Published: 26 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHILE MOST ISRAELI and American historians of the Shoah have tended to devote more attention to its Jewish victims, German academics have excelled at the study of their "own" people: the troops, police, Nazi leadership, the common people, the decision-making processes.
That particular interest led to the rise of the Tätergeschichte ("the history of the perpetrators"), a stream of historical writing that has become a trademark of German historians dealing with the Holocaust.
But that immovable, exclusive focus on how the Holocaust was solely and uniquely perpetrated by Germany is now in danger of leading to the distortion, even falsification, of the history of the Holocaust.
To understand this surprising claim, let’s take a trip to Tutzing, a picturesque village close to Munich. I was participating in an academic workshop there that brought together German and other specialists in the history of the Holocaust, and "paired" German scholars with their non-German counterparts to discuss differences in our approaches to history.
It quickly became obvious that some of our German colleagues felt that their "perpetrators’ history" specialism had reached its logical end. The explanations had been found: the hundreds, of studies of German society, of the police and military units, of Nazi leadership and party structures and their involvement in the Holocaust, left little room for further investigation.
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Photo: German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Reuters/ K Pempel)
