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WORK TITLE: Why? Explaining the Holocause
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/7/1946
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/emeriti/peter-hayes.html * http://www.history.northwestern.edu/documents/people/faculty/cvs/cv-hayes.pdf * https://jfr.org/bureau-of-speakers/peter-hayes/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 85030488
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n85030488
HEADING: Hayes, Peter, 1946 September 7-
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100 1_ |a Hayes, Peter, |d 1946 September 7-
370 __ |f Evanston (Ill.) |2 naf
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373 __ |a Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Department of History |2 naf |s 1980
374 __ |a Historians |2 lcsh
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378 __ |q Peter Francis
400 1_ |w nnea |a Hayes, Peter, |d 1946 Sept. 7-
670 __ |a Imperial Germany, 1985: |b CIP title page (Peter Hayes)
670 __ |a WW Midwest, 1984-85 |b (Hayes, Peter Francis; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; born September 7, 1946)
670 __ |a Das Amt in der Vergangenheit, 2010: |b title page (Peter Hayes) jacket flap (Peter Hayes; born 1946; professor of history and German at Northwestern University)
670 __ |a Northwestern University, Department of History website, viewed July 7, 2014: |b link to People page (Peter Hayes; Ph. D. from Yale in 1982; Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor; joined the faculty at Northwestern as an Instructor in 1980) |u http://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/hayes.html
953 __ |a ba07
PERSONAL
Born September 7, 1946.
EDUCATION:Bowdoin College, graduated; Oxford University, graduated; Yale University, Ph. D., 1982.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1980-2016, instructor, history and German professor, Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor; Independent Historians Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, 2006-10.
AWARDS:Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1992, for Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World; Northwestern University, Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award, Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, and Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence; Bowdoin College, Distinguished Bowdoin Educator Award; American Historical Association, Conference Group for Central European History, Biennial Book Prize for Industry and Ideology; Lessons & Legacies Conference, Claremont, CA, Holocaust Educational Foundation, Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born September 7, 1946, Peter Francis Hayes is an award winning writer who concentrates on the Holocaust and the history and economy of Nazi Germany. He was a professor of history and German at Northwestern University from 1980 to 2016 and was named the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust Studies Emeritus. He was also chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He graduated from Oxford University and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982.
Hayes has published numerous books. He edited Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World in 1991 which examines how history can preserve, expand, and apply knowledge about why and how the Holocaust happened. Researching German corporate and government archives, Hayes wrote Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era in 1987 to address the power of big business in the Third Reich and the I.G. Farben chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate in particular. Farben prospered under the Nazi regime and was directly involved in some of its greatest crimes. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, coedited with John K. Roth in 2010, provides information on enablers, protagonists, settings, representations, and aftereffects. The extensive anthology, How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader in 2015, collects essays on the historical context for anti-Semitism, impediments to escaping Nazi Germany, the logistics of the death camps, and struggles of the displaced survivors.
In 2017, Hayes published Why? Explaining the Holocaust, which answers many commonly asked questions about how Nazi Germany was able to perpetrate the Holocaust, as well as dispels common misconceptions. Hayes explains why the Nazis focused on the Jews as an ethnic group, how mass murder was accomplished so quickly, why more Jews didn’t fight back, why Jews did not receive more help worldwide, and attempts to describe why there is no single theory that can explain the Holocaust. Drawing on questions from students in his history classes, Hayes offers scholarly research into the complexity of Nazi Germany, puts the atrocity into context, and educates a new generation on the kinds of horror that can exist if current historians, politicians, and citizens are not diligent.
“In this clearly written, cogently argued and researched book, eminent historian Peter Hayes challenges the widely held assertion that the Holocaust is unfathomable and inexplicable,” concluded Michael N. Dobkowski on the Jewish Book Council Website. Hayes explains that anti-Semitism did not play a decisive role in bringing Hitler to power, the Allies could not have prevented the mass killings once they began, and active Jewish resistance would have made little difference due to their limited means. Dobkowski added that “Readers may not agree with some of Hayes’ conclusions…but they will appreciate the logical and judicious presentation of his arguments.”
Noting that Hayes’ book is well-written but can be dense in some places, Robert Eaglestone nevertheless observed online at Times Higher Education: “Not only does he show a sophisticated and judicious mastery of the most up-to-date historical scholarship, but he also tries to demonstrate his conviction that the Holocaust is as ‘historically explicable’ as ‘any other human event’.” Calling Hayes’ approach to a common historical subject refreshing, Marian Mays in Library Journal commented: “In a narrative brimming with historical sources, Hayes’s work is required reading for history scholars.” According to a Publishers Weekly contributor, “Hayes reveals the virtues of dealing with this overwhelming subject in a topical rather than a chronological way.” New York Times reviewer Nicholas Stargard wrote that Hayes “has provided an intellectually searching and wide-ranging study of the Holocaust in a modest, didactic form. He provides just enough thumbnail narrative to frame his very thoughtful answers for a lay audience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, November 1, 2016, Marian Mays, review of Why? Explaining the Holocaust, p. 87.
Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2016, review of Why?, p. 69.
ONLINE
Jewish Book Council, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (October 1, 2017), Michael N. Dobkowski, review of Why?
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 3, 2017), Nicholas Stargard, review of Why?
Peter Hayes Website, https://www.peterfhayes.com (October 1, 2017), author profile.
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (February 23, 2017), Robert Eaglestone, review of Why?*
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PETER HAYES
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND GERMAN, THEODORE ZEV WEISS HOLOCAUST EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES EMERITUS
Ph.D., Yale, 1982
Contact:
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Interests
Principal Research Interest(s)
Modern Germany, Holocaust and Genocide
Peter Hayes (Ph.D., Yale, 1982) specializes in the histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and, in particular, in the conduct of the nation’s largest corporations during the Third Reich. He taught at Northwestern for thirty-six years from 1980 to 2016, in the process winning the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award, the Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the University’s highest honor for teaching. His alma mater, Bowdoin College, also has honored him with its Distinguished Bowdoin Educator Award. The recipient of numerous research fellowships and a former member of the academic boards of several professional societies and Holocaust memorial sites, Prof. Hayes currently serves as the chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Publications
Prof. Hayes is the author or editor of twelve books. They include the prize-winning Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987, 2001) and Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (1991). From 2006 to 2010, he served as the only American member of the Independent Historians Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, which resulted in the publication of a bestseller in Germany entitled Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Most recently, he has produced three major works on the Holocaust: The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth, 2010), an extensive anthology called How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015), and a compact analytical synthesis, Why? Explaining the Holocaust, that W. W. Norton & Company will release early in 2017. He is currently writing (with Stephan Lindner of Munich) Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Third Reich, which is under contract in English with Cambridge University Press and in German with Beck Verlag.
Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust
Why? Explaining the Holocaust
Universitätskulturen L'Université en perspective The Future of the University
Universitätskulturen
L'Université en perspective
The Future of the University
Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik
Das Amt und die
Vergangenheit:
Deutsche Diplomaten
im Dritten Reich und
in der Bundesrepublik
From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich
From Cooperation
to Complicity:
Degussa in the Third Reich
Degussa im Dritten Reich: Von der Zusammenarbeit zur Mittäterschaft
Degussa im Dritten Reich:
Von der Zusammenarbeit
zur Mittäterschaft
Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era
Industry and Ideology:
IG Farben in the Nazi Era
The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies
The Oxford Handbook
of Holocaust Studies
The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz
The Last Expression:
Art and Auschwitz
Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial
Lessons and Legacies III:
Memory, Memorialization,
and Denial
Imperial Germany
Imperial Germany
How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader
How Was It Possible?
A Holocaust Reader
Teaching Interests
Although Prof. Hayes no longer teaches at Northwestern, he remains active in training secondary school and university teachers of courses on the Holocaust through organizations such as Facing History, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also continues to lecture widely in the U.S. andabroad on the histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
Recent Awards and Honors
In November 2016, Prof. Hayes received a Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies from the Holocaust Educational Foundation at the Fourteenth biannual Lessons & Legacies Conference in Claremont, CA.
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About Peter Hayes
Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University.
His publications have won several prizes and been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. His acclaimed study of IG Farben, Industry and Ideology, received the Biennial Book Prize from the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association.
In his monumental history of the Nazi economy entitled The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze called Industry and Ideology "the best book on IG, indeed the best book on business in the Third Reich." Hayes has long supported the work of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, notably in preparing How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he currently chairs the Academic Committee.
Also an award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.
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Print Marked Items
Hayes, Peter. Why? Explaining the Holocaust
Marian Mays
Library Journal.
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p87.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Hayes, Peter. Why? Explaining the Holocaust. Norton. Jan. 2017.400p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN
9780393254365. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393254372. HIST
Few other historical events are as ffequendy analyzed as the Holocaust, yet too often these investigations present
information that is not unique. Hayes (history, German, Northwestern Univ.) offers a refreshing examination of this
World War II atrocity and why it was allowed to happen. As the chair of the academic committee of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Hayes expertly answers commonly fielded but complex questions in chapter topics such as "Why
the Jews?," which details the events leading up to Hider's rise in power; "Why Murder?," which explains the factors
that led up to mass extermination, and "Why Such Limited Help from Outside?," a thorough examination of the
influences that spurred complicity among outside countries. Throughout, Hayes dispels prevailing myths that
negatively impact Holocaust scholarship, such as the misconception that anti-Semitism brought Hitler to power. The
work concludes with legacies and lessons of the Holocaust while emphasizing the importance of abolishing
indifference. VERDICT In a narrative brimming with historical sources, Hayes's work is required reading for history
scholars, amateur history buffs, and anyone interested in answering necessary questions surrounding this tragedy.--
Marian Mays, Washington Talking Book & Braille Lib., Seattle
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mays, Marian. "Hayes, Peter. Why? Explaining the Holocaust." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 87+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830393&it=r&asid=aa27cfa072152c84865b54d266303234.
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Why? Explaining the Holocaust
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Why? Explaining the Holocaust
Peter Hayes. Norton, $27.95 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-393-25436-5
Hayes (How Was It Possible?), professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, answers eight
questions relating to the Shoah in order to show that it is "no less historically explicable than any other human
experience." Particular themes frame the chapters, which have subtitles such as "Why the Germans?," "Why Didn't
More Jews Fight Back More Often?," and "Why Such Limited Help from Outside?" An economic historian by training,
Hayes delves into the day-to-day functioning of the Nazi slave-labor system. He also examines the fraught nature of the
relationship between Polish Jews and gentiles during the Holocaust. His analysis of Jewish leaders' diverse survival
strategies shows that none had much effect against the relentless Nazi murder machinery. In Minsk, for example, the
two heads of the ghetto actively supported armed resistance, yet "that availed them little as the ghetto's population
dropped from 100,000, in October 1941, to 12,000, in August 1942." In his concluding chapter on legacies and lessons,
Hayes sturdily debunks a number of Holocaust myths. But it's also the book's weakest section; his lessons there focus
on prevention of the Holocaust's recurrence and are stated vaguely: e.g. "Be self-reliant but not isolationist." Hayes
reveals the virtues of dealing with this overwhelming subject in a topical rather than a chronological way. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Why? Explaining the Holocaust." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 69. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616202&it=r&asid=d64c49e6bdd5419658c972fa53f7cfeb.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the
Holocaust in a Changing World
Publishers Weekly.
238.27 (June 21, 1991): p55.
COPYRIGHT 1991 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Based on papers presented by Holocaust scholars at a conference held at Northwestern University in 1989, this earnest,
valuable survey challenges the notion that the Holocaust is incomprehensible, alien and distant. Comparing the
Holocaust with medieval anti-Semitism, the witch-hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries and the Gulag, Steven T. Katz
demonstrates why the latter three were not genocidal and why the Nazi Final Solution was "unprecedented and
unparalleled." Alvin H. Rosenfeld questions if the dramatic and film versions of the enormously popular diary are a
faithful portrayal of the image of Anne Frank and that of the larger Jewish tragedy she symbolizes, or of these media
cheapen and distort, converting Anne Frank into a "ready-at-hand formula for easy forgiveness." Nechama Tec's 10-
year study of the nature of altruistic Polish Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that these Poles
overwhelming emphasize that they had responded to the persecution and suffering of the victims and not to their
Jewishness. Hayes wrote Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World." Publishers Weekly, 21 June 1991, p. 55.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA10999471&it=r&asid=a975efed6a4543158ab642c92de8ae47.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor
of Raul Hilberg
George Cohen
Booklist.
91.6 (Nov. 15, 1994): p577.
COPYRIGHT 1994 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
This perceptive work had its origins in a 1991 international conference on the Holocaust honoring Raul Hilberg, the
preeminent scholar of the Holocaust. The book contains all seven of the presentations delivered at the conference by
Yehuda Bauere, Christopher Browning, Claude Lanzmann, Alvin Rosenfeld, Richard Rubenstein, George Steiner, and
Herman Wouk, and four other essays by Peter Hayes, Eberhard Jackel, John Roth, and Robert Wolfe. The essays cover
such topics as the writings of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, Nazi-Jewish negotiations, the Wannsee Conference, in which
the decision on the final solution to the Jewish question was reached, German corporate involvement in the Holocaust,
and perpetration of the Holocaust in Poland, as well as two tributes to Hilberg (by Shoah filmmaker Lanzmann and
novelist Wouk).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cohen, George. "Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg." Booklist, 15 Nov. 1994, p. 577.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15925220&it=r&asid=ba3dd51a02afa0078d2bafd8c28f4f6a.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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Why? Explaining the Holocaust, by Peter Hayes
Beware the beginning is one lesson to take from a vital and timely study, says Robert Eaglestone
February 23, 2017
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1
By Robert Eaglestone
Halt sign at Auschwitz
Source: iStock
If times were different, I might review this book differently. Peter Hayes, trained as an economic historian, aims to answer, calmly and sensibly, the issue of why the Holocaust happened by addressing, in detail, eight questions the public or students frequently ask him: a book of public pedagogy and explanation.
In doing this, not only does he show a sophisticated and judicious mastery of the most up-to-date historical scholarship, but he also tries to demonstrate his conviction that the Holocaust is as “historically explicable” as “any other human event”. But if times were different, I’d suggest that this meticulous book was heavy on facts and light on, well, let’s quickly call it metaphysics (understood roughly as what the philosopher Adrian Moore calls “the most general attempt to make sense of things”). Does it answer the question – posed not only by philosophers and poets but by nearly everybody – why? Not really, unless you think that explaining how the optic nerves work explains why we find a shade of orange beautiful, or that the wetness of water, or how it refreshes, is explained by its molecular composition. Within the academy, it’s the job of “theory” people like me to ask recondite questions about frameworks and categories (and what constitutes an explanation, anyway?). So if times were different, I’d say something like that.
But these are not those times and this clear, well-written, if occasionally dense, book has much of importance to tell us in an age of sudden fear, propaganda and fake news, in which the Third Reich and its crimes reappear often as a “touchstone”. To begin at his conclusion – could the Holocaust have been stopped? – Hayes writes: beware the beginning. He cites the events of early April 1933: Nazi thugs demanded that Gustav Krupp, boss of a huge arms and steel firm, sack its Jewish and anti-Nazi employees. He did. And so capitulated to “bullying” and “deprived the organization of all basis for future noncompliance with Nazi demands”.
The book is also full of no-nonsense “myth-busting”: did many top-ranking Nazis escape justice? No: for example, all 16 commanders of death camps died or were sentenced. Did the genocide take up huge amounts of resources? No: as an indicator, Hayes estimates that during its height only two trains a day were used, while the German railways ran 30,000 trains per day in the same period. Hayes does a good line in detail, too. He points out that the hyphen that Microsoft Word puts into “anti-Semitism”, coined in 1879 to make hating Jews sound respectable or even scientific, implies a “semitism” to which one could be “anti”.
As well as telling, Hayes’ prose also shows us. Some historians of the period resort to accounts of horror that swamp argument and analysis. Hayes, while not avoiding suffering, demonstrates the unshowy anger and scholarly restraint that characterises the best work by historians. In a field that can be partisan, he explains the views of contemporary scholars and then what leads him to his conclusions – allowing room for understanding and even informed disagreement. Overall, this timely, level-headed book is a model of public engagement by a historian.
Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought, Royal Holloway, University of London.
Why? Explaining the Holocaust
By Peter Hayes
W. W. Norton, 432pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780393254365
Published 26 January 2017
POSTSCRIPT:
Print headline: Level-headed amid the horror
READER'S COMMENTS (1)
#1 Submitted by abe on September 15, 2017 - 5:24pm
Hi Peter,
I watched your speech that you gave about the why it happened and were things done or not done to prevent and why.
First to complement you, real nice job done here and lots of research.
However I have a few issues but most I will assume I am wrong because you maybe did more research then me, so your info may be better then mine.
But 1 thing I must disagree with you, is about why the US did not bomb the tracks to the death chambers. You explained that at the time to only place the US was able to fly from and was GB and it was impossible to do it at that time without being able to refuel.
I can agree to this on the Jews in Poland and in Germany, however the Hungarian Jews were deported almost at the end of the war and in 8 weeks about (dont get me wrong if the number here is off then your numbers) 1 half million - 800,000 Jews were gas up and burned in 8 weeks.
This was a time when America kept on bombing Germany daily and yet it did not care to throw one Bomb on these tracks and let the Jews be gassed up.
Yes the Germans did it but America cant just look aside and say we were unable to! Congress knew about it the Jews in America begged and they just did not care.
I would really like your answer and input on this.
from a whole family in Hungary my grandfather is the only survivor one bomb on the tracks would save his family, he is still alive and almost 100 years yet lived a life in a shadow of his lost family just because no one cared to do anything!
Again real good job and we can agree to disagree on items but i would like to get your input on this
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Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
Peter Hayes
W. W. Norton & Company 2017
432 Pages $27.95
ISBN: 978-0393254365
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Michael N. Dobkowski
In this clearly written, cogently argued and researched book, eminent historian Peter Hayes challenges the widely held assertion that the Holocaust is unfathomable and inexplicable.
He asserts that the Shoah is comprehensible in the same way that other complex historical events are—if patience, scholarship, careful reasoning, and application are brought to the task. Utilizing the most recent scholarship on the subject, he distills many of the historical debates and provides sensible assessments of their most salient conclusions. In the process, he dispels many of the myths and assumptions that have become part of the conventional wisdom and rejects any approach that seeks to treat the Holocaust as sacred or pull it out of history. The Shoah, he contends, was the product of a particular time and place—Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution—and can be recovered, analyzed, and understood by the usual historical methods. To approach it in awe or as an unfathomable event is to abdicate our responsibility to try to understand how and why it occurred, he believes, and to give in to fate, divine purpose, or the randomness of history. If we hope to learn anything valuable, we need to view the Holocaust not as mysterious and inscrutable but as the work of humans and societies acting on familiar motives and weaknesses.
Why?: Explaining the Holocaust takes on the most difficult of challenges posed by the Holocaust and attempts to answer four basic questions: Why were Jews the primary targets? Why Germany and not some other European country with possibly a more entrenched antisemitic tradition? Why was total elimination the goal, and how were the particular means of extermination chosen? And why was the eradication of the Jews so nearly successful?
Along the way, Hayes debunks or at least complicates a number of myths. He rejects the notion that antisemitism played a decisive role in bringing Hitler to power. He contends that the Allies could not have done much to impede the killing once it began, given the determination of the Nazis and where most of the slaughter took place. More active Jewish resistance would not have accomplished much, due to their limited means and options, and more rescue efforts by non-Jews would not have been able to save many more victims. Ultimately, the Holocaust did not divert resources from the German war effort, nor did the leading perpetrators of the Holocaust and many of their accomplices escape punishment after World War II.
Hayes concludes by challenging the claims made by Zygmunt Bauman and others that the Holocaust was a product of modernity and a harbinger of its dangers. On the contrary, far from being modern in concept or means, it was an expression of extraordinary primitivism and nihilism. Readers may not agree with some of Hayes’ conclusions—particularly those related to Jewish resistance and punishment for the perpetrators of the Holocaust—but they will appreciate the logical and judicious presentation of his arguments, the clarity of his writing, and mastery of the scholarship on the subject. This book courageously confronts some of the thorniest issues raised by the Shoah, making Why?: Explaining the Holocaust an indispensable work for specialists and informed readers alike.
Visiting Scribe: Peter Hayes
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Two New Books Look at the Holocaust in Civic and Military Terms
By NICHOLAS STARGARDTJAN. 3, 2017
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Children from Lodz on their way to the Chelmno extermination camp, 1942. Credit Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
FINAL SOLUTION
The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949
By David Cesarani
Illustrated. 1,016 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $40.
WHY?
Explaining the Holocaust
By Peter Hayes
Illustrated. 412 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
At the center of “Final Solution” are the words of Jewish victims. In mid-August 1942, Rudolf Reder arrived at Belzec on a train that had taken many hours to cover the 60 miles from Lvov. He was assigned to a small group of men held back on the platform, while the rest were led away. “After a few minutes prisoners appeared with stools and hair-cutting equipment: Their job was to shave the women. It was ‘at this moment that they were struck by the terrible truth. It was then that neither the women nor the men — already on their way to the gas — could have any illusions about their fate.’ ” Reder saw how “the women, naked and shaved, were rounded up with whips like cattle to the slaughter, without even being counted — ‘Faster, faster’ — the men were already dying. Two hours was the time it took to prepare for murder and for murder itself.”
The German SS men and the Ukrainian guards “counted 750 people for each gas chamber. Those women who tried to resist were bayoneted until the blood was running. Eventually all the women were forced into the chambers. I heard the doors being shut; I heard shrieks and cries; I heard desperate calls for help in Polish and Yiddish. I heard the bloodcurdling wails of women and the squeals of children, which after a short time became one long, horrifying scream. . . . This went on for 15 minutes. The engine worked for 20 minutes. Afterward there was total silence.” Reder became a gravedigger in the huge burial pits at Belzec and was one of only two inmates known to survive it. Without him, we would know far less about what happened in this first of the Nazi death camps.
It is impossible to read such testimony and not to be overwhelmed by the event itself. There are over 16,000 books devoted to the Holocaust and decades of witness testimony. Among the memoirs and documentaries, exhibitions and — in recent years — the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a counterculture of skepticism and audience fatigue has grown up. And yet there is something so singular and unimaginable about the events themselves that in this field, unlike many others, historians turn away from metaphor.
As a narrator, David Cesarani, the author of “Becoming Eichmann,” employs a timbre that is clear and somber, the voice of classical realism, as he eschews explicit emotional and moral commentary for the most part, in order not to displace the cumulative impact of his witnesses. Not that Cesarani’s opinions and simmering moral outrage are ever in doubt, as he dispenses with one lingering taboo: Almost every attack and atrocity against Jews was accompanied in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine by rape and sexual violence against Jewish women, sometimes by Germans, sometimes by their local helpers. In Warsaw, well-dressed women were targeted from the start of the occupation, especially those still wearing fur coats. When the mass deportations to Chelmno were underway, many of the Jewish gravediggers were executed at the end of each day’s shift. The Polish ones made themselves so helpful to the SS that they were rewarded by having Jewish women handed over to them. After one or several nights they too were driven into the mobile gas vans and buried in the forest. Male atavism and excess and sexualized violence were everywhere.
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“Final Solution” is not an account that will find favor in the new Eastern Europe. Dividing many of his chapters into one slow year at a time, Cesarani achieves a sense of profound claustrophobia by tracing the extreme difficulty of hiding without being caught, blackmailed, denounced and handed over to the Germans in most of occupied Eastern Europe. In Poland, he writes, “village elders, mayors, police officials, firemen, forest rangers and upstanding citizens all took part in Jew-hunts and sought to profit from the mythical wealth of the Jews.” So too did sections of the resistance and partisan movements in Poland and Ukraine. For the approximately 250,000 Jews in Poland who went into hiding, it was the near-hostile environment that made their chances of survival so slim: “Making it through 1943 and into 1944,” Cesarani writes, “was a mountainous challenge.” Robbing Jews continued after their deaths, as people dug into the ash pits of Sobibor and Treblinka looking for valuables that the SS had missed.
Peter Hayes is more circumspect than Cesarani in “Why?,” suggesting that the Poles who actively helped to hide Jews and those who persecuted them were actually both minorities, but that all the institutions of power were stacked on the side of the persecutors. While acknowledging that helping to hide Jews often carried a stigma in postwar Poland, he also points out that over 1,000 Poles were executed by the Germans for doing just that. With his judicious, thoughtful and balanced answers to difficult and often inflammatory questions, Hayes, a professor emeritus at Northwestern, has provided an intellectually searching and wide-ranging study of the Holocaust in a modest, didactic form. He provides just enough thumbnail narrative to frame his very thoughtful answers for a lay audience, as each chapter of the book addresses a particular question — Why the Jews? Why murder? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often?
Hayes’s answer to this last question is characteristically balanced and astute, as he sketches out the different courses set by four different ghetto leaderships. Whether it was Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw, Chaim Rumkowski kowtowing in Lodz or Jacob Gens in Vilna and Jewish leaders in Minsk who tried to assist Jewish partisan groups, it ultimately made no difference. As Hayes concludes, “whatever the Jewish leaders did — kill themselves, aid the resistance, appease the Nazis — the outcome was the same.” Theirs were truly choiceless choices. Contemporaries may have debated the right course of action, and Cesarani recounts the confrontation between Rabbi David Kahane and Henryk Landsberg, the respected lawyer and head of the Jewish Council in Lvov, in which Kahane declared that “it is better that all die and not one Jew be delivered to the enemy,” while Landsberg countered that the rabbis were not living in the prewar world. But neither Hayes nor Cesarani has any time for the old accusation leveled by Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt that without the collusion of the Jewish Councils, the Nazis could not have carried through the Final Solution to the same extent. Cesarani faults the Jewish leaders in Poland not for things over which they had no control, but for their venality and social conservatism when it came to allocating the scant resources they possessed.
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Cesarani’s central claim to originality is to reconnect the Final Solution with the military campaigns of World War II. As he argues, recent historiography has shown that “making war” was “the central mission of Hitler and the Third Reich,” but that their preparations for war were “erratic”; that the decisive victories over France, Britain and the Soviet Union in 1940-41 were achieved “mainly thanks to the mistakes of their opponents”; and that the regime’s response to the changing military tide thereafter was marked by “inadequacy.” There are obvious dividends to breaking down the artificial compartments that often separate Holocaust and military historians from one another: It is clear that deporting and murdering the Jews was not allowed to interfere with military priorities. Indeed, one reason the Lodz ghetto was established in December 1939 in a city that had just been formally incorporated as a “German city” within the Reich was that winter coal shortages curtailed all noncritical rail traffic. The same exigency returned two years later, just as the decision to expel all Jews from the Reich and murder them was being communicated to Nazi leaders in Berlin. Again, actual deportation plans were put on hold until the winter crisis on the Eastern front was over.
Recent historians have pointed out how make-do the German war effort was, as industrial capacity was shuttled to solve one bottleneck by creating another. Cesarani applies this insight to the Holocaust. While this interpretation may not be as new as he claims — it was a theme of Gerhard L. Weinberg’s work on World War II — it is well taken, and Cesarani is surely right to insist that “compared to the construction of coastal fortifications in northwest Europe, flak defenses in the Reich or practically any other aspect of the war effort, in material terms the war against the Jews was a sideshow.” It was “low-cost and low-tech.”
What is less clear is what this reading means for how we understand Hitler’s overall aims. Was the Holocaust itself unimportant to Hitler, or was it simply ranked as less urgent compared with the demands of fighting a world war? How does this traditional, Hitler-centric view sit with Cesarani’s insistence that the Holocaust was chaotic and ad hoc, “ill-planned, underfunded and carried through haphazardly at breakneck speed”? Here Cesarani returns to familiar territory, placing the short period of September to December 1941 at the center of the decision-making story. These were months of worsening conditions on the Eastern front as the Germans advanced on Moscow. In this account, Hitler’s final decision about the Jews was made at the time he declared war on the United States, on Dec. 11. The murder of the Jews may have been a second-order objective to winning the war, but in the end that fact tells us more about practical reasoning and immediate priorities than it does about core aims.
For Cesarani no less than for Saul Friedländer or Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s obsessive hatred was still the driving force. And on the final page of this magnificent book, he returns to Hitler’s political testament to show that he remained consistent in blaming the Jews for Germany’s defeat in 1918. Behind the chaos, he once more reveals a central will to destroy.
Both Hayes and Cesarani reinstate the singularly Jewish character of the tragedy. The murder of the Roma and disabled is sidelined: Cesarani is too good a historian to omit this from his narrative, but these victims remain voiceless, with no witness testimony cited. Indeed, Cesarani insists that it was the firing squads in Poland and not the gassing of psychiatric patients in Germany that “created the model for mass murder.” Undoubtedly, in Nazi minds the Jews were an all-powerful international enemy, the focus of both fear and hatred, which marked them out as a different kind of enemy from Roma, the disabled or Soviet civilians. But if one’s aim is to reconnect genocide with the rest of the German war, then these other victims also deserve to be written into the story.
Both of these books are the culmination of careers devoted to explaining the Holocaust. In his retirement, Hayes has given us “Why?” as his last lecture course. Cesarani finally wrote the book he had turned away from writing 15 years earlier. His own unexpected death while it was in preparation means that this indefatigable contributor to public debate in Britain could neither enjoy nor participate in the reception of his magnum opus. We are in his debt.
Nicholas Stargardt is a professor of modern European history at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is “The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45.”
A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 2017, on Page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Power and Persecution. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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HOME / A&E / BOOKS / WHY? EXPLAINING THE HOLOCAUST (W.W. NORTON), BY PETER HAYES
Why? Explaining the Holocaust (W.W. Norton), by Peter Hayes
By David Luhrssen
Apr. 11, 2017
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More than 70 years later, people are still asking why? As a particularly striking example of the human capacity for evil, the Holocaust continues to demand answers despite the library of books already dedicated to the subject. In Why? Northwestern University history professor Peter Hayes directs his attention to the general public. As he patiently explicates, there are many answers as well as many questions, including the relative lack of Jewish resistance, why Jews fared better in some Axis-occupied nations than others and why the outside world didn’t do more to help. In defense of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cautious efforts to admit Jewish refugees, Hayes cites widespread opposition to immigrants in Congress and among voters. And as to why the German public went along with the Nazi agenda, Hayes makes another point significant for today: the coarsening of political discourse changed the valence of acceptability. Intimidation and indoctrination played a role—as did indifference.
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Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
Image of Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
Author(s):
Peter Hayes
Release Date:
January 16, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
W. W. Norton & Company
Pages:
432
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Charles S. Weinblatt
“Antisemitism did not bring Hitler to power; a pervasive national crisis and the machinations of self-interested conservative politicians did.”
“Hitler did not plan to murder the Jews from the day he took office; the decision to kill evolved as the Nazis gradually came to recognize a mathematical dilemma; they could not drive Jews out of German territory faster than its expansion encompassed more of them.”
Peter Hayes has been teaching the Holocaust to undergraduates and lecturing about the subject for more than 30 years. Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes dismantles conventional wisdom, disrupts pervasive misconceptions, and explains in detail how a volatile mix of complicity, fear, indifference, and greed paved the way for genocide. He produces compelling arguments against a series of commonly held beliefs about the Holocaust.
Why did Nazi Germany make Jews the targets of their aggression? Why did violence escalate into genocide? Why was the extermination of Jews so far-reaching and rapid? Why didn’t Jews fight back more often? Why was almost every other nation slow to respond to the mass murders and with such limited aid?
How much did Germans know about the genocide? Why did the vast majority of Europeans watch dispassionately as millions of Jewish families were uprooted, brutalized, made into slaves and finally exterminated?
Why does the world continue to exact genocide against millions of innocent people? Why would more genocide occur in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur? Why do humans continue to murder simply because the person murdered was in some way different?
Professor Peter Hayes has produced a finely tuned depiction of why the Holocaust occurred, who was responsible, and why the nations of the world were so slow to respond to the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. The Allies, including America, England, and Russia, pursued only military targets. When they could bomb a Nazi death camp, and stop the mass murder for a while, they refused. Why? Was Jewish blood that worthless to the Allied command?
Why? dispels many of the typical misunderstandings and misconceptions of the Holocaust. It delivers a fact-based presentation, backed by many useful references, into the Shoah. It answers many questions that have been ignored or incompletely explained. Author Hayes continues to ask the major questions. Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why such a swift and comprehensive extermination of the Jews of Europe? Why didn’t more Jews fight back and more often? Why didn’t they receive more help?
Hayes brings to bear a vast archive of scholarly achievement, and he challenges some recent interpretations. He argues that there is no single theory of the Holocaust that explains everything. Instead, Hayes proffers that the convergence of disparate forces colliding at one particular moment in time to provide the foundation for the industrial genocide that we call the Holocaust.
Professor Hayes has produced an excellent explanation of why and how the Holocaust occurred, grounded in well-referenced and well-researched facts; it is concise and evocatively written. Why? can serve as a stand-alone textbook for an undergraduate history course, or for someone interested in acquiring additional depth in terms of Holocaust education. Its detailed, applied research serves to bolster and enhance many of the concepts that we already knew, while questioning a few others.
Hayes accesses compelling data and spot-on facts to explain the basics of why the Holocaust occurred. Visual learners would prefer the addition of a few more maps, diagrams, and pictures to aid in amassing the staid facts presented. Regardless, Hayes has produced a very viable text that reveals the major forces surrounding WWII and the Shoah. His insight and delivery is superb.
Why? is an outstanding book that will help anyone to better understand the meaning of the Holocaust and the many questions that surround it. We unfortunately live in an age when anti-Semitism, reactionary politics, and ultra-nationalist political activity is increasing, turning Jews into the mendacious threats that anti-Semites imagined in Europe 75 years ago. The hate is returning. More likely, it never left. The only difference today is that Muslims are now despised in addition to Jews. Somehow the white haters have forgotten that their ancestors were also immigrants.
A brief foray into Internet discussion groups will produce a litany of hate-filled posts aimed directly at Jews with lies, innuendo, and deceit. The need for a clear and cogent explanation of historical Holocaust facts is an absolute necessity to deter the increase in message board hatred against Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the chatter has increased. The threats have redoubled. More and more people find it appropriate to post hate-filled mendacious lies about Jews on the Internet and this never seems to slow down. This makes books like Why? Ever more necessary.
We live upon the cusp of another Holocaust. Dancing on the blade of a knife, society presents itself with profane, hate-filled lies against Jews and Muslims every day. No longer under the surface, reactionary and ultra-nationalist political parties are drawing more votes in Europe than ever before. Therefore, the time is right for a book that explains the result of anti-Semitism this clearly, concisely and adroitly. We should all hope for the day when such books are no longer necessary to our survival.
Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia.
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Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
Image of Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
Author(s):
Peter Hayes
Release Date:
January 16, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
W. W. Norton & Company
Pages:
432
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Charles S. Weinblatt
“Antisemitism did not bring Hitler to power; a pervasive national crisis and the machinations of self-interested conservative politicians did.”
“Hitler did not plan to murder the Jews from the day he took office; the decision to kill evolved as the Nazis gradually came to recognize a mathematical dilemma; they could not drive Jews out of German territory faster than its expansion encompassed more of them.”
Peter Hayes has been teaching the Holocaust to undergraduates and lecturing about the subject for more than 30 years. Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes dismantles conventional wisdom, disrupts pervasive misconceptions, and explains in detail how a volatile mix of complicity, fear, indifference, and greed paved the way for genocide. He produces compelling arguments against a series of commonly held beliefs about the Holocaust.
Why did Nazi Germany make Jews the targets of their aggression? Why did violence escalate into genocide? Why was the extermination of Jews so far-reaching and rapid? Why didn’t Jews fight back more often? Why was almost every other nation slow to respond to the mass murders and with such limited aid?
How much did Germans know about the genocide? Why did the vast majority of Europeans watch dispassionately as millions of Jewish families were uprooted, brutalized, made into slaves and finally exterminated?
Why does the world continue to exact genocide against millions of innocent people? Why would more genocide occur in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur? Why do humans continue to murder simply because the person murdered was in some way different?
Professor Peter Hayes has produced a finely tuned depiction of why the Holocaust occurred, who was responsible, and why the nations of the world were so slow to respond to the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. The Allies, including America, England, and Russia, pursued only military targets. When they could bomb a Nazi death camp, and stop the mass murder for a while, they refused. Why? Was Jewish blood that worthless to the Allied command?
Why? dispels many of the typical misunderstandings and misconceptions of the Holocaust. It delivers a fact-based presentation, backed by many useful references, into the Shoah. It answers many questions that have been ignored or incompletely explained. Author Hayes continues to ask the major questions. Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why such a swift and comprehensive extermination of the Jews of Europe? Why didn’t more Jews fight back and more often? Why didn’t they receive more help?
Hayes brings to bear a vast archive of scholarly achievement, and he challenges some recent interpretations. He argues that there is no single theory of the Holocaust that explains everything. Instead, Hayes proffers that the convergence of disparate forces colliding at one particular moment in time to provide the foundation for the industrial genocide that we call the Holocaust.
Professor Hayes has produced an excellent explanation of why and how the Holocaust occurred, grounded in well-referenced and well-researched facts; it is concise and evocatively written. Why? can serve as a stand-alone textbook for an undergraduate history course, or for someone interested in acquiring additional depth in terms of Holocaust education. Its detailed, applied research serves to bolster and enhance many of the concepts that we already knew, while questioning a few others.
Hayes accesses compelling data and spot-on facts to explain the basics of why the Holocaust occurred. Visual learners would prefer the addition of a few more maps, diagrams, and pictures to aid in amassing the staid facts presented. Regardless, Hayes has produced a very viable text that reveals the major forces surrounding WWII and the Shoah. His insight and delivery is superb.
Why? is an outstanding book that will help anyone to better understand the meaning of the Holocaust and the many questions that surround it. We unfortunately live in an age when anti-Semitism, reactionary politics, and ultra-nationalist political activity is increasing, turning Jews into the mendacious threats that anti-Semites imagined in Europe 75 years ago. The hate is returning. More likely, it never left. The only difference today is that Muslims are now despised in addition to Jews. Somehow the white haters have forgotten that their ancestors were also immigrants.
A brief foray into Internet discussion groups will produce a litany of hate-filled posts aimed directly at Jews with lies, innuendo, and deceit. The need for a clear and cogent explanation of historical Holocaust facts is an absolute necessity to deter the increase in message board hatred against Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the chatter has increased. The threats have redoubled. More and more people find it appropriate to post hate-filled mendacious lies about Jews on the Internet and this never seems to slow down. This makes books like Why? Ever more necessary.
We live upon the cusp of another Holocaust. Dancing on the blade of a knife, society presents itself with profane, hate-filled lies against Jews and Muslims every day. No longer under the surface, reactionary and ultra-nationalist political parties are drawing more votes in Europe than ever before. Therefore, the time is right for a book that explains the result of anti-Semitism this clearly, concisely and adroitly. We should all hope for the day when such books are no longer necessary to our survival.
Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia.
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ShareThis Copy and Pastenew york journal of books Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Enter your keywords Why?: Explaining the Holocaust Author(s): Peter Hayes Release Date: January 16, 2017 Publisher/Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Pages: 432 Buy on Amazon Reviewed by: Charles S. Weinblatt “Antisemitism did not bring Hitler to power; a pervasive national crisis and the machinations of self-interested conservative politicians did.” “Hitler did not plan to murder the Jews from the day he took office; the decision to kill evolved as the Nazis gradually came to recognize a mathematical dilemma; they could not drive Jews out of German territory faster than its expansion encompassed more of them.” Peter Hayes has been teaching the Holocaust to undergraduates and lecturing about the subject for more than 30 years. Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes dismantles conventional wisdom, disrupts pervasive misconceptions, and explains in detail how a volatile mix of complicity, fear, indifference, and greed paved the way for genocide. He produces compelling arguments against a series of commonly held beliefs about the Holocaust. Why did Nazi Germany make Jews the targets of their aggression? Why did violence escalate into genocide? Why was the extermination of Jews so far-reaching and rapid? Why didn’t Jews fight back more often? Why was almost every other nation slow to respond to the mass murders and with such limited aid? How much did Germans know about the genocide? Why did the vast majority of Europeans watch dispassionately as millions of Jewish families were uprooted, brutalized, made into slaves and finally exterminated? Why does the world continue to exact genocide against millions of innocent people? Why would more genocide occur in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur? Why do humans continue to murder simply because the person murdered was in some way different? Professor Peter Hayes has produced a finely tuned depiction of why the Holocaust occurred, who was responsible, and why the nations of the world were so slow to respond to the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. The Allies, including America, England, and Russia, pursued only military targets. When they could bomb a Nazi death camp, and stop the mass murder for a while, they refused. Why? Was Jewish blood that worthless to the Allied command? Why? dispels many of the typical misunderstandings and misconceptions of the Holocaust. It delivers a fact-based presentation, backed by many useful references, into the Shoah. It answers many questions that have been ignored or incompletely explained. Author Hayes continues to ask the major questions. Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why such a swift and comprehensive extermination of the Jews of Europe? Why didn’t more Jews fight back and more often? Why didn’t they receive more help? Hayes brings to bear a vast archive of scholarly achievement, and he challenges some recent interpretations. He argues that there is no single theory of the Holocaust that explains everything. Instead, Hayes proffers that the convergence of disparate forces colliding at one particular moment in time to provide the foundation for the industrial genocide that we call the Holocaust. Professor Hayes has produced an excellent explanation of why and how the Holocaust occurred, grounded in well-referenced and well-researched facts; it is concise and evocatively written. Why? can serve as a stand-alone textbook for an undergraduate history course, or for someone interested in acquiring additional depth in terms of Holocaust education. Its detailed, applied research serves to bolster and enhance many of the concepts that we already knew, while questioning a few others. Hayes accesses compelling data and spot-on facts to explain the basics of why the Holocaust occurred. Visual learners would prefer the addition of a few more maps, diagrams, and pictures to aid in amassing the staid facts presented. Regardless, Hayes has produced a very viable text that reveals the major forces surrounding WWII and the Shoah. His insight and delivery is superb. Why? is an outstanding book that will help anyone to better understand the meaning of the Holocaust and the many questions that surround it. We unfortunately live in an age when anti-Semitism, reactionary politics, and ultra-nationalist political activity is increasing, turning Jews into the mendacious threats that anti-Semites imagined in Europe 75 years ago. The hate is returning. More likely, it never left. The only difference today is that Muslims are now despised in addition to Jews. Somehow the white haters have forgotten that their ancestors were also immigrants. A brief foray into Internet discussion groups will produce a litany of hate-filled posts aimed directly at Jews with lies, innuendo, and deceit. The need for a clear and cogent explanation of historical Holocaust facts is an absolute necessity to deter the increase in message board hatred against Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the chatter has increased. The threats have redoubled. More and more people find it appropriate to post hate-filled mendacious lies about Jews on the Internet and this never seems to slow down. This makes books like Why? Ever more necessary. We live upon the cusp of another Holocaust. Dancing on the blade of a knife, society presents itself with profane, hate-filled lies against Jews and Muslims every day. No longer under the surface, reactionary and ultra-nationalist political parties are drawing more votes in Europe than ever before. Therefore, the time is right for a book that explains the result of anti-Semitism this clearly, concisely and adroitly. We should all hope for the day when such books are no longer necessary to our survival. Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia. Buy on Amazon Home Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Sitemap Terms of Use Privacy Policy Contact Us NYJB Editing Services Review Requests Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn new york journal of books Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Enter your keywords Why?: Explaining the Holocaust Author(s): Peter Hayes Release Date: January 16, 2017 Publisher/Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Pages: 432 Buy on Amazon Reviewed by: Charles S. Weinblatt “Antisemitism did not bring Hitler to power; a pervasive national crisis and the machinations of self-interested conservative politicians did.” “Hitler did not plan to murder the Jews from the day he took office; the decision to kill evolved as the Nazis gradually came to recognize a mathematical dilemma; they could not drive Jews out of German territory faster than its expansion encompassed more of them.” Peter Hayes has been teaching the Holocaust to undergraduates and lecturing about the subject for more than 30 years. Hayes is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes dismantles conventional wisdom, disrupts pervasive misconceptions, and explains in detail how a volatile mix of complicity, fear, indifference, and greed paved the way for genocide. He produces compelling arguments against a series of commonly held beliefs about the Holocaust. Why did Nazi Germany make Jews the targets of their aggression? Why did violence escalate into genocide? Why was the extermination of Jews so far-reaching and rapid? Why didn’t Jews fight back more often? Why was almost every other nation slow to respond to the mass murders and with such limited aid? How much did Germans know about the genocide? Why did the vast majority of Europeans watch dispassionately as millions of Jewish families were uprooted, brutalized, made into slaves and finally exterminated? Why does the world continue to exact genocide against millions of innocent people? Why would more genocide occur in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur? Why do humans continue to murder simply because the person murdered was in some way different? Professor Peter Hayes has produced a finely tuned depiction of why the Holocaust occurred, who was responsible, and why the nations of the world were so slow to respond to the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. The Allies, including America, England, and Russia, pursued only military targets. When they could bomb a Nazi death camp, and stop the mass murder for a while, they refused. Why? Was Jewish blood that worthless to the Allied command? Why? dispels many of the typical misunderstandings and misconceptions of the Holocaust. It delivers a fact-based presentation, backed by many useful references, into the Shoah. It answers many questions that have been ignored or incompletely explained. Author Hayes continues to ask the major questions. Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why such a swift and comprehensive extermination of the Jews of Europe? Why didn’t more Jews fight back and more often? Why didn’t they receive more help? Hayes brings to bear a vast archive of scholarly achievement, and he challenges some recent interpretations. He argues that there is no single theory of the Holocaust that explains everything. Instead, Hayes proffers that the convergence of disparate forces colliding at one particular moment in time to provide the foundation for the industrial genocide that we call the Holocaust. Professor Hayes has produced an excellent explanation of why and how the Holocaust occurred, grounded in well-referenced and well-researched facts; it is concise and evocatively written. Why? can serve as a stand-alone textbook for an undergraduate history course, or for someone interested in acquiring additional depth in terms of Holocaust education. Its detailed, applied research serves to bolster and enhance many of the concepts that we already knew, while questioning a few others. Hayes accesses compelling data and spot-on facts to explain the basics of why the Holocaust occurred. Visual learners would prefer the addition of a few more maps, diagrams, and pictures to aid in amassing the staid facts presented. Regardless, Hayes has produced a very viable text that reveals the major forces surrounding WWII and the Shoah. His insight and delivery is superb. Why? is an outstanding book that will help anyone to better understand the meaning of the Holocaust and the many questions that surround it. We unfortunately live in an age when anti-Semitism, reactionary politics, and ultra-nationalist political activity is increasing, turning Jews into the mendacious threats that anti-Semites imagined in Europe 75 years ago. The hate is returning. More likely, it never left. The only difference today is that Muslims are now despised in addition to Jews. Somehow the white haters have forgotten that their ancestors were also immigrants. A brief foray into Internet discussion groups will produce a litany of hate-filled posts aimed directly at Jews with lies, innuendo, and deceit. The need for a clear and cogent explanation of historical Holocaust facts is an absolute necessity to deter the increase in message board hatred against Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the chatter has increased. The threats have redoubled. More and more people find it appropriate to post hate-filled mendacious lies about Jews on the Internet and this never seems to slow down. This makes books like Why? Ever more necessary. We live upon the cusp of another Holocaust. Dancing on the blade of a knife, society presents itself with profane, hate-filled lies against Jews and Muslims every day. No longer under the surface, reactionary and ultra-nationalist political parties are drawing more votes in Europe than ever before. Therefore, the time is right for a book that explains the result of anti-Semitism this clearly, concisely and adroitly. We should all hope for the day when such books are no longer necessary to our survival. Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia. Buy on Amazon Home Home Recent Reviews Fiction NonFiction About Us Sitemap Terms of Use Privacy Policy Contact Us NYJB Editing Services Review Requests Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn ShareThis Copy and Paste
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BOOK REVIEWS
Explaining the Holocaust: Author's lessons still resonate
By Repps Hudson Special to the Post-Dispatch Jan 21, 2017 (0)
When trying to understand the rationale of the Holocaust, one is usually reduced to reciting the steps of German — and European — history that led to the heinous mass murder of more than 6 million Jews and others.
In Peter Hayes’ book “Why? Explaining the Holocaust,” the author takes us through the genocide’s origins and how it was executed with industrial efficiency. He does a remarkably dispassionate job of detailing, with the eye of a well-established historian, the convergence of paths in Germany that led to one of the greatest crimes in the history of the world.
Hayes is professor emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University and chair of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He knows his subject intimately.
Many older readers are familiar with the story of the Holocaust, in part because of famous stories like that of Anne Frank, who left her diary before perishing in a death camp. But younger readers may not be aware of the vast scope of the Nazi killing machine that nearly wiped Jews from the face of Europe during World War II. The author revives that story in convincing detail, enough so that even deniers would have a hard time refuting the historic evidence he cites.
He organized his book as he did his lectures, taking on the most basic questions first. Chapter 1 is titled “Why the Jews?”
Hayes writes: “One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God [in Christianity], they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.”
And Chapter 2: “Why the Germans?”
Hayes reminds readers that in the 19th century, the German people were all about unification and establishing themselves at the crossroads of Europe. Some of its leading thinkers were interested in creating a sense of Volk — German peoplehood — and developing German nationalism.
He explains: “Establishing precisely what this Volk had in common was the great task of German nationalist thinkers during the early nineteenth century. They labored to identify … a collective German nature, and they began by defining it around what Germans in the early 1800s were collectively against.”
That would be anything French, since the emperor of France, Napoleon, had been at war with various German states. French ideas were anathema to emerging German ideology.
“Since emancipation of the Jews was a French import,” Hayes writes, “many German nationalists rejected it as the product of an alien spirit.”
And so on through this depressing but necessary story of the near destruction of an ancient people, along with the killing of homosexuals, Gypsies and those opposed to the Nazi regime. The answers, however, are neither easy nor entirely satisfying. None leaves the reader with the sense that the author has resolved the matter.
Many of the answers, though, reveal much about flawed human nature.
Why didn’t Britain and France, the other leading European powers of the time, step in to stop Hitler, whose isolation and persecution of German Jews were well-known?
Essentially, neither country wanted to challenge Hitler, which led to the policy of appeasing German demands. Neither country wanted more war after the massive death and destruction of 1914-18.
“Hitler and his propaganda agencies also played shrewdly on the antisemitism present in Britain, France, and also the United States,” Hayes writes. “He blackmailed these countries into reticence or silence by the simple trick of claiming that they were tools of the Jews and then citing any protest on their behalf by these countries as proof of his charge.”
No one is virtuous here. What’s a big lesson from the Holocaust for today?
“… [T]he Holocaust illustrates the fundamental importance and difficulty of individual courage and imagination,” Hayes writes in closing. “This dreadful history shows the necessity of standing up to categorization and conspiracy peddling, of refusing to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to defamation. There can be no drawing of distinction between citizens when it comes to fundamental human rights, no hair-splitting about who gets to have them and who does not.”
Hayes has written a valuable book for today’s challenges, with perspective and sensitivity, that is, indeed, authoritative, readable and revealing.
Repps Hudson is an adjunct university instructor and freelance journalist.
'Why? Explaining the Holocaust'
“Why? Explaining the Holocaust”
By Peter Hayes
Published by Norton, 412 pages, $27.95
"Why? Explaining the Holocaust"
By Peter Hayes
Published by Norton, 412 pages, $27.95
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WHY? Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes as reviewed by Lynne Lawrence
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This is quite an extraordinary book. How, you ask, can there be anything more to say after hundreds of writers have delved into this topic? Holocaust literature is almost a genre unto itself. And judging from the length of Hayes’s bibliography, he has read most of it. But now, with the passing of the generation that perpetrated, and suffered, the Holocaust, is perhaps the time for another definitive look.
Yes, there have been other holocausts – other genocides, other ethnic cleansings – and they continue today. Which is perhaps Hayes’s point . . . if we have not learned how to prevent this outcome, then perhaps we need to look more analytically at the actions, events and conditions that allowed it to happen.
Hayes explains how a failing economy, particularly the huge disparity in the distribution of wealth, engendered so much fear in the German population that they listened to the leader who made the most promises, who shouted them the loudest, and who convinced them the impossible was possible – and that he, and only he, could make it happen. Promises were made, and some were kept. What first passed as patriotism, love of country and leader, became a nationalistic frenzy – a dangerous situation for minorities – those who were seen as “not like us.” With a calculated understanding of just how much could be tolerated at any given time, those in power engineered their terrible solution, day by day, edict by edict – and no one stopped them until it was too late. So many people, so many governments, so many religious leaders – were complicit.
We’ve all heard of Dachau and Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen – but the truth is that there were nearly 40,000 “work” camps and death camps throughout Germany and Poland. Some were very small, with only a half dozen guards; some held several thousand doomed prisoners – they dotted the countryside like family farms. As my 94-year-old veteran friend says, “At first we didn’t know. We were going to save the world. Some guy named Hitler was taking over whole countries and it was our job to stop him. But then the rumors started to circulate among the guys. At first we knew none of that stuff could be true. And then we started to wonder . . . And finally, those of us who made it all the way, we saw it with our own eyes. Those memories come back to me every night, just like it was yesterday.”
Although this is a serious work of scholarship, it’s very readable. I understand it is not going to be the #1 book checked out of Tucker Free, but It feels important, it feels like something to which we should all be paying attention. The one big question that is only partially answered: how could we - the U.S., the rest of the world - have allowed this to happen? One hopes the answer doesn’t lie in today’s newspaper.
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