Ethical Diversions

[Paul Mackin]

Found some interesting twists on the  Holocaust in the current  
NYReview.  The book being reviewed is 1945: the War That Never Ended  
by Gregor Dallas. Anyway, for what it's worth, the reviewer states  
the following:

Dallas follows Solzhenitsyn in denying the uniqueness of the  
Holocaust. The classic distinction between stigmatizing a race (which  
could not change its characteristics) and a class (which could be  
"reeducated") breaks down with Stalin. He too "dumped whole nations  
down the sewer pipes," wrote Solzhenitsyn. Stalin deported the  
nations whom he thought had collaborated, or might collaborate, with  
the Germans—Georgians, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmuks—straining the  
Russian transport system just as the deportation of Jews to the East  
strained the Nazi transport system. The reasoning was the same in  
both cases: their ethnic characteristics made the victims actual or  
potential enemies of the regime. In 1941, Hitler wavered between  
deporting and exterminating the Jews. He had been considering  
evacuating all Jews first to Madagascar and then east of the Urals.  
It was "the loss of any chance for control of these lands...[which]  
pushed the Nazis towards...the 'Final Solution.'"

In another twist to the story, Dallas argues that the "event decisive  
for the fate of the Jews" was initiated not by Hitler but by Stalin  
when he deported the Volga Germans to Siberia in September 1941.  
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi minister for the eastern territories, told  
Hitler that virtually none would survive. "It seems that it was  
between late September and October 1941 that Hitler, not a forgiving  
man, decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe in return." Thus the  
two regimes' policies were linked in a murderous tit for tat. The  
acceleration of Hitler's extermination program in 1942 was a reaction  
to a war that was being lost. After the defeat in front of Moscow,  
Dallas argues, Hitler "was obliged to imagine ways in which his Nazi  
ideology could survive.... The Jews, all the Jews, would have to be  
murdered while he still had control, before the war was ended."

Later in the review Robert Sidelsky (the review}  states:


Different interpretations are possible of the origins of the  
Holocaust, and Dallas's is entirely plausible. Its great strength is  
its insistence that this appalling tragedy was not predetermined. His  
account raises large questions about what other nations might have  
done to prevent the genocide of the Jews. The most uncomfortable  
question of all is: Would it have happened at all had Britain and  
France conceded Danzig to Hitler?
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