THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE ATTITUDE OF POPE PIUS XII

TOWARD THE JEWS IN WORLD WAR II

Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. By John Cornwell. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999, 417 pp.

Hitler, the War and the Pope. By Ronald J. Rychlak. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001, 470 pp.

The Vatican’s theological (1965 Nostra Aetate) and political (1993 Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel) revolution in relation to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and the question of beatification of Pius XII, revived an intensive debate about the role of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. A rich, controversial literature emerged on this theme – condemnatory, on the one hand, and apologetic, on the other – among which the research of John Cornwell holds a central place. Cornwell, a researcher at Jesus College, Cambridge, had intended to write a book which would vindicate the pontificate of Pius XII. However, in mid-1997, toward the end of his research, he found himself in a state of ‘moral shock’ because the archival sources contradicted his previous assumptions.

Cornwall’s thesis is based on two main arguments: a) the link that he creates between ancient religious anti-Judaism of the Catholic Church and racial, so-called modern antisemitism; and b) the claim that the pope’s attitude toward the Jews stemmed from deeply rooted antisemitism that dated back to his youth.

In regard to the link between religious anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism, Cornwell argues that although racism and persecution of Jews on the basis of Nazi racial ideology contradicted Catholic teachings, modern racists were influenced by the Christian history of hatred toward the Jews. In the interwar period in Europe the Church supported the nationalist regimes, which followed Nazi Germany in adopting racial laws. This alliance with the supporters of a racist ideology was based upon a deep fear and an uncompromising hatred of communism. Some Catholic bishops expressed antisemitic views even as the persecution of Jews gathered pace in Germany in the mid-1930s. Cardinal Hlond from Poland, for example, declared that there would be a “Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain.” Cornwell mentions, too, the antisemitic attitude of Slovak bishops and of leading Dominican theologian Garrigou-Lagrange, who was an adviser to Eugenio Pacelli before he became Pope Pius XII in 1939 and a keen supporter of Marshal Petain, head of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France.

An important illustration used by Cornwell to support his second argument about Pope’s Pius XII antisemitic sentiments is a letter written by him (as Pacelli), on 18 April 1919, during his mission as the pope’s nuncio in Munich, to Monsigor Pietro Gaspari. The letter describes the coup which deposed the Bavarian monarchy and the declaration of a socialist republic on 8 November 1918 in Munich by the independent Social Democratic Party, whose leader, Kurt Eisner, was a Jew. The letter paints an ugly picture of the revolutionaries:

An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge... this Levien is a young man, of about thirty... also Russian, a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly... With a hat on his head and smoking a cigarette, he listened to what Monsignor Schioppa told him, whining repeatedly that he was in a hurry and had more important things to do (p. 75).

In Cornwell’s opinion, this letter is not only proof of Pacelli’s concurrence with the growing belief among Germans that the Jews had instigated the Bolshevik Revolution which threatened Christian civilization, but of his innate antisemitism. By using phrases which describe the moral and physical repulsiveness of the Jews, Pacelli revealed his “stereotypical antisemitic contempt.”

This was only the beginning, claimed Cornwell. From 1917 until World War II, Pacelli pursued an antagonistic policy toward the Jews based on his conviction of a link between Judaism and the alleged Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom. When the Nazis took over Germany, he (as secretary of the Vatican State) refused to sanction the German Catholic Episcopate’s protest against the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish goods, and to forbid Catholic clergy from collaborating in racial identification of Jews, essential information that aided the Nazi persecution.

But the most damning evidence against Pope Pius XII appears in the chapter “Pacelli’s Journey into Silence.” Cornwell rejects the Vatican’s apologetic theory that the pope’s silence saved Jewish life. This contention is based on a single, unconvincing statement given by Pacelli’s housekeeper before the Vatican committee for beatification of Pius XII. The housekeeper quoted the pope’s words from a conversation he had had with her:

But I now think that if the letter of the bishops has cost the lives of 40,000 persons [converted Jews], my own protest, which carries even stronger weight, could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews. I cannot take such great responsibility. It is better to remain silent before the public and to do in private all that is possible (Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 [London, 1990], p. 30).

This testimony reinforces the version held by supporters of Pius XII that in retaliation for a pastoral letter sent by the Catholic archbishop of Utrecht, Holland, which denounced the Nazi murder of Jews, in 1942 the Germans decided to deport 40,000 (according to the Vatican) converted Jews, including Edith Stern. This event supposedly influenced the pope’s decision not to speak out against the Nazis.

Citing the research of BBC producer Jonathan Lewis, Cornwell emphasized that the number of Jewish converts to Catholicism who were arrested and deported from Holland was no more than 92. The pope or his defenders intentionally exaggerated the number of deportees in order to underline the tragic results of Church intervention.

Another controversial issue is the pope’s Christmas Eve broadcast, on 24 December 1942, viewed by his supporters as a clear denunciation of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people:

Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction (p. 292).

Even here the terms ‘Nazi’ or ‘Nazi Germany’ are not used, nor the word “Jews.” Thus, Cornwell noted ironically, “Hitler himself could not have wished for a more convoluted or innocuous reaction from the Vicar of Christ to the greatest crime in human history.” It was, Cornwell said, a clear evasion on the part of the pope from his moral duty (p. 293).

This policy of silence continued throughout the war. Cornwell accuses Pacelli of clear indifference toward members of the Jewish faith. The ‘others’, the six million Jews who did not share the Christian faith were not worthy of compassion. His failure to express a “candid word” in favor of the persecuted Jews demonstrated that the Vicar of Christ had not been moved to pity and anger. From this point of view he was the ideal pope for Hitler’s plan: “He was Hitler’s pope,” concluded Cornwall.

In contrast to Cornwell, Ronald J. Rychlak, professor of law at the University of Mississippi, is an enthusiastic defender of Pope Pius XII. He portrays a real Vicar of Christ who “did not waver in his approach to Hitler and the Nazis.” In Rychlak’s opinion, Pius saw his obligation as a Christian to ease suffering wherever he could, and he chose to react according to his conscience and to the circumstances, even though this might subject him to accusations. Rychlak rejects Cornwell's claim that Pacelli was an antisemite. Referring to Pacelli’s letter to Pietro Gaspari, Rychlak claims it can not be described as an antisemitic document, but an objective description of the 1919 coup: “The trouble is that it seems to be largely true. The 1919 Munich terror was led by Russian Jewish Bolsheviks. They did murder people. They were frightening.” Pacelli’s extreme criticism was directed at the communist revolutionaries and not at their Jewish origins, claims Rychlak. It was an outcome of fear and deep animosity toward the Bolsheviks, but not against the Jewish people. This is not a basis for affixing an antisemitic label to the rest of Pacelli’s life, he asserts.

Rychlak’s interpretation of the 1919 document is a significant example of the distortion of facts and of the misuse of historical documents as part of efforts to defend the pope. Pacelli’s description of the events in Munich as a vicious Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy democracy was undoubtedly biased and antisemitic. The coup came in the wake of the confrontations between German nationalists and those whom they perceived as traitors, such as socialists and communists, during which the socialist prime minister of Jewish origin Kurt Eisner was assassinated. Some leading activists of the communist coup were indeed Jews, but portraying it as a Jewish plot and demonizing the Jews reveals the clear connection made by Pacelli between Jews and the “Bolshevik peril.” Linking the Jews to the Bolsheviks became central to nationalist ideologies in Europe and in particular to Nazi ideology, and had fatal consequences for European Jewry.

                                                Ruth Braude

                                                Dept. of Jewish History

                                                Tel Aviv University

The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina. By Uki Goñi. London: Granta, 2002, 382 pp.

Perón’s relations with the Nazis are at the center of this heavily footnoted volume. A combination of investigative journalism and other genres, it seeks to advance on Goñi’s earlier Perón y los alemanes. This first book, while generally well-received in Argentinean journalistic circles, was given lukewarm, if not plainly unfavorable, reviews in leading publications, mainly Argentinean academic journals such as Ciclos and Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, the Hebrew University’s Reflejos (Latin American studies), and even the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, which labeled Goñi a rather opinionated author.

Boasting a broader scope than the earlier volume, The Real Odessa was potentially the best Spanish language journalistic volume on this theme had it not suffered from serious flaws, including factual errors, as well as exclusions and omissions. Nevertheless, The Real Odessa surpasses the works of several authors on Nazis in Argentina, mainly journalists such as Patrick Burnside, author of El escape de Hitler, who claimed Adolf Hitler did not die prior to the war’s end, but lived in Argentina from 1945 to 1957; Abel Basti, whose tourist guide Bariloche nazi seeks to posit that Hitler and Eva Braun resided at the San Ramón estate in southern Argentina; as well as Jorge Camarasa and Juan Gasparini, who each maintained that Martin Bormann also relocated to postwar Argentina. Additionally, Goñi’s writings are superior to some articles in the Buenos Aires daily Página/12, as well as to Juan Salinas and Carlos de Nápoli’s volume Ultramar sur. Like Camarasa, Salinas and de Nápoli assume that the number of Nazi submarines that arrived in Argentina far exceeded the two which surrendered in 1945, and the indications of a third one which was never caught. These three are alluded to by distinguished American historian Ronald Newton, author of El cuarto lado del triángulo, in a study he prepared for CEANA (Commission of Enquiry into Activities of Nazism in Argentina) in 1998. The search for the rusted remnants of other allegedly sunken German U-boats, up to 16 according to one source, resulted in four expeditions. Facilitated by a Scandinavian NGO, the foremost sub-aquatic archeology equipment allowed investigators Mónica Valentini and Javier García Cano to report to CEANA that such claims remained unverified.

Likewise, Goñi’s volume is more reliable than some works written by legislators of the 1940s’ Commission of Anti-Argentinean Activities (CIAAA). The first commission president, Raúl Damonte Taborda, wrote a decade later about Bormann and Hitler as if they had been living in postwar Argentina. Técnica de una traición, a classic work of Silvano Santander, a well-intentioned Argentinean Lower House and CIAAA member, also has drawbacks due to its inclusion of erroneous information. Likewise, the credibility of the book by Benjamin Stern and Pelagia Lewinska was doubted by their publishers, who disclaimed all responsibility for the content. Stern and Lewinska claimed, for example, that upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, Adolf Eichmann was taken by German submarine to the Amazon region where a group of ex-Nazis had created, among other things, a center for manufacturing cocaine and other drugs.

Among the book’s positive features is Goñi’s estimation of 300 fugitive war criminals who found shelter in Argentina after the war. This is 0.5 per cent of the inflated figure of 60,000 given by Simon Wiesenthal (quoted in the Buenos Aires daily Página/12, 3 Feb. 1993) and fairly close to CEANA’s assessment of 180. Interestingly, in the mid-1980s, Jacob Tsur, Israel's first diplomatic representative to Buenos Aires, dismissed as “gross exaggeration” the rumors that Peron provided several thousands of blank documents to Nazi fugitives and European collaborationists in 1944-45 to facilitate their arrival in the country.

Another point in the book’s favor is Goñi’s explicit doubts about Evita Perón’s European meetings in 1947 with Otto Skorzeny and Father Krunoslav Draganovic (p. 136). According to some researchers, these meetings were intended to facilitate the migration to Argentina of alleged war criminals and other fugitive Nazis and collaborationists. In contrast to Camarasa and Gasparini, Goñi rightly states that such encounters are difficult to confirm (p. 137).

As noted, however, the book suffers from some serious flaws. Among its errors and omissions, Goñi identifies Gustav Mueller (p. 135) as the sole or main leader of the Peronist Movement of Foreigners (MPE), a creation of the ruling party of that time for Argentina’s foreign residents, without mentioning Elías Richa’s presidency of that organization. Unlike Richa, Mueller who was of German origin, seems to have corresponded to the Nazi-Peronist label coined by Stalin’s envoy Vittorio Codovilla, or to that of distinguished psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann (envoy of the Argentinean Communist Party related League of Rights of Mankind to the first UN General Assembly meeting in London, 1946), who referred to Perón and his supporters as “the last vestiges of bloody Nazi-falangism.” However, not only were the MPE’s Italian and Croatian sections more important than the German one, but Richa’s Lebanese origin and Peronist credentials did not prevent his son from taking a Jewish spouse. Goñi’s claim concerning Mueller’s importance within MPE circles is apparently intended to reinforce his argument equating Peronism with Nazism. However, the notion that Peronism was akin to fascism was dismissed by prominent scholars such as Gino Germani.

As for missing data, Goñi’s narrative concerning Branko Benzon, a former pro-Nazi Croatian ambassador to Berlin, avoids any reference to postwar US documents showing that Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic, who lived in Argentina until 1957, denounced Benzon as a communist. Thus, a disquieting question arises: an intimate friend of Perón (p. 126), was Benzon in the service of Tito or of Pavelic? This is a crucial issue because of his role in the Argentinean Society for the Reception of Europeans (SARE), uncovered by CEANA senior researcher Diana Quattrocchi-Woisson. SARE’s consultative status with the immigration authorities allowed Benzon to recommend landing permits for fellow Nazis and collaborationists.

In some cases missing information can mislead the reader by offering simple answers to complicated situations. An example is Goñi’s treatment of Perón’s 1949 amnesty for inhabitants who had entered Argentina illegally. Goñi considers this Perón measure as intended to tie up a “certain loose end of his Nazi immigration policy”; however, he lacks data proving that “the real beneficiaries” were “Nazi fugitives” (pp. 261–2). A less politically loaded approach would have stated that Nazis were neither the sole, nor the principal beneficiaries of this amnesty, and that at least 10,000 Jews gained from it. Moreover, according to Peronist and other sources linked to the successor government’s vice-presidential National Commission of Investigations (CNI), the Jewish beneficiaries exceeded this number. Paradoxically, this throws light on two related topics: Argentina, the last Latin American state to break diplomatic ties with the Axis states and to declare war on Germany, was also the region’s haven for up to 45,000 Jews between 1933 and 1945, a number unequalled by Brazil and Mexico, two Latin American states in the Allied camp, or by any other country south of the USA. Moreover, since up to half of Jewish entries to Argentina were clandestine, Jews were one of the principal beneficiaries of the Perón government amnesty.

Goñi’s technique of presenting opposing sides to a story is confusing since it is difficult to determine their truthfulness; for instance, his odd decision not to pronounce Bormann unequivocally dead. Disregarding the fact that at the beginning of the 1970s dental records of human remains were discovered in Germany and subsequently connected to Bormann, Goñi refers to the discovery in southern Chile in the 1990s of a Uruguayan passport in the name of one of Bormann’s aliases. While Goñi admits that a later DNA examination confirmed Bormann’s death in 1945 (p. xiii), a hundred pages later he returns to Bormann’s fictitious presence in Argentina (p. 108). Goñi also ignores the 1998 report by US Undersecretary Stuart Eizenstat, which stressed that after the war Hermann Göring, not Martin Bormann, was the most senior Nazi official alive.

Similarly, Goñi’s interpretation as to the far reaching influence of the Nazi fugitives on Argentina should also be questioned. Goñi compares the most recent military regime (1976–83) to the Nazi regime (p. 321). However, if the latter and the Nazi influx to Argentina had a significant impact on the leaders of the military regime, the author needs to explain why Guatemala and El Salvador, whose intake of Nazi fugitives and alleged war criminals was not known to be large, suffered from similar disappearances and killings during that period.

Regarding unattributed borrowings, CEANA academic vice president Robert Potash has pointed out Goñi’s appropriation of Matteo Sanfilippo’s earlier discovery for CEANA of Cardinal Tisserant’s intercession with an Argentinean ambassador in support of Argentinean visas for some Vichy collaborationists, who were afraid to return to France because of the severity of the measures that might await them, or worse, popular justice. Some of the collaborationists, in particular, Francophone publicists and academics, not only joined Perón’s intellectual circles but also taught at Argentinean universities.

Another doubtful and unsubstantiated interpretation, bordering on a conspiracy theory, is Goñi’s insinuation that the Middle East inspired bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires had its genesis in a right-wing Peronist group’s proposition, in revenge for Israel’s kidnapping of Eichmann 32 years earlier (p. 319).

To sum up: Goñi’s obvious factual errors and interpretative weaknesses, his tendentiousness and confusing discourse, as well as his appropriation of third party findings and his conspiracy theories, do not make the book a reliable historical research study. A fifty-page list of endnotes and sources is not a definitive guarantee of investigative rigor, nor does it automatically bestow credibility on the book.

Ignacio Klich

Universidad Nacional

de Buenos Aires

Les Mythes fondateurs de l’antisemitisme – de l’Antiquite a nos jours. By Carol Iancu. Privat – Bibliotheque historique, 2003, 190 pp.

While reading Carol Iancu’s short, but powerful journey into the ‘founding myths’ of antisemitism, I came across an essay – one of many on the ‘new antisemitism’ – whose opening lines seem to encapsulate Iancu’s book. The article, by the well-known American writer Cynthia Ozick and entitled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” was published on 10 May in the New York Observer.

We thought it was finished. The ovens are long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipated into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute, the bullets splitting throats and breasts… the heap of eyeglasses and children’s shoes, the hills of human hair… naively, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that the cannibal hatred, once quenched, would not soon wake again. It has awakened.

One might wonder, indeed, if the “cannibal hatred” was ever “quenched”; perhaps it has never left us.

Carol Iancu, professor of Modern History at the Paul Valery University in Montpellier, has written prolifically on numerous issues related to modern Jewish history, especially the Jews of Romania, as well as antisemitism and the Holocaust. Moreover, he has published, under a pseudonym, poems on the Holocaust, in which he shed the professional mantle of the exacting historian and depicted the Holocaust through his emotions.

His book is timely in France, where much of the public debate on the ‘new antisemitism’ is centered, and where a European society is encountering its first wave of Muslim antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda. This book does not pretend to be an overall “history” of the “longest hatred” – a reference to Robert Wistrich’s now classic study (p. 18) – but a chronological “road map” to the “founding myths” of antisemitism. While the author does not provide a precise definition of ‘myth’, the underlying sense is that it is something which might have no truth in it but will always be with us.

Each chapter – progressing chronologically and emphasizing the main events and developments in antisemitic motifs and stereotypes – relates to patterns of both continuity and change in canards of the time. In fact, these are actually a collection of myths that have evolved over the ages, with each period making its contribution to the existing base of hostility toward the Jew, from the ancient accusation of deicide to the modern charge of ‘judeo-bolshevik’ and ‘plutocrat’ – the eternal and convenient ‘other’ in world history who belongs to a cunning, parasitic race and must be eliminated.

Iancu examines the role of the antisemitic discourse in European society from antiquity to early Christianity, then through ‘mature’ Christianity, when antisemitic myths flourished. His chapter “Medieval Christian and Muslim Antijudaism” contains many examples from primary sources and from noted historians such as George Duby (p. 43) on medieval arguments and images of the Jew in the chronicles of the epoch.

It seemed that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the ideas and ideals of the French Revolution, the era of emancipation, and granting civil rights to the Jews might bring about the decline of old antisemitic myths and stereotypes. However, they were recharged in the late 19th century with the proliferation of conspiracy theories, in particular The Protocols, ‘proving’ the Jewish attempt to rule the world and the ‘Judeo-Masonic connection’. The era of nationalism ushered in new-old forms of rejection. What was the Dreyfus affair about if not empirical proof of the notion, in the mind of the antisemite, that if someone is a spy, by definition, he must not be a Frenchman but an ‘alien’, a Jew?

Iancu describes several cases of ‘state antisemitism’ where rejection of the Jew was at the level of national policy, such as in Russia (p. 80). Here a ‘Romanian bias’ is recognizable since in several chapters, including that on the Middle Ages, more Romanian examples are used than those from other countries (Hungary, for instance). This impression that Romania was one of the most antisemitic societies in Europe is, unfortunately, true.

Rightly, the ‘Shoah’ is examined only in the context of the result of centuries-long hatred. Here, Iancu is meticulous in pursuing the myths and their outcome, and not the overall historical process.

Communist antisemitism is treated more in the context of the regimes’ anti-Zionist and anti-Israel policies; however, after 1989 we learned that the communist states manipulated the memory of the Holocaust in order not to raise public sympathy for the Jews and their state.

Iancu claims that he has no intention of being ‘politically correct’ when he writes of the impact of Muslim propaganda on the emergence of the ‘new antisemitism’, which is both anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. Thus, old myths have been linked to new situations, with the ‘racist Zionist entity’ as the target. For example, the enemies of globalization, who began by rejecting American symbols such as McDonald’s, now denounce Israel as a primary force behind globalization, similar to the old fiction of Jewish attempts to control the world economy. The link between anti-Americanism, antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and hatred of Israel is also addressed by Iancu; since the publication of his book, this connection has become even stronger, especially in the wake of the war in Iraq.

Old myths, as Iancu demonstrates, never die; they do not even fade away.

Raphael Vago

                                                      Dept. of General History

                                                      Tel Aviv University

In Brief

Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. By Donald Bloxham. Oxford University Press, 2001, 273 pp.

In this volume, Donald Bloxham confronts the difficulties involved in using the Nuremberg trials to establish a historically accurate account of the Nazi period. He also reveals the Allied predilection for dealing with military crimes, as opposed to concentration camp crimes, and the Allied reluctance to allow the Jews to take center-stage in the trials of those who conducted what they regarded as their war against German expansionism. Thus, the trials, which prefigured the Allied plan for the ‘re-education’ of Germany, promoted a victim-free image of Nazi Germany. Despite the accomplishment of the judicial procedure in assigning guilt, when the effects of the Allied occupation and later, when Europe’s boredom with the issue and their desire to delete it from collective memory are added, we see that the Trial as a factor in preserving the historical memory of genocide is itself on trial.

A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain. Edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin. London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2003, 318 pp.

This volume seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of the numerous unqualified reports and data on recent manifestations of antisemitism in Britain. The central questions addressed are: Is there really a new phenomenon at work and if so, how is it manifested? How is it distinguished from earlier incarnations of antisemitism? Who are the perpetrators? The editors have collected the views of leading Jewish intellectuals, writers, academics and other experts who offer a range of perspectives on the experience of antisemitism in Britain. Their contributions, which focus on three aspects of the problem: manifestations, media, and religion and politics, include topics such as “Antisemitism on the Streets,” by Michael Whine; “Is There Anything ‘New’ in the New Antisemitism?” by Anthony Julius; “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?” by Jonathan Freedland; and “Muslims, Jews and September 11: The British Case,” by Robert Wistrich. The authors provide a concluding analysis on “Globalized Judeophobia and Its Ramifications for British Society.”

Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Antisemitism. By Manfred Gerstenfeld (Foreword by Emil L. Fackenheim). Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem and the WJC, 2003, 238 pp.

The main thesis of the book is that present antisemitism and hostility toward Israel represent a continuation of the hatred directed at Jews in Europe in the wake of the Holocaust. The basis for this claim lies in an analysis of the attitude of the various states toward the Jews who returned from concentration camps and hiding places, toward moral and financial compensation; toward war criminals and their trials; and toward commemorating the Holocaust and teaching its lessons. The book begins with an extensive, 80-page essay by Gerstenfeld, followed by 15 short interviews with Jewish scholars and public figures.

The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide. By Wolfgang Benz. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 186 pp.

Eminent German historian Wolfgang Benz has written numerous studies on modern antisemitism, the history of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and postwar German society. The twelve essays in this volume are topical rather than chronological. The first chapter, “Talks Followed by Breakfast,” presents the Wannsee Conference not as a place where the Final Solution was announced, but where the participants discussed what had already been decided. The other chapters cover topics such as the fate of German Jews, the creation of the ghettos, the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’, the operation of the death camps and ‘the other genocide’ – on the persecution of the Roma and Sinti.

The book, which is aimed at the wider public, also includes references. The essays reflect Benz’s thoughts and interpretations on some of the major and most debated topics of the Holocaust.

Publications Received

Koonz, Claudia / The Nazi conscience / Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003.

Patel, Kiran Klaus / Soldaten der Arbeit: Arbeitsdienste in Deutschland und den USA 1933–1945 / Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, c2003.

Reil, Harald 1965– / Siegfried Kracauers Jacques Offenbach: Biographie, Geschichte, Zeitgeschichte / New York: P. Lang, c2003.

Franck, Dieter, 1926– / Youth protest in Nazi Germany / London: East and West Library, 2002.

Polak, Jaap, 1912– / Steal a pencil for me: love letters from Camp Bergen-Belsen, Westerbork / Scarsdale, NY: Lion Books 2000.

Zwischen Moral und Realpolitik: Deutsch-Israelische Beziehungen 1945–1965: eine Dokumentensammlug / Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1997.

LeBor, Adam / Hitler’s secret bankers: the myth of Swiss neutrality during the Holocaust / Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Pub. Group, c1997.

Rose, Paul Lawrence / German question/Jewish question: revolutionary antisemitism from Kant to Wagner / Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, [1992].

Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Analysen, Grundzuge, Forschungsbilanz / Munchen: Piper, 1989.

Der Judenpogrom 1938: von der ‘Reichskristallnacht’ zum Volkermord / Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988.

Bloxham, Donald / Genocide on trial: war crimes trials and the formation of Holocaust history and memory / New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Why Weimar? Questioning the legacy of Weimar from Goethe to 1999 / New York: P. Lang, 2003.

Amsel, Melody, 1948– / Between Galicia and Hungary: the Jews of Stropkov / Bergenfield, N.J.: Avotaynu, 2002.

Retribuce v CSR a narodni podoby antisemitismu: Zidovska problematika a antisemitismus ve spisech mimoradnych lidovych soudu a trestnich komisi ONV v letech 1945–1948; (sbornik prispevku) / Praha: Ustav pro soudobe dejiny Akademie ved Ceske republiky, c2002.

Povalecna justice a narodni podoby antisemitismu: Postih provineni vuci Zidum pred soudy a komisemi ONV v ceskych zemech v letech 1945–1948 a v nekterych zemech stredni Evropy ; (sbornik prispevku)/ Praha: Ustav pro soudobe dejiny Akademie ved Ceske republiky, c2002.

Goñi, Uki / The real Odessa: smuggling the Nazis to Peron’s Argentina/ London: Granta Books, 2002.

Grupinska, Anka / Warsaw Ghetto/ Warszawa: Wydawn. Parma-Press, 2002.

‘Uns hat keiner gefragt’: Positionen der dritten Generation zur Bedeutung des Holocaust / Berlin: Philo, 2002.

Alexander, Bevin / How Hitler could have won World War II: the fatal errors that led to Nazi defeat / New York: Crown, 2000.

Benz, Wolfgang / The Holocaust: a German historian examines the genocide / New York: Columbia University Press, c1999.

In our midst / Binghamton, N.Y.: Keshet Press, 1997.

Keegan, John, 1934– / The battle for history: re-fighting World War II / London: Hutchinson, c1995.

Roder, Thomas, 1957– / Psychiatrists – the men behind Hitler: the architects of horror / Los Angeles: Freedom Pub., c1995.

‘Those were the days’: the Holocaust through the eyes of the perpetrators and bystanders / London: H. Hamilton 1993, c1991.

Moszkiewiez, Helene, 1920– / Inside the Gestapo: a Jewish woman’s secret war / New York: Dell Pub., 1987.

Higham, Charles, 1931– / Trading with the enemy: an exposé of the Nazi-American money plot, 1933–1949 / New York: Dell Pub. c1983, 1984.

Neville, Peter, 1944– / Mussolini / London: Routledge, 2003.

Shore, Zachary / What Hitler knew: the battle for information in Nazi foreign policy / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Dambitsch, David, 1959– / Im Schatten der Shoah: Gesprache mit Uberlebenden und deren Nachkommen / Berlin: Philo, c2002.

Elon, Amos / The pity of it all: a history of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 / New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002.

Engelhardt, Isabelle A topography of memory: representations of the Holocaust at Dachau and Buchenwald in comparison with Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and Washington D.C. / Bruxelles: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2002.

Kostanian, Rachile / Spiritual resistance in the Vilna Ghetto / Vilnius: The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002.

Dachau prisoner information from captured German documents [League City, Tx: JewishGen, c2002–2003].

Picknett, Lynn / Double standards: the Rudolf Hess cover up / London: Time Warner Books, 2002.

Yesterdays and then Tomorrows: anthology of testimonies and readings for Holocaust study through literature, excursions to Poland, and Holocaust memorial ceremonies / Jerusalem: International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, 2002.

Meier, Kurt, 1927– / Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: die evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich / Munchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001.

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