about 800,000 people) to those of the Jews in Denmark (about 8,000 people).

.˙Mikl˘s Radn˘ti: "Fragment". In: Forced March. Selected Poems. Translated by George G”m”ri and Clive Wilmer (Carcanet, Manchester, 1979, p. 46.)

.˙Bauer, Yehuda: Defini lhat˘-e a Holocaust? [Can the Holcaust be defined?] (Val˘s g, 1987. 11. pp. 70-81. Translated by Pajkossy, G bor)

.˙Wistrich, 1996, p. 31.

.˙For the comments of Browning on April 8, 1996, at the USHMM debate, see M. Mitchell - P. Caldwell - Internet, loc.cit.

.˙When Professor Arno J. Mayer (Princeton University) claimed in one of his works that Hitler was first of all an anticommunist, and hated not the Jews but modern society, this rather dubious statement was called "lunatic fantasy" by American historian Lucy Dawidowicz. In detail, see: Dawidowicz, Lucy: Perversions of the Holocaust (Commentary, 1989 October, pp. 56-60., line quoted: p. 56.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 416. In the German edition of his work he himself admitted that monocausal explanations did not suffice for the understanding of the Holocaust, but he insisted that antisemitism was the decisive factor behind the Germans in Germany planning

and then executing the Holocaust all over Europe. For that, see the debate between D. J. Goldhagen and Josef Joffe, New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 2. (February 6, 1997) p. 40.

.˙Goldhagen, D. J.: The "Cowardly" Executioner: On Disobedience in the SS (Patterns of Prejudice 12, No. 1. (1978), pp. 1-16.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 4, 9.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 11. Later in his book he says the number of German mass murderers "was certainly over one hundred thousand", even more than 500,000. (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 167.)

.˙Browning, Christopher: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, Harper Collins, 1992.)

.˙Many of the members of the Einsatzgruppen, the special action groups that committed the mass murders on the Eastern front, had their nerves worn out under the burden of their "job", says Gideon Hausner, Chief Prosecutor of the Eichmann trial in his monograph. "The members of the firing squads soon became alcoholics. Some of them grumbled since it was not easy to shoot at children. Eichmann himself complained that these people soon became sadists." SS General Bach-Zelewski, says Hausner, advised Himmler to look the men of the firing squads in the eye if he wanted to see how worn out they all were. "These people have had their nerves ruined for their whole lives! We are making neurotics or savages here." Hausner, Gideon: It‚let Jeruzs lemben (Eur˘pa K., Budapest, 1984. Translated by Balab n, P‚ter, p. 131.) According to other data, at least 20% of the members of the genocidal Einsatzgruppen had serious psychological problems. For that, see: Lifton, Robert Lay: Medicalized Killing in Auschwitz (in: The Nazi Concentration Camps. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference - January 1980., Jerusalem, 1984, p. 211.)

.˙Report of the Ministry of Interior, No. 1942. [June 8]/14.496 VII. to the Foreign Ministry, OL-K/63K�m. pol.-f. 202. 1942. 21. subj.: Germany, pp. 62-64.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 301-302.

.˙Gordon, op. cit. pp. 181-182. See also: Laqueur, Walter Zeev: Hitler's Holocaust: Who Knew What, When, Where? (Encounter, July 1980, pp. 6-25.); Laqueur, W.Z.: The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (Little Brown, Boston, 1980.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 330, 364.

.˙In one of L szl˘ Tabi's stories about the war, in 1943 a forced labourer walked from the Don to Szolnok, Hungary, with a bucket in his hand. He was not stopped, he was not demanded to prove his identity since everyone saw the bucket in his hand, and it was obvious that he was going somewhere for water. Finally, an alert Hungarian military policeman noticed that the bucket had no bottom. Tabi L szl˘: Mit tud egy v”d”r? [What is a bucket good for?] (in: Humorban p colva [Pickled in humour], Magvet“ K., Budapest, 1955., pp. 67-69.)

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 205-208, 455.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 31, 601. n. 11.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 388, 434.

.˙As far as we know, there are about five hundred of the DEGOB depositions in English in the YIVO Institute in New York. The Yad Vashem Archives keep approximately 3,600 such records in English and Hungarian. The last document among those in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (henceforth: MZSML [Magyar Zsid˘ MŁzeum ‚s Lev‚lt r]) carries the number 3,662. Unfortunately, 24 are missing from among the records numbered 1 to 3,662. During my researches recently among the partially uncatalogued documents of MZSML I have found 67 unnumbered DEGOB testimonies.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, p. 529.

.˙Karsai Elek - Karsai L szl˘: A Sz lasi per [The trial of Sz lasi] (Reform K., Budapest, 1988.); Karsai L szl˘ - Moln r Judit: Az Endre-Baky-Jaross per [The trial of Endre, Baky and Jaross] (Cser‚pfalvi K., Budapest, 1994.). At present, with my colleague, Judit Moln r, we are editing for publication the documentary material of the people's court trial of D”me Szt˘jay and his accomplices.

.˙Goldhagen, 1996, pp. 311-312, 314.

.˙MZSML-DEGOB-1004. (In accordance with the provisions of the laws on data protection and archives currently in force on Hungary, and for the protection of personal rights, I give the initials only of the persons born after 1907. -- L.K.) W.R. and her comrades, besides separate beds, had tables, chairs, cupboards, proper bath, indeed, a "restaurant", "so here we could again feel that we were humans." Ibid.-2282. Similar conditions of accommodation are described by R.S., who was worked in an arms factory at Salzwelden. Ibid.-684; and by F.S., forced to work in an ammunition factory at Grunben(?). Ibid.-777.

.˙Ibid.-1342. H.J. worked at Monowitz as an engine fitter, living in wooden barracks, and he was issued two blankets and even a quilted silk coverlet. Ibid.-2013. After Auschwitz, S.E. felt she was in a "sanatorium" when at Ravensbr�ck, at orders from a Wehrmach officer, "everybody was given spoons, bowls, jugs, we had one bed for two on average, and we had blankets, too. All we had to do was the Appel from 4 to 7 in the morning; after 7 we went back to bed, and even had breakfast in bed." Ibid.-3554.

.˙Ibid.-1567. W.S. worked in an ammunition factory at Torgau for seven months. Their living quarters had central heating, with hot water, they could take a hot bath every second week. Ibid.-2263.

.˙Ibid.-1990.

.˙Ibid.-2096.

.˙Ibid.-2602.

.˙Ibid.-2538.

.˙Ibid.-1343.

.˙Ibid.-1406.

.˙Ibid.-1664.

.˙Ibid.-2185.

.˙Ibid.-1807.

.˙Ibid.-2013.

.˙Ibid.-3320.

.˙Ibid.-3148.

.˙Ibid.-684.

.˙Ibid.-1968.

.˙Ibid.-Mrs. S.J. Ibid.-1661.

.˙Ibid.-1663.

.˙Ibid.-2999.

.˙Ibid.-1672.

.˙Ibid.-1010.

.˙Ibid.-1276.

.˙Ibid.-2096.

.˙Ibid.-2140.

.˙Ibid.-3171.

.˙Ibid.-3322.

.˙Ibid.-2250. P.A. worked in the same factory, and had similar memories to those of K.�. Ibid.-2326.

.˙Ibid.-2450.

.˙Ibid.-2695. In Bruck, Sz.S. worked together with a Todt engineer, who was very decent to him, and provided him with many things. Ibid.-3073.

.˙Ibid.-3549.

.˙Ibid.-3554.

.˙Ibid.-2393.

.˙Ibid.-3555.

.˙Ibid.-576. B.H. had similar experiences in the ammunition factory at Malhof (Ibid.-1005); S.E., at Lieberstadt (Ibid.-1342); and R.S. at N‚metl”v“ (Ibid.-1880.)

.˙Ibid.-1368.

.˙Ibid.-2690.

.˙Ibid.-1737.

.˙Ibid.-1774. Salamon L”winger met kindhearted elderly SS guards at Offenburg, as did B.A. at Laingen. Ibid.-3416., and 3442.

.˙Ibid.-3313.

.˙Ibid.-2209. Unlike Goldhagen, G.S. does not generalize. At Gelsenkirchen they were guarded by SS soldiers, who included good ones and bad ones. Ibid.-1018. N.I. and his comrades were "badly beaten except by two or three SS." Ibid.-1026. S ndor Weisz forced labourer was luckier near Bruck, they were supervised by SA guards from Vienna, and they treated them fairly well. "But there were four or five among them, who were malicious. These battered us, even if we did the most and the best work." Ibid.-2547.

.˙Ibid.-2333.

.˙Ibid.-2537.

.˙Ibid.-2261. Mrs. B.Gy. and W.J. also met kind women SS guards at Burgau. Ibid.-2787., and 3236. Mrs. Sandor Kürthy artist craftswoman and her comrades were treated compassionately by their German woman block commander in the prisoners' camp at Ravensbrück, and they were similarly treated at Königs-Wasterhausen by their women SS guards. Ibid.-2846.

.˙Ibid.-3011.

.˙Ibid.-3051.

.˙Ibid.-3551.

.˙Ibid.-1073, 1340.

.˙Ibid.-2194.

.˙Ibid.-3012.

.˙Ibid.-3008. F.S. had similar experiences in the same camp. Ibid.-3026.

.˙Ibid.-3113.

.˙Ibid.-3060. As far as R.E. knows, about four women died in that camp between November 20, 1944 and April 23, 1945.

.˙Ibid.-2077.

.˙Ibid.-2556.

.˙Ibid.-2183.

.˙Ibid.-2927. He recalls exactly: "We got every day half a kilo of bread, half a litre of sweet coffee, 7 decilitres of thick soup, the same in the evening, Wednesday noon mangel, Saturday evening beetroot-soup, Sunday noon noodle soup with meat, in the evening a cold supper of 5 dekagrs of margarine, 5 dekagrs of salami and 5 dekagrs of cheese."

.˙Ibid.-2936.

.˙Ibid.-1095.

.˙Ibid.-1788.

.˙Ibid.-1976. B.A. also worked digging trenches at Schattendorf under the supervision of the SA, and had similar experiences. Ibid.-2166. Laszlo Wallerstein met humane SA commanders at Siegendorf. Ibid.-2177.

.˙Ibid.-2096.

.˙Ibid.-1228.

.˙Ibid.-2196.

.˙Ibid.-2440.

.˙Ibid.-2258.

.˙Ibid.-2126.

.˙Ibid.-1653.

.˙Ibid.-1774.

.˙Ibid.-1674.

.˙Ibid.-1617.

.˙Ibid.-131.

.˙Ibid.-862. "Decent" Wehrmach guards are mentioned by G.O. in Schaulen, and H.H. in Breslau. Ibid.-1856. Rudolf Braun worked at Nagylozs under kind, elderly Wehrmach soldiers. Ibid.-1903. L.G. met humane Wehrmacht soldiers at Wüstegiersdorf. Ibid.-3116.

.˙Ibid.-1343.

.˙Ibid.-1411.

.˙Ibid.-2695.

.˙Ibid.-3224.

.˙Ibid.-3014.

.˙Ibid.-2424.

.˙Ibid.-3489.

.˙Ibid.-1301. F.L. remembers with special gratitude a soldier called Brino, who treated them well, "protected us from the SS, and fought for us." Ibid.-1825.

.˙Ibid.-2971.

.˙Ibid.-3603.

.˙Ibid.-2881.

.˙Ibid.-2943.

.˙Ibid.-3027.

.˙Ibid.-1650.

.˙Ibid.-1658.

.˙Ibid.-2415.

.˙Ibid.-3563.

.˙Ibid.-2553.

.˙Ibid.-2091.

.˙Ibid.-3326.

.˙Ibid.-2332.

.˙Ibid.-1675.

.˙Ibid.-2175.

.˙Ibid.-2454.

.˙Ibid.-2599.

.˙Ibid.-2593.

.˙Ibid.-3012.

.˙Ibid.-2609.

.˙Ibid.-576; 726.

.˙Ibid.-783.

.˙Ibid.-1160.

.˙Ibid.-1906. W.E., B.A., and Dr. S.A. had similar experiences in that village.˙Ibid.-1976., 2166., 3189.

.˙Ibid.-2177.

.˙Ibid.-2555. N ndor Pfeufer had the same experience at Bruck.˙Ibid.-2449.

.˙Ibid.-3024.

.˙Ibid.-3140.

.˙Ibid.-3555.

.˙Ibid.-1817.

.˙Ibid.-2444.