JUST 51 years after the opening of the death camps, we are still downwind of the stench of decay and murder at least another full generation will have to be born and come to maturity before we can place a proper perspective on the abominable deeds of that time.
But that doesn't mean we, shouldn't do our best in facing up to the horrors of what the Germans did and we similarly must look at other crimes other peoples did at that time.
Scholarship and truth are not assisted in any degree by state supported Declared Truths, such as the current German law which states that six million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust and that it is a crime to state otherwise. The truth is that nobody actually believes, that precisely six million Jews died. Some Israeli scholars believe the figure is a good deal, less than six million. The idea that less than six million were, murdered should not in itself be an event of criminality; yet it has become so, if only for the generally laudable reason that German neo Nazis use the Holocaust "myth" as one of the central planks in their current programme. Of course, the reality is that we should be relieved that the Nazis were less, successful in their extermination programme than had been supposed.
All the evidence, from all sources indicates that the leadership of the Third Reich intended to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, and embarked upon its programme with much assistance from willing allies everywhere. And though we live, as I said, downwind of the Holocaust we should at this span of time be able to consider the evidence dispassionately. The fate of yet two more books on this epoch indicates that this is not the case.
Goebbels Book Stopped
The biography of Goebbels by the eccentric and bizarre British historian David Irving will not, after all, be published this year in the USA following pressure from Jewish groups. Irving has a reputation of being a neo Nazi, but nothing that I have read in his three volume Hitler's War and his single volume on Churchill indicates that he is anything so simple as that. Apparently, he believes that three, not six, million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The acknowledgement that the Nazis murdered three million Jews is evidence enough of genocidal intent, if not of genocidal completion.
Far from Irving disputing the anti Semitic intentions of the Third Reich, his work on Hitler is conclusively adamant: "Those deported were the lucky ones, for no country outside Europe was to apply the grisly Final Solution as enthusiastically as Slovakia when the methodological liquidation programme began in 1942. Of Auschwitz, Irving wrote: "The defunct paraphernalia of death - idle since 1943 - began to clank again as the first trainloads (of Jews) from Hungary arrived.
No doubt Irving is an unpleasant man, no doubt many of his views are odious, no doubt he is a partisan historian; but his archival work is often brilliant. Nonetheless, six members of the TCD Modern History Department, in denouncing this column when I spoke out for Irving's right to speak to an audience some time ago, insisted that the duty of historians was to "help support democratic society".
No, it is not. It might be a citizen's duty to do that but it is the duty of historians to speak the truth, and to tolerate the expression of error, opposing it by exposing it. Which the six did not do - primarily, I would guess, because they had not read Hitler's War.
Revisionist Thesis
Just as Irving encounters another ban, a new book on the Third Reich, Daniel Goldhagen's superbly researched Hitler's Willing Executioners, is being vigorously promoted everywhere by Little Brown. The Goldhagen thesis is as avowedly revisionist as Irving strives to be, but in the opposite direction, alleging that the Holocaust was not merely the work of the Nazi party but of the German people generally, who were enthusiastic participants in genocide.
What might be hard for Goldhagen to stomach is that, that is precisely what one can adduce from Irving, who has detailed atrocities by regular German army units. Goldhagen's thesis suggests that the Germans alone seemed to have this capacity for genocidal slaughter yet, just as Irving effectively torpedoes his own theories that Hitler could have been in ignorance of the Final Solution being enacted in the east, Goldhagen does the same with his absurd germanocentric explanation of the Holocaust.
Repeatedly we see in his account the activities of some of the worst and most evil antiSemites, the "Trawnikis" or "Hiwis", eastern European auxiliaries whose appetite for murder seems to have exceeded that of their German chums to the point where they could wade knee deep in the gore of butchered Jews, something their more squeamish German companions balked at.
Wider Scenario
This is not to take away from part of Goldhagen's thesis that ordinary Germans, as best represented in his account of the abominable Police Battalion 101, were well capable of mass murder. The point is surely broader: that all over Europe, people proved capable of mass murder. Poles butchered thousands of ethnic Germans in 1940 as in later times they, leagued with their German invaders against their Jewish neighbours. All over the Third Reich the Nazis found willing allies ready to help murder whoever in vast numbers - preferably Jews.
This ability, to murder was not the invention of the Third Reich. It was evident in Stalins Russia, in which millions were killed by methods not very different from those of the Nazis and their henchmen; it had been evident in the massacre of Armenians - largely by Kurds - in Anatolia in 1915; it was evident in the Sudetenland in 1945, when maybe 100,000 ethnic Germans were killed.
It is a repeated feature of 20th century European life, as events in Bosnia have taught us. It needs little but the deadly binary mix of tribal pride in a divided society and the suspension of the Sixth Commandment; and then mankind, and not just its German component, is capable of anything.