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David Bankier 1947–2010
“Despite the Importance and Centrality of Antisemitism, It Cannot Serve as the Exclusive Explanation of Murder and Murderers”
David Bankier, Professor of Holocaust History at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and holder of the John Najmann Chair at Yad Vashem, passed away on February 25, 2010. This is a great loss not only to his family, to Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University, to his friends and colleagues, including the present author, but also to the field of Holocaust research in general. Bankier wrote several basic studies and was known in the community of researchers of Nazism and the Holocaust as a punctilious scholar with a piercing and analytical mind. He also nurtured a group of young scholars, providing them with basic tools for Holocaust study, and gave advice to many researchers. For my part, our shared path extended over several decades. It commenced in the late 1960s and early 1970s when together we studied Jewish History at the Hebrew University. The past decade, when we worked closely and intensively in the academic administration of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, was a rich and productive period. Bankier was graced with a mixture of humor, academic acuity, receptiveness to other opinions, and appreciation of scholarly originality combined with sincere but uncompromising criticism; he also loved Yiddish, movies, and excellent football. All these attributes were completely devoid of any trace of arrogance. Thanks to these traits, he was an inspiring colleague and a dear friend whom I will miss greatly.
David Bankier was born on January 19, 1947 (27 Tevet, 5707), in the Zeckendorf DP camp in the Bamberg district, Oberfranken, Germany, in the then American Occupation Zone. His parents were Holocaust survivors from Ukraine and Poland. From there his family migrated first to Israel and then to Argentina (on reaching adulthood, David immigrated to Israel; the family immigrated to the USA; in the 1980s his parents returned to Israel). David grew up in Argentina; he studied at a public school and at a Jewish school where he consolidated his knowledge of the Hebrew language. In his youth he participated in Zionist activity and in 1967 immigrated to Israel. In that year he began to study Jewish history at the Hebrew University and in 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation, “German Society and National Socialist Antisemitism, 1933–1938.”1
The great basic question in Holocaust research — “How could this happen?” — was also at the basis of Bankier’s research work. Holocaust scholars have sought and still seek to answer this question in various ways while dealing with diversified secondary questions deriving from the main question: To what extent did ideology have an influence? Did propaganda play a real role? Should the explanation focus on the leader (Hitler), on the regime’s bureaucratic mechanism, or on German society — and by extension on societies in the occupied countries and in the Axis countries, or perhaps on a complex and complicated interaction between them? How did the mental and organizational transition occur from “normal” antisemitism to murderous antisemitism working with rational tools? Was the success of the Nazi extermination project the result of the acts of the murderous activists only? Or did the latent attitude toward the Jews even in circles not involved in the actual murder make its contribution, serving initially as a convenient background for murder, allowing it to continue without real opposition and even affecting the way of coping with it a posteriori? Scholars of the Jewish aspect also asked whether characteristics of Jewish society and Jewish conduct in face of the events played their part in the territorial range and the numerical extent of the murderous enterprise.
These questions led Bankier to focus on German society principally, but also on European society in general, even though his training was actually in Jewish History. This focus produced a doctrine with several thematic points:
As I have shown elsewhere, the “Jerusalem School” of Israeli Jewish History scholars active at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from the 1940s — Ben-Zion Dinur, Yitzhak Beer, Shmuel Ettinger, Jacob Katz, and Jacob Talmon — dealt extensively with the question of modern antisemitism.2 They considered that the main change in the history of antisemitism to which the Jews were subjected over the generations occurred in the second part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century; the radicalization that arose at this point led to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.3 A series of younger Israeli scholars in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv — Nathaniel Katzburg, Uriel Tal, Bela Vago, Walter Zwi Bacharach, Moshe Zimmerman, Shmuel Almog, Michel Abitbol, etc. — wrote studies including doctoral dissertations in line with this perspective. They analyzed the way in which antisemitism took root in the political dialogue that developed in those years in various countries — principally in Germany, Hungary, Romania, and France — the social circles that adopted it and the reasons for this, the new elements that integrated into it and reflected reactions to the current hardships, and the programs that they prepared and even partially implemented.4
The view at the basis of these studies was that the fundamental change in thought that occurred in modern antisemitism was sufficient to explain the Holocaust. When the Nazi party, which professed “modern” antisemitism, came to power, the seed had already been sown for the process that was to end in extermination from an inner logic. This historiography, which prevailed in Israeli research for many years, therefore understood the Holocaust in an intentionalist way, asserting that the intention came into existence in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Moreover, this approach assumed that the ideology in itself sufficed in order to set a process in motion if the holders of this ideology achieved governmental power that allowed its implementation through the governmental tools at their disposal.
Bankier accepted the diagnosis of the profound changes that occurred in the manifestation of antisemitism until the Nazi rise to power, and on numerous occasions — in lectures to many groups at Yad Vashem and in other discussions — he emphasized these trends as creating potential. However, as a scrupulous historian aware of the complexity of historical processes, particularly in a country with a large population like Germany, he was not prepared to allow research to stop at the development of antisemitism and the ways in which it functioned in social and political life at the very time of the Nazis’ rise to power. As one who shaped his research outlook regarding Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in the second half of the 1970s, he was well aware of the functionalist criticism of the overly linear viewpoint in relation to the development of the policy toward the Jews — the intentionalist approach, which was also the heritage of his teachers to some extent. He also did not accept the approaches prevalent in the world regarding the power of propaganda and the complete control of totalitarian regimes. Thus, at the beginning of his doctoral dissertation, which later became the first part of his book, The Germans and the Final Solution, he wrote:5
In the literature discussing totalitarian regimes we regularly find categorical determinations concerning the government’s effectiveness in creating uniformity, with the consequent development of absolute mass loyalty to the ruling regime. According to some of the scholars in this area, in the process of arriving at totalitarianism, interpersonal relationships are dissolved and the previous social institutions and political cultures are destroyed. As a result all the classes in society become amorphous masses devoid of opinions and viewpoints on any social or political subject. This reality … leads to one result — social fragmentation and elimination of critical self-judgment in the population.
In this historiographic context many scholars who examined the social reality in National Socialist Germany came to the conclusion that in the Third Reich public opinion independent of the totalitarian government did not exist. Since the Jewish question was an organic and basic part of the National Socialist doctrine, the German public had no independent opinion in this area either, or alternatively, the regime reflected the almost monolithic antisemitic consensus in the population.6
David Bankier disagreed with these assumptions. To him the notion that Nazi rule was totalitarian from the time of the Nazi rise to power, that Hitler gave his instructions from the top and the government mechanisms fell into place and the masses obeyed and toed the line (the top-down view) is clearly simplistic and completely unreasonable. Under the influence of one of his doctoral advisors, the preeminent scholar George Mosse, one of the most important researchers on the underlying forces in German society,7 he decided to examine in detail the place of antisemitism in the first years of the Nazi regime. In the wake of his other advisor, Otto Dov Kulka, who had dealt from the mid-60s with the regular secret reports (Lageberichte, Stimmungsberichte, Meldungen) written methodically and continuously by the Reich and SS security organizations,8 he decided to use this material as one of the main sources for this examination. He also searched a number of archives in Germany, the United States, Italy, and Israel.
After studying different German groups in different areas and at different times in the first years of the regime, he concluded that the description of the success of the National Socialist doctrine among the German public was exaggerated. He showed that the external signs of processions and demonstrations and symbols indeed initially attracted the masses, but over time they lost their effectiveness, and ultimately large portions of the German public did not change their basic opinions and positions due to the propaganda and the party indoctrination. National Socialism’s success, he determined, was to be attributed to the failure of the alternative political systems rather than to the effectiveness of the regime’s indoctrination.
As regards antisemitism and its functioning in propaganda, in recruiting the masses, and in the deterioration of the situation of the Jews, he determined — contrary to the accepted theories in the research until then — that the antisemitic elements in the National Socialist propaganda did not always play unifying roles in German society. Nor did they necessarily help to recruit the masses to the anti-Jewish policy. Antisemitism was effective in recruiting the party activists to action but “most of the public did not attribute to antisemitism the importance that it had in the eyes of the National Socialist Party, and placed it in a secondary place in its order of priorities.” Moreover, “points of friction appeared between the party and the population,” and from this point of view the regime did not achieve one of its most important goals. Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that generally the reservations about the antisemitic policy in the Third Reich did not derive from “humanitarian motives and the success of the ideals of the Emancipation” but from “the fears of the possible negative repercussions of the persecution of the Jews and, except for a few exceptional cases, there is almost no opposition to the actual State antisemitism... but a demand to stop the terror and its dangerous repercussions and to give a legal framework to a solution of the Jewish problem in the Third Reich.” And thus:
The general population played its part in the success of the antisemitic policy, precisely because it demonstrated moral apathy and estranged itself from the ideas of the Emancipation. The latent hostility to the Jews remained as it was, and to this was added the declared indifference to the fate of the persecuted. This combination made it possible to carry out the antisemitic policy until the final solution stage.
However, regarding the way in which the government conducted the anti-Jewish policy, “a close connection can be shown between the public mood and ‘public opinion’ and political decisions or their timing.” There was a clear correlation “between the attempt to maintain the ideological momentum and prevent the waning of revolutionary energy on the one hand and the political decision-making on the other.”9
Already in these writings Bankier took a very interesting independent stance in relation to accepted approaches on a series of subjects in the study of that period, including:
When he prepared his doctoral dissertation for print, Bankier expanded his investigation of public opinion to the period after 1938. The last three chapters of the book discuss the population’s responses to the severe measures deriving from the antisemitic policy until the Final Solution and the interaction between the government and public opinion. After showing that in general the public was aware of what was happening, he reached the conclusion that from 1941 a buffer was created between the population and the regime, a buffer “that derived from the growing pessimism about the war, the dissatisfaction with the euthanasia program, and the conflict with the Catholic Church in the campaign to remove the crosses. By 1942 the people were already very tired of the war.” The decreased hopes of victory and the fear of the retaliation of the Jews or the Allies led many ordinary Germans to distance themselves from the propaganda, and particularly from the subject of the Jews. The attempts of the Nazis to incite antisemitic feelings did not only fail to calm the fears of the public but actually increased them, and thus the more the information about the mass extermination filtered through the more the public wished to be less involved in the Final Solution. This conclusion was essentially a continuation of Bankier’s view in relation to the first years of the Nazi regime.13
Bankier’s object was not to detract from the role of German society in the extermination campaign’s success but to show that this success and the participation in it of so many Germans — a fact about which there is no disagreement — did not derive simply from the driving force of antisemitism in the population through the propaganda but from other reasons, and principally from distancing and clear disinterest. This attitude was already evident, as previously mentioned, in the 1930s, but in the 1940s in the face of the systematic extermination, this conduct casts a heavy shadow on the German population in general.
In light of his great sensitivity as regards the complexity of the driving force of antisemitism in the Third Reich, we can understand his sharp response to two studies published in the 1990s and which provoked many reactions: Götz Aly’s and Susanne Heim’s Vordenker der Vernichtung,14 and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.15 Susanne Heim and Götz Aly, according to Bankier’s analysis, sought to present the Holocaust as a “rational” process,
A way of solving economic questions, so that the Jews were not killed because they were Jews but because they were underdeveloped Luftmenschen. Moreover, the Holocaust was not unique. The murder of the Jews was the first step in a much more comprehensive plan to commit genocide against other ethnic groups and cannot be isolated from the vast schemes of social modernization undertaken by the Third Reich.16
Bankier examined the different claims made by Heim and Aly, showed their weaknesses and rejected them. “Nazi racism,” he maintained, “was the driving force behind the extermination, and the rationalization of social engineering was simply objectified hatred in order to give a social and economic meaning to mass murder.”17 Bankier expressed great appreciation of the new sources offered by the scholars, but “Above all there is no persuading explanation of why the Jews were singled out. And the absence of comparative methodology does not provide a firm analytical base. In downplaying ideological factors the authors leave to themselves no opportunity to respond to this question.”18
He reacted more severely to Goldhagen’s book in a criticism that he wrote in the late 1990s in which he compared Goldhagen’s attempts to explain the Holocaust with those of Saul Friedländer. He firmly declared: “The question is posed of whether the author succeeded in proving his thesis on the basis of his sources. The answer to this must be negative.” In his criticism Bankier dealt with several questions, but in our context the following are the important topics:
The question of the murderers’ motives has always been one of the main questions — perhaps the main question — in Holocaust research. In Goldhagen’s opinion the only motive for the Holocaust is [eliminationist] antisemitism. He is certainly right in determining that the murder derived from an ideological motive. The Na- 16 17 Ibid., p. 117–118. David Bankier’s Path in Holocaust Research • 25 zis did not murder out of euphoria or because of social pressure.19 He is also right when he asserts that the murderers were proud of their actions. Yet, despite the importance and centrality of antisemitism, it cannot serve as the exclusive explanation of murder and murderers. Therefore, I consider that the discussion of the motives is the weakest part of the book. Goldhagen’s explanation, based on one single motive, and his treatment of that basic motive for all the actions, over time and in every place, is not the historical explanation. This sweeping view leads to overlooking extreme changes that occurred during the years of Nazi rule and to a failure to make distinctions between different types of expressions of antisemitism, from social isolation to mass murder. He also discusses two types of motives as if they were one: murder for pleasure and murder out of belief. If pleasure accompanies murder, the moral question does not exist. Alternatively, not every person who commits murder out of belief — even among the Nazis — enjoys it.20
The issue is therefore much more complicated than Goldhagen assumed. Bankier firmly asserted that “it [antisemitism] cannot serve as the exclusive explanation of murder and murderers,” and at the same time he sought to show that different types of non-Nazi antisemitism were widespread in the German population to the extent that they served to prevent support of the Jews even among ideological opponents of the regime; even among the finest there was distancing and alienation. The different types of antisemitism had an influence not only on the motivation for murder but also on the absence of intervention on behalf of the Jews as a particularly persecuted group (and also on the reflections that arose in these circles on the method of Germany’s rehabilitation after the fall of the Nazi government). This is discussed in a series of articles Bankier devoted to the attitude of the German Socialists and Communists, both in and outside Germany (those who fled for fear of the regime), toward the Jews and the “Jewish question” in Germany.21
Bankier was an innovator in this field too, because in Bankier’s words, “historians have focused primarily on the attitudes to antisemitism in the Wilhelmine empire and in the Weimar Republic.”22 They generally assumed that certain segments of the left-supporting public were won over by Nazi propaganda,23 and others — as they were anti-Nazi they were therefore opposed to the antisemitic element in Nazism.
However, Bankier’s examination of the Social Democrats in Germany and of German exiles showed a complex picture. Indeed, the Socialist doctrine minimized the importance of antisemitism and saw it as a secondary category of a general problem, and its official spokesmen indicated that the antisemitic propaganda was a manipulation of the Nazi propaganda. However, they too were not free of prejudices against the Jews. The literature and the press expressed reservations, sometimes declared and sometimes concealed, about the Jews as a bourgeois group. Even though there was no clear-cut antisemitic tradition among members of the German Social Democratic movement, language disdainful of “Jewish” characteristics and contempt for Jews as a bourgeois group was not unknown in these circles. Jews were perceived as narrow-minded, arrogant, aggressive, etc., and the reaction in the leftist camp to the antisemitic legislation was generally, they have it coming to them.24
24 In his discussion of Communism, Bankier criticized the “idealization [made] of the fight of the KPD [the German Communist Party] against German antisemitism — both in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich.” In this party too there were “antisemitic foundations” as early as the Weimar period, he stated. However, the main problem in the early years of the Third Reich was the “dogmatic rigidity of the Communist interpretation, and consequently its disregard of the qualitative differences between National Socialism and the other fascist movements in relation to the Jewish question.” Moreover, in these first years the KPD adopted a propaganda method “of goring the regime while plucking on antisemitic chords in the public;” its various representatives argued inter alia that the Nazi regime’s antisemitic policy was directed only against the poor, not against the wealthy Jews. However, there were Communist activists in different places in Germany who revealed a more unequivocal position and condemned the regime’s policy. Kristallnacht from this point of view was an event that shocked and provoked open criticism and sharp condemnation; in the party publications the arguments and positions of combating antisemitism were close to the polemical literature and struggle of the liberal Jewish camp.25 In this matter Bankier saw “not only a change in the viewpoint regarding the Jewish question, but also... a reevaluation of Jewish nationalism” that led to controlled support of the Zionist goals. This position continued to grow subsequently and from 1941 a trend was apparent, according to Bankier, that emphasized the uniqueness of the Jewish fate in the war and led ultimately to support of the Jewish aspirations to statehood. However, this trend was self-serving and utilitarian during wartime and would disappear after its end.26
In conclusion, Bankier showed that antisemitism was a main instrumental tool utilized by Nazi policy, but the success of this tool was limited and evident principally among the party’s circle of supporters, which indeed expanded. Antisemitism in German society was diversified and not uniform; but in the 1930s it was enough to ensure that the general population protested little about what was being done to the Jews, and also any protests derived mainly from expedient calculations, not from moral ones. In the 1940s, and particularly in the Final Solution period, the regime again used antisemitism as a driving force as regards its supporters, so that they would help in the mission of implementing the antisemitic vision. Meanwhile, in relation to the general German public, the government adopted an action plan similar to that of the 1930s, that is, making known its criminal actions in general and vague terms only and justifying them on the basis of antisemitic arguments. The aim was not actually to urge the public to become activist, but to accustom the masses to what was being done out of an understanding whose object was to solve a real problem. The reaction of extensive nonNazi circles in the German public to this tactic was also similar to that of the 1930s — distancing themselves and becoming inured, but now the circumstances were far more serious. Thus, the population ignored the continued extermination until the last moments of the Third Reich.
Bankier summarized this view in an interview that he gave in 1997 at Yad Vashem. In Germany there was a radical kind of antisemitism that wished also to see the practical application of the antisemitic ideology; conversely, there was a society that related to this type of antisemitic activity with extreme opportunism. After 1938, when the antisemitic steps became a murderous policy, German society chose acquiescence (Sich-Fügen) and silence. It is doubtful whether this combination — radical and zealous antisemitism initiated by one part of the population that was tolerated by the majority — could ever have happened in such a way in other societies. From this point of view, German society bears the blame since, as he quoted in the name of Kurt Tucholski when writing to Arnold Zweig after the legislating of the Nuremberg Laws, “a country must be judged not only on the basis of what it does, but also on the basis of what it allows to happen.”27
The Relation between Hitler and the Anti-Jewish Policy
David Bankier published his groundbreaking article on Hitler’s involvement in anti-Jewish policy and received international acclaim before the translation of his doctoral dissertation into other languages.28 The period when the foundations of his research work were being laid — the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s — corresponded to the time of the functionalist–intentionalist polemic when the scales tipped clearly in favor of functionalism. As noted, his doctoral dissertation proved that the accepted premises — intentionalism and generalization regarding the complete power of the totalitarian regime — are not confirmed by a strict historical examination. However, he also no longer accepted the functionalist argument that lessened the importance of Hitler’s role. He emphasized this in the aforementioned article:
This line of analysis tends to disregard the personal factor, the role of the dictator and his personality in determining and conducting the policy-making process…. Admittedly, functionalist historical research has convincingly demonstrated the coexistence of Hitler’s monocratic position and the polycratic structure of the Third Reich….29 The whole system worked, however, because he personally provided the indispensable public charisma, without which his subordinates would have been powerless, while reserving for himself the ultimate decision-making on questions in which he had paramount interest. What interested him most were foreign, military, racial, and antisemitic policies and in these spheres he determined the course of action from above. In the antisemitic policy his intervention had a domino effect: one step led to another. Each step was harsher than the last and each was an outgrowth of the previous one…. A look at the interaction between Hitler and his hermeneuts in the party and the bureaucracy reveals that the latter were not autonomous, but worked under the pressure generated by Hitler’s will. Based on the Führerprinzip, the supreme leader acted as the ideological and political originator of antisemitic measures, supplemented by men who wished to prove their diligence, efficiency and indispensability. He approved and sanctioned their work, stamping his own personal imprint on the direction the work had to take. Hitler saw his particular strength in the ability to think consistently and simplify complex problems, deciding matters of political significance and of principle…. The figure of authority had to provide inspiration and not concern himself with administration…. One of the salient peculiarities of the Nazi regime was the absence of using common decision-making formulas, as we know them from democratic systems. Instead, we find an informal method whereby Hitler vaguely intimated his view on a certain issue or very generally expressed the course of action to be taken. It was subsequently the task of the policy makers to interpret these “Führer wishes” properly and to give them concrete and practical meaning. Although the wish was always communicated by a third party and not explicitly passed on as a Führer order, it has the force of an order.30
Later in the article he gave detailed proof of Hitler’s method of action in the main questions in which the functionalists disagreed with the others: whether Hitler determined the policy; whether Hitler was moderate in his antisemitic policy; and regarding Hitler’s role in antiJewish legislation.
In a brilliant discussion based on diversified documents, Bankier showed the extent of Hitler’s involvement in the policy-shaping and decision-making process on the Jewish question. Hitler was not “a prisoner of forces, but their creator.” He was motivated by ideological obsessions that became policy in the hands of his exponents.
Hitler controlled the policy-shaping process and was, as Alan Bullock calls him, ‘a combination of calculation and fanaticism.’ He conceived and initiated the entire antisemitic process, and when it began to move and received independent momentum at the ideological level, the bureaucrats joined in to give it a practical impetus. Hence, they were tools only in accelerating his initiatives and did not work independently and of their own accord.31
The importance of this article cannot be underrated. In it Bankier laid down the foundations of the viewpoint accepted today in the mainstream of so-called “perpetrator historiography,” and decisively undermined what was then considered a dominant functionalist approach. He was not alone in feeling extreme dissatisfaction with the then polemic that presented extreme and mainly simplistic positions. Ian Kershaw, for instance, strived precisely in that period to find a link between the findings on the bureaucratic activity, on one hand, and Hitler’s centrality, on the other — an effort expressed for the first time in his book The Hitler Myth in which he discussed the power of the Führer’s image in the Nazi regime and in German society beyond Hitler, the man.32 Bankier’s study, which showed that Hitler was involved and closely followed the anti-Jewish policy, made a great contribution to breaking out of the impasse of the then contemporary polemic; this breakthrough preceded the great changes that occurred following the collapse of the Communist Bloc, with the opening of archives and the broadening of research outlooks.
It is therefore not surprising that the article immediately attracted attention. In the second edition of his book on the historiography of Nazism, published in 1989, Kershaw devoted a long note to David Bankier’s article in the chapter on “Hitler and the Holocaust.” Kershaw considered that “Bankier succeeds in demonstrating that Hitler did intervene in the ‘Jewish Question’ more often than has been thought, and that he showed from time to time interest in the minutiae of anti-Jewish policy.” Alongside the appreciation of Bankier’s findings, Kershaw argued with him, claiming “Bankier takes the thrust of his findings too far in claiming that Hitler ‘conceived, initiated, and directed the entire process,’ and his argument appears to be based in part on a misunderstanding (or exaggeration) of the structuralist (or functionalist) case he is attacking.”33
As noted, in that period, Kershaw himself adopted an orientation that sought to restore to Hitler his central status, but still largely adhered to the functionalist view and defended several of its assertions. In time he also tended more toward the synthetic approach and consolidated an outlook closer to Bankier’s positions, in particular, after reading Bankier’s The Germans and the Final Solution. This is clearly expressed in Kershaw’s great two-volume book on Hitler published in 1998–2000, particularly in the first volume in the extremely important methodological chapter, “Working Towards the Führer,” in which he quotes Bankier extensively.34
Hans Mommsen — from many points of view, the main functionalist — also felt a need to respond to Bankier’s article and to defend himself. He found the appropriate platform in his foreword to the reprint (1990) of Karl Schleunes’s book The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, first published in 1970, in which the functionalist view was applied in the field of analysis of the anti-Jewish policy. Mommsen emphasized in this foreword the importance of Schleunes’s book — nobody who had tried “to describe the process of Jewish persecution in Germany” since the publication of Schleunes’s book for the first time, he wrote, “had succeeded in presenting such a well-balanced summary account of its early stages.” He added that Schleunes’s claim that “‘the Final Solution as it emerged in 1941 and 1942 was not the product of a grand design’ still is controversially received, but has not been convincingly refuted in spite of the opposing view of several Israeli scholars, especially David Bankier, who regards Hitler as the central promoter of the individual anti-Jewish actions throughout the course of the Third Reich.”35
Bankier’s pioneering article, published at the beginning of his research career, thus provoked strong reactions among leading scholars in the field at that time and helped to pave the way for a new stage in the study of the development of the anti-Jewish policy, which returned Hitler to the first cause of the Holocaust without ignoring the complexity of its actual implementation. Bankier summarized his opinion on this matter briefly in an interview:
Hitler’s role [in the process that led to the Final Solution] is unequivocal. Without him such a “Final Solution” would not have occurred, and things would have remained at the level of expulsion of the Jews from Germany.... Hitler had no doubt that there was no room for Jews in Europe. He would have agreed [to become moderate only to the level of a policy that would lead] to expulsion to Siberia or to the Ice Sea [i.e. the Arctic Ocean], which is identical in its nature to “the Final Solution.” From this viewpoint Hitler’s role was decisive.36
A posteriori,it can be said that Mommsen’s opinion was rejected and that of Bankier and several other scholars was adopted, as shown in several comprehensive basic books published in the last fifteen years — first and foremost those of Ian Kershaw, Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich, and Christopher Browning. These scholars, despite the differences between them, represent the mainstream in perpetrator historiography that asserts Hitler’s forward thrust and decisive centrality alongside his vagueness as regards implementation of his goals. This fact also gives crucial importance to the extensive willingness in the bureaucracy and in German society to work in order to find the most effective means for the implementation of his goals.37
What did the German population know about the Nazi extermination policy? “What did the German public know about the Holocaust? To what extent was it aware of the mass shootings in the east, the gassing, and the extermination centers?” These questions continued to trouble David Bankier even after the publication of his book on German public opinion, and he devoted a series of articles to this topic.
In his article “The Germans and the Holocaust: What Did They Know?”38 he examined a far greater variety of sources than in his book. Bankier, like Kershaw, arrived at the conclusion that the secret reports of the Nazi regime’s security institutions, which were previously a main source of research, are not sufficiently reliable as regards the war period, and particularly not for the extermination period. “Because of these obstacles, and in the interest of the historical truth, it becomes highly imperative to compare the information conveyed by these sources with other records, such as diaries, eyewitness accounts, and Allied intelligence reports,” he indicated.39 Indeed, he added cautiously,
We acknowledge that the new material basis of this paper, like the SD reports, is unquantifiable and of an impressionistic nature, a fact that precludes the possibility of drawing definite conclusions. Nevertheless, some tentative conclusions can be suggested. Much information on the extermination of the Jews definitely circulated in Germany. We must distinguish, however, between various levels of knowledge.40
There were those who participated in the murder or saw the murders with their own eyes — soldiers, administrators, and other people who were at the murder sites. Others — clerks and people of the opposition — who sought information “had to view it in their mind’s eye,” and because these things were unprecedented, “they were not always able to conceive the monstrous dimensions of the crime.” Therefore, “what became known as The Holocaust was an inconceivable and therefore unbelievable reality even for those anti-Nazis who deliberately sought information.” Most of the population heard rumors that
went through many screening stages and therefore became distorted. “… the greater the number of filters, the less precise the information. The lack of a graphic sense of how the murders were perpetrated activated their imagination, and this explains the stories that circulated on gassing tunnels or mass electrocution.”41
The question was not “who knew?” but “who wanted to believe?” to quote Hans Mommsen. Therefore, “the Germans definitely felt the gravity of the crime committed by the regime they supported,” but those who participated actively in the mass murder, who could not deny what they did and saw, were separate from “those back in Germany who obtained the information only in a roundabout way.” The latter seem to have “consciously avoided such knowledge, especially when fear of retribution triggered guilt feelings, and vice versa, when awareness of guilt gave rise to fear of the consequences. In one sentence: They knew enough to know that it was better not to know more.”42
In another article Bankier analyzed the tactics employed by the regime in relation to information about the murder. In the past some scholars, principally Raul Hilberg but also many others including myself, asserted that there was a decisive policy of erasing the traces of the murder and concealing information about it,43 but Bankier pointed to a sophisticated approach of releasing the information, an approach that he called “imposed guesswork.” “What was said by the German media about the Final Solution and in what context?” he asked and examined this subject by tracing “what linguistic construction was employed by the Nazi propaganda and what was the symbolic content of the conveyed imagery.”44 He distinguished two important tactics. Firstly, when the Allies accused the Nazis of war crimes, the latter rejected the accusation as slander, yet when they were accused of exterminating the Jews, the Nazis neither denied nor confirmed the Allies’ claim but simply did not respond. Clearly, this silence was intentional.45 The other tactic was gradual disclosure in the editorial articles of the press from the spring of 1942 “of the true meaning of the Final Solution.”46 Bankier concluded, stating:
Information on the Final Solution was conveyed obliquely in a highly suggestive pattern: a cynical manipulation with a political vocabulary that conferred different levels of meaning which structured the political perceptions of the propaganda. The Nazis used in their political discourse a technique of imposed guesswork: by not giving details on what was really happening to the Jews they wished to prevent public discussion, and by employing a language with implicit presuppositions they wanted the public to speculate on what was actually going on with the Jews and thus to become responsible for what they understood the term “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” meant.47
In recent years Bankier extended his study of the extent of knowledge of the murder of the Jews to a second sphere, that is, areas outside Germany. Since studies have already been made of the information that reached Jews and local inhabitants in the Nazi-occupied countries, he concentrated his interest on information that could be received through the official information channels allowed by the occupier. In this area he noted in his summary of the summer 2009 workshop held at Yad Vashem48 that the official German-controlled media usually omitted to report arrests and roundups in the framework of the Final Solution that occurred “at home,” within the country. For instance, he indicated in particular the absence of reports in France on the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup in Paris in the summer of 1942, an action carried out in view of the local inhabitants. However, reports could be heard or read on the actions carried out in other countries; in other words, the “great action” carried out against the Jews was not hushed up completely. Here too he discerned a sophisticated approach of the regime, a variation on the approach adopted in Germany itself.
The third sphere that he examined during his last decade was the Free World. What was the scope of the information in the Free World, and principally in the hands of the Allied intelligence services, and how did they interpret it?49 This was the subject of the anthology that he edited and that was based on a congress held in New York in 2003, following the opening of the archive collections of British and American intelligence in the late 1990s. In the foreword to the book, he summarized his opinion on this question, an opinion based on his examinations and on the material presented in the book.
The papers included [in the book] indicate that the West obtained much more detailed information about the Holocaust than previously assumed…. We learn that coded Nazi messages intercepted since July 1941 revealed the scope of German genocide. By September 1941, British intelligence had assembled conclusive evidence that the Nazis were conducting a genocidal policy in the conquered territories of the Soviet Union. The decrypts were assembled into daily lists for the use of intelligence desks of the military and political headquarters. Based on this material alone, Churchill could learn that the number of Jews murdered amounted to tens of thousands. 50
The deciphered messages gave information on concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps. Well before 1943, the intelligence services had information on the slaughter and the deportations. Did the decoders and analysts understand the significance and the implications of the data? Did the analysis of the intelligence material influence the political echelon’s decision-making with regard to saving Jews? In Bankier’s opinion the decipherers, even the most experienced and expert, failed to understand the implications of the information that reached them.As regards the political echelon, Bankier maintained, “President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were often hindered in their attempts to do something to help the Jews in occupied Europe by bureaucratic petty-mindedness prevailing in some ministerial quarters, or anti-Semitic sentiments in public opinion.”51
Bankier’s interest in Pope Pius XII also belongs to the third sphere. This subject, which was one of the first that arose for discussion as part of the study of the “bystanders” already in the early 1960s with the staging of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy and the publication of Saul Friedländer’s book on the issue, has been debated ever since. However, in recent years the debate has become heated following the publication of several books on Pius XII with the disclosure of new archive materials and in the wake of the Catholic Church’s intention to canonize him. In this context Bankier intensified his investigation of the subject in his last year in light of new documents that arrived at Yad Vashem and the publication of new research literature. He was one of the participants in the March 2009 historians’ workshop held at Yad Vashem, made possible by the cooperation between Yad Vashem and the office of the Apostolic Nuncio in Jerusalem. Because of his illness, he was able to participate in only a few of the discussions, but together with Iael Nidam-Orvieto he edited the proceedings of the conference and attached great importance to this, particularly as some of the studies presented at the workshop shed new light on many controversial issues. Even though he did not publish anything in the book, I can attest from my joint work with him that also on this question he applied his meticulous methodology. He opposed the extreme statements on the Pope’s conduct (he considered the epithet “Hitler’s Pope” to be inappropriate), and at the same time criticized those who wished to canonize him. He wanted research to examine in depth the key points in the chronology of persecutions of the Jews on one side, and on the other, the activities of the Pope and Church circles close him – and have them meticulously synchronized in order to reach an unbiased conclusion regarding the Pope’s positions anchored in historic reality. As a rational scholar, he preferred to see the Pope first as a political leader, and he believed that the future opening of the secret Vatican archive would give us additional, extremely important information on this question.52
The Political and Bureaucratic Collaboration Mechanisms that Created the Murder Operation
In recent years Bankier sought to broaden research on the organization of the pan-European murder operation after the idea of the Final Solution was consolidated, i.e., from 1942 onwards. In fact this was a necessary continuation of Christopher Browning’s book The Origins of the Final Solution.53 A tremendous research effort has been devoted in the last ten years to clarifying the ideological and practical path that led to the Final Solution. Concerning the organization and implementation of the genocide from the time that the idea had crystallized in the spring of 1942, there are indeed many studies, but only as regards implementation in the different countries and not as an integrative entity. The comprehensive books on the Holocaust generally divide the descriptions of the events following the implementation of the Final Solution by countries and do not give a global picture. How was the murder coordinated at the pan-European level, and how were events in seemingly distant places related? How was the operational network deployed over the vast areas under Nazi rule? Bankier wanted an infrastructure to be laid that would make it possible to arrive at such an integrative view. For this, two large projects were planned under his guidance at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem: the killing sites project and the deportations project. The killing sites project was designed to create as completely as possible a picture of all the murder sites in the areas of the USSR — their locations, the number of victims and their places of origin, the perpetrators of the murderous enterprise, etc. The deportations project was designed to lead to a full recording of all the transports of Jews carried out during the Third Reich — from where to where, the number of victims in each transport and their origin, etc. Thus, we are destined to receive for the first time more comprehensive and exact information on two main aspects of the extermination operation — the murders by mobile units (Einsatzgruppen, German police, military units, local auxiliary units, etc.) throughout the occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the complex and sophisticated transport system of Jews from all the other parts of the European continent.
Bankier was greatly preoccupied in his research, particularly in recent years, by the question of the self-examination of the peoples of Europe, and in particular the Germans, in light of the dimension and scope of the crime against the Jews.
Shortly after his appointment as head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, he planned an international conference on the subject of “The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after World War II.” At this conference and in the anthology that derived from it, he asked all the participants to relate not only to the postwar situation but to reflections and plans that arose after the great turning point in the war in early 1943 (after the German defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad), when Germany’s defeat in the war became a real possibility. He was particularly interested in the positions of the governments and populations in Europe with regard to the possible return of the surviving Jews, demanding reintegration into the societies where they had previously resided and the restoration of their property taken from them, principally their homes and businesses. In the foreword that he wrote for the anthology, he presented his fairly depressing conclusion that all the governments declared on the face of it that they would restore matters to the prewar and pre-occupation situation, but they knew that the return of the property, even in the countries where antisemitism did not prevail, would meet with many obstacles. It was clear in many countries after the war that the governments would not have the power to order people to vacate their previously Jewish-owned homes or to leave their formerly Jewish-occupied positions and jobs. A government that dared to do so would be committing political suicide.54
He cited examples from Poland, France, and Germany; in all these countries even the most moderate people and people who had been anti-Nazi saw the Jews as the “other” and as foreigners, a special category not included in the national rehabilitation.55 He defined the attitude to Jews returning to their places in European societies toward the end of the war and immediately afterwards as “a cool reception at best.”56
In the foreword to the anthology published after Yad Vashem’s December 2006 international conference, “Justice and the Holocaust,” he expressed his astonishment regarding the first trials held for war criminals at Nuremberg, that “The Holocaust was not a central issue in any of the thirteen trials of the international military tribunal conducted in Germany between 1945 and 1949, even though the very facts of the persecution of the Jews and their wholesale murder were explicitly mentioned in several instances and implicitly in many. Why was this so?”57
However, his main interest in this question focused on the Germans and how they coped with the guilt immediately after their defeat. He devoted one of his last studies to this, a study written when he was already dealing physically and emotionally with his serious illness. The research was carried out for the purpose of writing a historical introduction to the Hebrew translation of Karl Jaspers’ book Die Schuldfrage that Bankier edited with his philosopher colleague Jacob Golomb from the Hebrew University.58
With the end of World War II public debate both in and outside Germany focused on the question of the collective guilt of the German people for the Nazi crimes. In this debate there were two opposing viewpoints: some argued that there should be no mercy for the Germans, their aggressiveness is an integral part of their nature and all are guilty collectively for the Nazi crimes.... In contrast, others denied the very idea of collective guilt imposed on the Germans and wished to alleviate their punishment…. In the Jewish public the opinions were also divided, and precisely among Jews of German origin many objected to the thesis of collective German guilt....
With the collapse of the Third Reich, the question of Germany’s guilt became a burning question also in the German public. Yet in Germany itself, only a few dared to argue for collective guilt of the entire people.... From the public political viewpoint the question that arose was: What are the limits of liability of the Germans as a people for the actions of the Nazi regime? It follows that the question that troubled the people of that period was not who was guilty for the outbreak of the war, but a completely different question — whether the Germans are guilty of denial of the basic principles of human civilization. In this climate Karl Jaspers wrote his book The Guilt Question.59
Bankier emphasized Jaspers’ public courage which, he said, “touched ... a sensitive nerve and awakened the subject of the Holocaust, that the German public wished to erase from its consciousness,” a widespread tendency among many in the German public when people began to learn about the Final Solution, and particularly from 1942 onwards. This was indicated by Bankier, as already noted, in his previous studies and was emphasized once more in this article. “The people of that time refused to acknowledge the unique significance of the murder of the Jews. In the debate on the question of German guilt and the extent of their responsibility for antisemitism, the murder of the Jews was pushed from consciousness and from the public agenda. Karl Jaspers and Wolfgang Veil were among the few who condemned the conduct of the Germans on account of their indifference to the deportation of the Jews to their death.”60
Bankier demonstrated that various circles and personalities in Germany were involved in the debate, but all skirted around the sensitive question of the extermination of the Jews. “The Holocaust of the Jews was pushed to the margins of awareness after the war, also because the narrative that prevailed in the post-1945 intellectual dialogue emphasized that Germany was the main victim of Nazism and attributed the country’s misfortunes to Hitler’s charisma, completely exonerating the people.”61
The Allies did indeed try to influence public opinion in Germany in different ways; they initiated a program of denazification, but this also “did not help to instill awareness of guilt in the population.”62 Their propaganda did not have real influence, and the Cold War needs had a detrimental influence on their determination to carry out the denazification. Moreover, “interruption of the denazification left the elite in their positions,” and because of this “a conspiracy of silence was created on their activity in the Nazi period.”63 If we add to this the continued existence of extensive antisemitism and the wish of the churches — a few of which indeed criticized the Nazi government during the Third Reich — to attract the public back to them, clearly the main desire that prevailed in Germany at that time was to forget.
In the context of the general tendency in Germany, the importance of his [Jaspers’] treatment of the guilt question is outstanding, and particularly his profound reflection on the question of the “moral” and “metaphysical” guilt. Precisely because he refuses to recognize the all-embracing and undifferentiated guilt of the German people, Jaspers defines the area in which the ethical process of recognition by the Germans of the guilt is possible and necessary: guilt in what is beyond the political and criminal questions, guilt of keeping in line with the requirements of what Jaspers calls “the criminal state.” The interest of this awareness lies in the universal values of solidarity and compassion between human beings, and in man standing personally before his conscience and before his God. In all these there is an appeal — exceptional in its time — to reflect profoundly, to look truly at what happened and at the place of each individual in the course of the events and to start out on the path towards great change, spiritual purification and renewal of the commitment to the humanistic values of German tradition that was trampled underfoot so crassly under Nazi rule.64
This moving description of the importance of Jaspers’ intellectual discourse immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich and after the Holocaust shows, to my mind, why Bankier had the urge to discuss Jaspers. Bankier found in him a representation of his own aspirations and investigations. In his study, as already noted, Bankier also refused “to recognize the all-embracing and indistinguishable guilt of the German people.” Like Jaspers, he also sought to see “beyond the political and criminal questions” to within human conduct and the different patterns of thought of the Germans — what led them to stand aside when their neighbors were taken from their homes and when they heard of the horror — namely, “to reflect profoundly, to look truly at what happened, and at the place of each individual in the course of the events.”
Bankier was a realistic and critical man also politically, but he was not a man to demonstrate and make declarations. However, his studies and his lectures to many publics and the diverse projects that he initiated and developed as part of his work at Yad Vashem and as a professor at the Hebrew University, his meticulous guidance of the students in the courses that he taught, and particularly the young scholars that he instructed, were to him a way to give the public tools for analysis of the past that would also be beneficial for analysis of the present — for purposes of “renewal of the commitment to humanistic values.”
With his death, we lost a profound and influential scholar, a colleague, and a friend. He embodied the words of the sage Ben Sira, who lived over 2000 years ago:
Do not refrain from speaking at the crucial time, and do not hide your wisdom.
For wisdom is known through speech, and understanding through the words of the tongue.
…Do not be reckless in your speech, or sluggish and remiss in your deeds.
…Be quick to hear, and forbearing in answering.
…Search out and seek, inquire and find; and when you get hold of her [wisdom] do not let her go.
…The mark of a happy heart is a cheerful face, and dealings with fellow humans result from thorough contemplation .65
May his research work be a memorial to him.66
Translated from the Hebrew by Stephanie Nakache
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