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WORK TITLE: The Extermination of the European Jews
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Gerlach, Hans Christian
BIRTHDATE: 1963
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Gerlach * https://web.archive.org/web/20080417055645/http://www.pitt.edu/~pitthist/faculty/gerlachcv.html * http://laurel.lso.missouri.edu:2083/iii/encore/record/C__Rb31270585__SGerlach,%20Christian,%201963-%20author.__Orightresult__X1;jsessionid=42E8165CDC11D6F08E3C6DD06C0412DB?lang=eng&suite=mobum-sso
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1963.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Bern, Switzerland, professor; associate editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Christian Gerlach is a writer and educator. He serves as a professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he teaches courses in modern history. Gerlach also works for the Journal of Genocide Research as an associate editor. He has written and cowritten books in German, including Vorbild Wehrmacht? Wehrmachtsverbrechen, Rechtsextremismus und Bundeswehr, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944, and Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944-1945.
Extremely Violent Societies
In Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World, Gerlach attempts to identify similarities in violent societies around the world and throughout history. Among the extremely violent societies he profiles are Nazi Germany, the Ottoman Empire, East Timor, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Gerlach finds that, in each of the societies, there has either been a major redistributing of wealth or a change in the class system. Also, the societies have usually experienced colonialism in their history. They have additionally endured armed conflicts, hunger, and poverty. Gerlach examines genocides of the Jews in Nazi Germany and of the Armenians during the Ottoman Empire.
M.L. Russell, offered a mixed review of Extremely Violent Societies in Choice. Russell suggested: “Although the book is successful in avoiding simplistic national or ideological approaches, it is a bit tedious.” Russell concluded by categorizing the book as “recommended.”
The Extermination of the European Jews
The Extermination of the European Jews finds Gerlach examining the Holocaust once again. He compares the Nazis’ killing of Jews to their treatment of other groups, including the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Sinti, Roma, the disabled, and homosexuals. Gerlach explains that three million Soviet POWs were murdered by the Nazi’s during World War II, a fact that is often omitted from Western texts. He suggests that the knowledge of statistics related to other groups persecuted by the Nazis can help researchers to better understand their treatment of the Jews. Comparing the plights of these groups helps to place the Germans’ violence into context. Gerlach profiles some of the groups that took part in killing European Jews, including the First Mountain Division and Reserve Police Battalion 101. He notes that both groups also killed non-Jews throughout the continent. Gerlach analyzes the Nazi’s reasons for having the Jews killed, explaining that they were varied. He highlights inconsistencies in the Germans’ treatment of their own Jews, as well as Jews from other countries. Gerlach goes on to discuss the functions of governments in France, Denmark, and Bulgaria with regard to the persecution of Jews.
In a favorable assessment of The Extermination of the European Jews in Choice, R.S. Levy commented: “This ambitious book certainly does not simplify its subject matter, yet its revisionism is a necessary task undertaken responsibly and usefully.” Bob Moore, reviewer on the H-Net website, suggested: “This book is a welcome addition to the already voluminous Anglophone literature on the Holocaust, primarily because it takes on the existing, and sometimes simplistic, explanations for the killing of six million Jews and forces the reader to confront the much wider prevailing climate of mass violence that engulfed not just the Jews but other minority groups and others as well.” Moore continued: “It should become core reading for students of the period, if only to act as a counterweight to the sometimes myopic concentration on the Nazis’ Jewish victims. Gerlach has done us all an enormous service by synthesizing a much wider body of literature from across Europe than is commonly consulted on this issue and providing us with thought-provoking questions about the multiplicity of factors that created the genocide.” Writing on the Historical Association website, Jeremy Black described the volume as “a first-rate discussion of the Holocaust.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, August, 2011, M.L. Russell, review of Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World, p. 2409; October, 2016, R.S. Levy, review of The Extermination of the European Jews, p. 278.
ONLINE
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org/ (September 13, 2017), Bob Moore, review of The Extermination of the European Jews.
Historical Association, https://www.history.org.uk/ (August 20, 2016), Jeremy Black, review of The Extermination of the European Jews.*
Christian Gerlach
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hans Christian Gerlach is professor of Modern History at the University of Bern.[1] Gerlach is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Genocide Research[2] and author of multiple books dealing with the Hunger Plan, Holocaust and genocide.
Contents [hide]
1 Writings
2 Ideas
3 References
3.1 Citations
3.2 Bibliography
4 External links
Writings[edit]
His books include "Krieg, Ernährung, Volkermord: Forschungen zur Deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg" (1998); "Kalkulierte Morde: die Deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944" (1999); "Das letzte Kapitel" (co-authored with and Götz Aly in 2002); and "Sur la conférence de Wannsee" (2002).[3]
Ideas[edit]
Gerlach's article, "Extremely Violent Societies: An Alternative to the Concept of Genocide"[4] has been the subject of great debate among scholars of genocide and violence.[5] In the article, Gerlach challenges the model utilized in trying to understand genocide. Gerlach has previously stirred intense debate among Holocaust historians with his thesis surrounding December 12, 1941 as the date on which Adolf Hitler made the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe.[6]
Gerlach is also known by his critical attitude towards the national conservative resistance in Nazi Germany. According to Gerlach, the resistance offered by officers such as Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow, who were responsible for the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944, was insincere and, in fact, Tresckow and many other resistance fighters were heavily implicated in national socialist war crimes [7] Gerlach's thesis was criticized by a number of scholars, among them Peter Hoffmann from McGill University and Klaus Jochen Arnold, from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a political party foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU).[8]
Other historians agree with Gerlach's findings. For example, the research by Johannes Hürter (de), a historian at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, confirms the culpability of the staff of Army Group Center in war crimes and Nazi atrocities. In his work, "Auf dem Weg zur Militaeropposition: Tresckow, Gersdoff, der Vernichtungskrieg und der Judenmord" ("Resistance in the Military: Tresckow, Gersdoff, the War of Extermination and the Murder of Jews"), Huerter analyzes documents on the relationship of Army Group Centre with the Einsatzgruppe B in 1941. He concludes that Tresckow and his circle of conspirators within the Army Group Center were well informed about the mass murder of Jews following Operation Barbarossa and provided required cooperation. Their National-conservative ideology was aligned with the Nazi regime in its anti-Communism, accompanied by racial prejudice against Slavs and Jews. Only when it became apparent that the defeat was imminent, and that Germany would be held responsible for its genocidal policies, did so-called ethical considerations came into play, he finds.[9]
QUOTED: "Although the book is successful in avoiding simplistic national or ideological approaches, it is a bit tedious."
"recommended."
Gerlach, Christian. Extremely violent societies: mass violence in the twentieth-century
M.L. Russell
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.12 (Aug. 2011): p2409.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Gerlach, Christian. Extremely violent societies: mass violence in the twentieth-century. Cambridge, 2010. 489p index ISBN 9780521880589, $80.00; ISBN 9780521706810 pbk, $28.99
As more universities create conflict resolution majors, works such as this one become more relevant. "Mass violence" is "widespread physical violence against non-combatants ... outside of immediate fighting between military or paramilitary personnel." Gerlach (Univ. of Bern, Switzerland) seeks to find patterns rather than a "watertight model" that he can apply in locations as diverse as Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire, Bangladesh, East Timor, Nazi Germany, or Guatemala. He determines that significant patterns include elite change or sudden redistributions of wealth, colonialism, the forced decline of middlemen minorities, famines, war, and discrepancies in economic development within a country. While the work is richly documented and includes some form of primary sources in each area, it is bound to ruffle some feathers. One case in point is that of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The author states that "[p]robably over half ... died from starvation" and acknowledges that the Armenians had been deprived of homes, assets, and livelihoods, but he does not connect the two, or cite the recent joint body of work by Turkish and Armenian scholars. Although the book is successful in avoiding simplistic national or ideological approaches, it is a bit tedious for those outside of conflict or genocide studies. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--M. L. Russell, East Carolina University
Russell, M.L.
QUOTED: "This ambitious book certainly does not simplify its subject matter, yet its revisionism is a necessary task undertaken responsibly and usefully."
Gerlach, Christian. The extermination of the European Jews
R.S. Levy
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p278.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Gerlach, Christian. The extermination of the European Jews. Cambridge, 2016. 508p bibl index ISBN 9780521880787 cloth, $89.99; ISBN 9780521706896 pbk, $29.99; ISBN 9781316547403 ebook, 24.00
(cc)
54-0878
D804
CIP
With this book, Gerlach (history, Univ. of Bern, Switzerland) thoroughly rethinks the genocide of the Jews, a subject he has treated in several previous, and controversial, books and articles; e.g., Extremely Violent Societies (CH, Aug' 11, 48-7226). His work rests on a reading of the enormous secondary literature concerning the Holocaust, as well as on impressive research in primary sources. Gerlach argues that the destruction of European Jews cannot be fully understood in isolation from other acts of mass violence by Germans and non-Germans. Nor can it be explained simply as a logical culmination of pre-1933 German history or ideological anti-Semitism (both of which he treats only cursorily). The rationales for mass murder were not fixed in systems of thought but various and changeable. The persecution of Jews, Russian POWs, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, and a host of other groups carried out by the Third Reich and its many collaborators performed a variety of political, economic, and ideological functions. Further complicating Gerlach's interpretation is the inescapable fact that this process responded to continuously changing circumstances before and during WW II. This ambitious book certainly does not simplify its subject matter, yet its revisionism is a necessary task undertaken responsibly and usefully. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--R. S. Levy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Levy, R.S.
QUOTED: "This book is a welcome addition to the already voluminous Anglophone literature on the Holocaust, primarily because it takes on the existing, and sometimes simplistic, explanations for the killing of six million Jews and forces the reader to confront the much wider prevailing climate of mass violence that engulfed not just the Jews but other minority groups and others as well."
"It should become core reading for students of the period, if only to act as a counterweight to the sometimes myopic concentration on the Nazis’ Jewish victims. Gerlach has done us all an enormous service by synthesizing a much wider body of literature from across Europe than is commonly consulted on this issue and providing us with thought-provoking questions about the multiplicity of factors that created the genocide."
Moore on Gerlach, 'The Extermination of the European Jews'
Author:
Christian Gerlach
Reviewer:
Bob Moore
Christian Gerlach. The Extermination of the European Jews. New Approaches to European History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 528 pp. $29.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-70689-6; $89.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88078-7.
Reviewed by Bob Moore (University of Sheffield)
Published on H-Nationalism (March, 2017)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel
As the author of this major new synthesis on the history of the Holocaust points out, there have been thousands of books in English devoted to the destruction of six million European Jews. This is undoubtedly a function of the increasing centrality of the final solution in interpretations of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the last half-century and has led to a multiplicity of scholarly approaches on the process as a whole, and to the detailed examination of individual national and regional case studies as well as innumerable analyses of the perpetrators. Indeed, some of the subjects have almost become topics in their own right as research has been carried out on more and more individual case studies. Each of the leading scholars who has attempted an overall synthesis on the Holocaust has his or her own way of approaching the subject. What makes Christian Gerlach’s approach different from previous works is his attempt to place the persecution and murder of the Jews in the context of other persecutions carried out by the Nazis and to identify the commonalities between them. As the author makes clear, the objective is not to construct a hierarchy of suffering but to try and make linkages between the fate of the Jews and those of other persecuted groups. In so doing, he is attempting to redress the huge imbalance in scholarship between large number of works devoted to the fate of the Jews and the paucity of studies on other victim groups, most notably the deaths of three million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in Nazi hands between 1941 and 1945.
Gerlach makes all these points in relation to the English-language literature but they are also to some extent applicable to the German literature. The Soviet POWs have received little or no attention from scholars in the West, perhaps because they were seen as part of the military history of the war rather than as innocent civilians, or because Cold War politics made it difficult to highlight the fate of Soviet victims in an increasingly polarized political environment. Nevertheless, their deaths can also be attributed to the same process of mass violence that occurred under the Nazi regime. His argument is that a greater attention to non-Jewish victimhood can tell us more about the comparative aspects of that mass violence and the various agencies that brought it about. As examples of this, the book examines the roles of various German units well known for their part in the killings of Jews, such as the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the First Mountain Division, and shows that this was only one aspect of their operations during the war, with the former implicated in other acts of violence against non-Jews in Poland in 1941 and the latter carrying out the killings of civilians in Yugoslavia and the Italian soldiers in Kefalonia as well as being involved in the pogrom at Lviv in 1941.
It is argued that both the contexts of the killings and the motivations behind them were many and various, and undoubtedly evolved over time. Brutality escalated as the tide of war turned increasingly against the Axis. In this context, generalizations are impossible; economics, labor supply, internal German politics, resistance, and civil wars within the occupied states all played a role in addition to anti-Jewish sentiments. As Gerlach points out, even the Nazi government was far from consistent on this. Jews had still been able to function within the German economy until 1938, and, although the majority were subsequently removed or fled, the regime then began importing Jews to meet the demand for labor right up to 1944. Likewise, British, American, and French Jews who were captured were left unharmed.
The book itself is divided into three parts: persecution by Germans, logistics of persecution, and finally, the European dimension. The first part traces the chronological development of the persecution of the Jews from 1933 to 1945 before looking at the structures and agents of violence. In this section, Gerlach concludes that this was far from being a centrally organized, top-down, process (which he argues is still a widely held view), but one that was partly decentralized and allowed for individuals and groups to pursue their own interests. This may overstate the novelty of what he is suggesting as a new approach, but this does not make it any less valid. The ad hoc nature of the killing processes in different extermination centers speaks to this idea of autonomy as does the multiplicity of agencies involved in dealing with other groups, such as partisans and even Soviet POWs. Those identified as persecutors or as responsible for killings came from a wide range of backgrounds, career paths, and social origins and existed within many different agencies. Their motives were similarly many and various and ranged from antisemitic bigotry through vengeful anticommunism to careerism and pressure to conform. The system of polyocracy provided them all with a degree of autonomy in carrying out the often very vague commands (or even assumed commands) of their superiors. Here again the book cites a series of pertinent examples to reinforce the argument being presented.
The second part deals with the logics of persecution and discusses in more detail the major contributory factors in fomenting the mass violence so evident in the regime. The section on racism and anti-Jewish thought will be the most familiar to most readers, but it is complemented by a detailed analysis of the role of forced labor, wider population policies, and an increasing war against indigenous resistance to Nazi rule as the war progressed. In all these sections of the book, Gerlach shows his mastery of the literature by citing examples from both Eastern and Western Europe. The arguments are carefully laid out and clearly developed. None of the major debates are ignored here and the book discusses not only the various economic factors that have been suggested as prompts for increased persecution and killing but also the issues surrounding population transfers, most notably in occupied Poland. While the discussions are not always of great length, the reader is left in no doubt how the author sees these factors as contributing to mass violence as a whole.
The third part deals with the wider European dimension in examining the roles of Axis-allied governments, such as Bulgaria, and quasi-independent regimes, such as Denmark and Vichy France. While the thrust of this section is designed to show how the policies of these various regimes either contributed to or retarded persecution and violence against minorities, there is a clear statement at the outset that one should not expect to see any unified or collective conclusions drawn from this as there were too many differences between countries and indeed regions to make this tenable. Nonetheless Gerlach does try to draw some tentative comparisons, for example in relation to legislation enacted against Jews in different jurisdictions, and in terms of local involvement in pogroms and other forms of violence against minorities.
This book is a welcome addition to the already voluminous Anglophone literature on the Holocaust, primarily because it takes on the existing, and sometimes simplistic, explanations for the killing of six million Jews and forces the reader to confront the much wider prevailing climate of mass violence that engulfed not just the Jews but other minority groups and others as well. It should become core reading for students of the period, if only to act as a counterweight to the sometimes myopic concentration on the Nazis’ Jewish victims. Gerlach has done us all an enormous service by synthesizing a much wider body of literature from across Europe than is commonly consulted on this issue and providing us with thought-provoking questions about the multiplicity of factors that created the genocide.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48009
Citation: Bob Moore. Review of Gerlach, Christian, The Extermination of the European Jews. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. March, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48009
QUOTED: "a first-rate discussion of the Holocaust."
Short Reviews - August 2016
Book Reviews
Professor Jeremy Black, last updated: 20th August 2016
5. The Extermination of the European Jews, Christian Gerlach, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 288 pp., 9780521706896
A first-rate discussion of the Holocaust although one that would benefit from greater attention to religious anti-Semitism. Gerlach, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bern, devotes due attention non-German states and societies, notably Romania, and throws light on popular notions of race. Overlong for many sixth formers but a valuable account for those willing to devote the time.