Hans Mommsen (1930–2015)
A History of Cumulative Radicalization

A researcher  named  Mommsen  has  long  been  associated with controversies regarding the Jewish question. Theodor Mommsen, one of the best-known advocates of the liberal view with regard to the Berlin dispute about antisemitism (the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) of 1879–1880, was a researcher ofantiquity and a Nobel Prize laureate. For the past half-century or so, however, Theodor Mommsen has been overshadowed by his great- grandson, Hans, in all matters that link the family name to Jewish history — here in the context of the history of Nazism and the Ho- locaust that Germany unleashed on European Jewry. For Holocaust researchers or readers of Yad Vashem Studies, Hans Mommsen is a familiar figure, one of the most prominent representatives of the so- called “functionalist school” in Holocaust research.

Hans Mommsen, who passed away on November 5, 2015, at the age of eighty-five, was a scion of a dynasty of historians. His great-grandfather, his father, Wilhelm, and his twin brother Wolfgang were all well-known historians. Dynasty aside, the German historians’ guild (the Historikerzunft) also ascribes importance to one’s affiliation with schools of thought and their progenitors. In this respect Mommsen was a pupil of Hans Rothfels, a dean among German historians and the epitomic pupil of Friedrich Meinecke. Rothfels, who was forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the United States due to his Jewish origins and despite his German nationalist views, returned after the war and became president of the German Historians Association. It was with Rothfels as his advisor that Hans Mommsen wrote the doctoral dissertation that pointed the way to his development as a historian and a public personality: The Question of Nationality and Social Democracy in the Austro­Hungarian Empire.1

Rothfels chose Mommsen  as his assistant and  tasked him  at the young age of thirty with writing important entries — on historical method, the nation, political parties, the modern era, and social history — in the authoritative historical lexicon published by Fischer. Even then one could already assess the nature of the young historian by reading one sentence from the “Social History” entry concerning the advantage of this method, which was then in its infancy in Germany:

Reference to the present and allegiance to an [ideological] position by a historian do not impede; instead, they are a source of fruitful questions as a point of departure for historical research and a springboard for innovative treatment of the historical material.2

It was Rothfels, who was not a social historian himself, who had en- couraged Mommsen to think in this manner, and Mommsen says that Rothfels instructed the new generation of historians (including Mom- msen) to assume moral and political responsibility and overtly take sides.3 This evidently explains why Mommsen subsequently ardently defended Rothfels’s memory against criticism for his having taken a nationalist and conservative approach, ostensibly joining the very group for which Mommsen would reserve his sharpest barbs, as explained below.

When Mommsen  moved to Heidelberg, he became the assis- tant to Werner Conze, one of modern Germany’s two greatest social historians. This positioned young Hans at the core of the main research trend in Germany since the 1960s, in which the champions of social history (Sozialgeschichte) shifted the main weight of research from the retelling of events, personalities, and ideas to structural history. His habilitation on the Third Reich civil service was a quintessential prod- uct of this kind of historiography; as such, it signaled the crossing of a watershed in the treatment of Nazism.4

Mommsen began his career by pursuing research on social democracy; moreover, he was an active social democrat despite, or perhaps because of, his pronouncedly bourgeois origins. It had been the fate of his father, a typical representative of the German bourgeois in- telligentsia, to sustain a slap in the face from both the Nazi regime (he was active in the DDP, the pre-1933 German Democratic Party) and the denazification process (he was denied a position on the claim of having become a collaborator with the Nazis).5 This left a strong imprint on Mommsen’s grasp of history and led him, on the one hand, to research social democracy and, on the other, to deal with Nazism as a manifestation of bourgeois culture. It is for good reason that the expression “dissolution of the German Bürgertum” as a central charac- teristic of the Third Reich recurs time and again in his writings.

When Hans Mommsen visited the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University as its first guest professor in 1980, the Center’s founding year, the national question and its attitude toward Social-democracy was still his main (but not sole) calling card. At that time he had already begun shifting the weight of his research oeuvre to the Holocaust and Nazism; i.e., the debate be- tween intentionalism and functionalism. Mommsen’s stint in Jerusa- lem that year helped him to formulate his groundbreaking articles on Nazism (see below), Hitler’s status in the National-Socialist method (1981), and the “Final Solution” as the realization of a utopia (1983).6

From then on Hans Mommsen positioned himself among the classic functionalists. As the author of an article in Yad Vashem Studies in Mommsen’s memory, it is fitting that I focus on his special stature in this polemic and its relevant habitus; that is, all matters related to the history of Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust. I will therefore center the remarks below on three topics from the totality of Hans Mommsen’s writings: the circumstances of the Nazis’ ascent to and consolidation of rule; the road to the “Final Solution”; and resistance to Nazism.

In the 1970s, a simplistic explanation for the collapse of the Wei- mar Republic and the Nazi accession was common. It stated, more or less, that Weimar had been doomed ab initio because Germany lacked a democratic tradition and the Weimar constitution rested on faulty fundamentals, while a party founded on antisemitism and racism, supported by the petite bourgeoisie and the rabble, managed to exploit the great economic crisis and high unemployment to rise to power lawful- ly. Mommsen disagreed with both premises on the basis of arguments that were widely regarded, at least when raised, as challenging.

Hans Mommsen did not see in the wording of the Weimar con- stitution, even its Section 48, the key to the downfall of Weimar and the Nazi seizure of power. On the contrary: he stressed that Hitler’s ap- pointment to the chancellery was unconstitutional and brought about by deceit. The true villain in the story, he says, is Franz von Papen, the man who sat on the defendants’ bench in Nuremberg and came away acquitted. Not only had Papen done what the German conservatives had sought in any case—toppled parliamentarism and restored autocratic rule with the assistance of the Nazis (whom he considered train- able) — but he had done it with the help of a deception that managed to fool President Hindenburg: the false claim that the Catholic Centre Party was also about to join the coalition and provide the so-called Government of National Awakening with parliamentary backing.

Focusing on the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, Hans Mom- msen repeatedly articulated his critical attitude toward both wings of the German bourgeois camp — the conservative and the völkisch. It was this camp that wished to bring down the parliamentary republic from the outset and that did so. Thus, the Nazi party and its supporters did not do this on their own. The timing, too, Mommsen claims, depended first and foremost on the bourgeoisie. Its representatives had sustained the parliamentary system from 1919 onward, as of 1925 subject to the presidential intervention of Hindenburg and his circle, as long as the conditions that the Allies had imposed denied them the possibility of emerging as victors, had they been in power, in the Ger- man internal arena.

Then came the adroit interpretation that surprised us even a gen- eration ago. In contrast to the claim that Weimar Germany fell into the clutches of the Right due to pressure from the Allies after the Versailles treaty was signed, Hans Mommsen maintained that this pressure actually prolonged the republic’s life. This was because in its wake the conservative Right, representing the country’s large interest groups (an important  point for a social historian), used the republic’s moderate governments as an alibi in hopes of a breakthrough. According to this explanation, the achievements of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann on the international scene gave the anti-Republican Right an advantage (after all, the Allies were willing to make concessions for Stresemann that they would not offer a right-wing nationalist government); and it was the cessation of the demand for reparations from Germany that expedited the demise of the last parliamentarian government (Brüning’s).

Indeed, from the early 1930s onward, as the Allies began to ease the pressure on Germany, the conservative Right found a path to recov- ery and began to undermine parliamentary rule. This was done mainly by invoking presidential authority, but also by lining up help from the Nazi party. The fact that Hitler, after becoming chancellor, tricked Papen and the strongman of the German Right, Alfred Hugenberg, does not alleviate the burden on the shoulders of the respectable bourgeoi- sie. Among them were those who supported both men’s miscreancy in seeking to deny the parties that supported democracy a possible parliamentary majority, thwarting a challenge to presidential administration, and willing to risk partnering with Hitler within the framework of what they called the “cabinet of national concentration.” Furthermore, after Hindenburg refused to appoint Hitler on August 13, 1932, following the Nazis’ strong electoral victory (37 percent of the vote), the Nazi party began to wane, as the November elections made clear. Pa- pen’s ruse, according to Mommsen, revived a party that was in decline. What Papen began by destroying the bastion of German democracy in Prussia on July 20, 1932, he completed with the sequence of actions that culminated in Hitler’s appointment on January 30, 1933. If so, it was neither the rabble nor the petite bourgeoisie, but rather the decent Germany that bears the main responsibility for the ascendancy of the Third Reich! Had this not happened, the thugs of the SA would not have become Germany’s overlords.7 Regarding them, too, Mommsen emphasized that despite all the Hitleristic verbiage against bourgeois behavior, it was precisely the bourgeois circles that turned into voters for the party and enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi illusion of the “community of the people” (Volksgemeinschaft).

When all is said and done, Mommsen’s position on the nexus of bourgeois structures and Nazism is that the latter not only penetrated the very core of the bourgeoisie, but also corrupted its upper and central strata. Given that Nazism allowed the bourgeoisie to enrich itself at the Jews’ expense, it refrained from acting against the persecution of the Jews even before 1938, when it still could have done something. Götz Aly disagrees on this point, as he regarded the proletariat and the Left as the main beneficiaries of the Nazis’ looting. A very personal remark by Mommsen captures these matters tellingly:

In retrospect, the willingness of the public to agree uncritically to the dismissal of Jewish professors and doctors is frightening. As one who belongs to the educated class, disgustedly I can still see how in late April 1945, several hours before the American Army entered, members of this stratum became savage looters of the abandoned Wehrmacht warehouses in Marburg. The false bourgeois affirmation of durable accepted values shattered into fragments as I looked on.8

In a conversation with me, Mommsen elaborated on having watched his high-school teacher pilfer coal at that time. He was fifteen when he discovered how “the thin patina of civilization” (dünne Patina der Zivilisation) vanishes with the bestialization of the bourgeoisie in the Third Reich.

“There is much evidence that it is not the extreme racial antisemi- tism that made the definitive contribution to the success of National Socialist propaganda before 1933 and the relative integration of the regime,” Mommsen advised a skeptical Israeli audience in 1980. Antisemitism was in any case widely espoused among the conservative bourgeoisie (Mommsen also acknowledged the presence of antisemitic elements among social democrats). If so, antisemitism goes further in explaining the willingness to collaborate and support the Nazis than it does the swift ascendancy of the Nazi party itself. This ascendancy, Mommsen claims, is explained to no small extent by the party’s success among young voters in view of the crisis that followed World War I. Antisemitic arguments found attentive ears precisely among voters associated with the affluent bourgeoisie. “Sometimes,” Mommsen alleged, “the conservative nationalists [the DNVP] made broader use of antisemitic slogans than the Nazi Party did.” He then added mordantly, “Had the Nazi Party not risen to power, the autocratic presidential governments would have limited the Jews’ civil rights and thwarted the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe.”9

Either way, he found Nazi antisemitism particularly evident among the academics and the intelligentsia, the flagships of the re- spectable bourgeoisie, and said so explicitly and emphatically before an Israeli audience that still tended to think otherwise.10 “The Nazi Party’s program did not go beyond the objectives of conservative anti-Semitism,” he stated elsewhere.11 Atop this antisemitic soil the Nazi regime could cultivate the more and more extreme solutions that followed.

Here Mommsen moves on to the stage that followed Hitler’s accession to the chancellery: the consolidation of Nazi rule. He was not thrilled with the one-sided explanation of success by means of terror and coercion, just as he did not support the theory of the innocent dupe enthralled by the propaganda  machine. Without  overlooking the terror, the propaganda, and Hitler’s tactical talents, he continued doggedly to track the old elites’ conduct and the collaboration that they offered. The manufacturers exploited the trade unions’ weakness, brought on by the economic crisis, to seek an authoritarian  constitutional reform for reasons of their own. This limited the possibility of opposing Hitler’s post-appointment  moves. The “Day of Potsdam” (March 21, 1933), symbolizing the alliance between Nazism and the Prussian tradition, was a solemn expression of the de facto collaboration that had come about between the new regime and the army. The military lobby, representing the old Prussia, and the wish to lift the restrictions that the Versailles treaty had imposed on the size of the German armed forces, explain the feelers that General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s precursor as chancellor, extended to the Nazi party, as well as the army’s initiative that led to Germany’s secession from the disarmament conference in October 1933, after Hitler had taken office. Shortly before World War II erupted, those on the conserva- tive Right believed that Hitler was indeed fulfilling the dream of re- vising the Versailles treaty in a way that would conform to their interests — until they discovered that his aspirations transcended theirs by far.

Mommsen devoted far-reaching research in this matter to the role of the civil service, which had been considered the backbone of the Prussian (and the German) state since Hegel’s day. Following the Nazi accession the civil service competed with the party apparatuses and managed to sustain itself in this situation by adjusting to the spirit of the new regime. According to Mommsen, there is no doubt about the willingness of most civil servants to display loyalty to the new administration. The bureaucracy was at once a rival and a lackey of the National-Socialist leadership.12 The adjustment process that began in 1933, was not revolutionary, because the civil service had been filling up with party supporters even before the party took the reins of government. Again, it was specifically bureaucrats affiliated with the conservative right-wing parties who changed their stripes following the change in government. The renegades (yesterday’s conservatives, today’s Nazis) switched masks in the belief that this party and the re- gime that it had created would henceforth be the most effective instru- ment for the implementation of their preexisting plan to undermine the republic. It was also they who powered the process of “coordina- tion” (Gleichschaltung) in a way that would maintain the appearance of lawfulness. In this matter, too, however, Mommsen stressed the inner dynamic that, mainly during the war, diminished the bureaucracy’s status despite its self-defilement, prompting even a quintessential Nazi such as Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick to resign his post in 1943. 

Mommsen devoted special attention to a representative episode in this context: the Civil Service Restoration Act (April 7, 1933). On the one hand, this was the first step toward translating the antisemitic doctrine into the language of law. Mommsen, true to his way of thinking, explains: “The antisemitic intention [of the Act] responded to a demand that was typical not only of the Nazi Party but also of the parties of the Right for a long time.” This could be seen as far back as the 1892 “Tivoli Program” of the Conservative Party (the party’s platform in- cluded an antisemitic plank). On the other hand, the statute furnished a somewhat acceptable instrument for the fulfillment of the nationalist conservative bureaucracy’s intention of purging itself of the republican elements that had infiltrated it during the Weimar era. The proportion of those dismissed, Mommsen emphasizes, was small; the bureaucratic system knew how to protect itself where communists and Jews were concerned. If so, the Nazis’ measures were taken on fertile soil. Soon enough, it turned out that the Nazi style of governance eviscerated the political and moral essence of the traditional professional bureaucracy. Ultimately, however, not only Jews and communists were victims of the new modus vivendi; the very existence of the bureaucracy as a foundational element of law and order fell victim as well.13

In his explanation of the consolidation of the Nazi regime, Mommsen strongly emphasizes two types of tactical measures—improvisation and retaliation. The most pronounced  case of improvisation, through which Mommsen marches confidently, is the torching of the Reichstag building a week before the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections. The Nazis, he says, did not initiate this action; rather, they responded to it. It was not they who set the Reichstag ablaze; they exploited the arson to attain a goal: creating a state of emergency that would justify action against the communists as enemies of the state, and thereby attaining, with no prior planning, de facto sanction to repeal the Weimar constitution. Mommsen calls attention to the recurrence of this tactic in other cases; for example, the murder of the diplomat vom Rath in Paris in November 1938.

With regard to the second tactic, retaliation and punishment, the Nazis portrayed as reprisals actions that they were interested in carrying out in any case. Thus, the boycott of Jewish-owned shops was present- ed as retaliation for the anti-German “atrocity propaganda” of “world Jewry”; the Nuremberg laws as a response to a decision by an Ameri- can judge to release from detention individuals who had removed the swastika flag from a German vessel that had dropped anchor in New York; and the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews as a reprisal for the assassination of vom Rath. “In the Nazi leaders’ political perception, retaliation played a role of an importance that cannot be overstated.”14 Hitler’s war was portrayed as a response to Weizmann’s “declaration of war” against Germany in August 1939. Where the fate of the Jews was concerned, the role of these two tactics would be crucial.

Even before the debate over “functionalism” began, Mommsen coined a term that posed a challenge to the historiography. Explaining the Third Reich’s modus operandi, he inserted a description of Hitler as a “weak dictator” — an assessment that, of course, clashed frontally with the conventional wisdom on history’s most unrivaled dictator (with the possible exception of Stalin). The term first appeared in a footnote in the book quoted above about the Third Reich bureaucracy.

In the note, relating to the status of the Führer’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, in the German bureaucratic hierarchy, Mommsen asserts,

Hitler’s status as one who knew how to deliberately exploit rivalry among different forces has been misinterpreted. However, on all questions in which a principled and firm stance was needed, he proved to be a weak dictator. Therefore, he also avoided being exposed as unprepared at cabinet meetings to deal with complaints from various quarters and forbade the presentation of any dis- agreements whatsoever.15

In an article on Hitler’s status in the Nazi system of government, Mommsen elaborated on what he meant by a “weak dictator.” Without disputing that the Führer’s will was sacred and, as such, the strongest argument for anything done in the Third Reich, he emphasized a fundamental flaw in the practice and style of the method. Hitler himself, Mommsen states, represented “human mediocrity and professional incompetence” and avoided most tasks associated with sound governance. The fact that Hitler last convened his cabinet in February 1938, symbolizes the absence of method in his regime. The Führer hated bureaucrats and, accordingly, thwarted administrative reform; he abetted “Bonzocracy” (Boznen — profiteering members of the party) and allowed corruption to develop; he avoided decisions of principle and refrained from systematic study of matters of state and their treatment. He took only a sporadic interest in administrative affairs, left his sa- traps to contend with one another without taking an explicit stance, and intervened only when confronted with the need to express his preferences explicitly. The rule is this: Hitler facilitated a system of “orderly temporary chaos” (i.e., “organized disorder”) and the so-called Nazi policracy and its “neo-feudal” structure.

As ridiculous as it sounds and contrary to the image of the totalitarian dictator, all of this had terrifying implications for the fate of the Jews:

Had it not been for the lust for action among the strongmen who vied for the dictator’s kindness, together with the autonomy of secondary bureaucracies that operated with perfection without attention to the purpose, Hitler’s fanatic racist goals would not have led to the ghastly reality of the extermination of more than five and a half million Jews and millions of Slavs and other victims of the regime.

Hitler rarely intervened explicitly in this situation — which Ian Kershaw, Mommsen’s  friend, defined as “working towards the Führer” —  and it was this that allowed the ascendancy of “order-takers and power-wielding technicians who were cynical enough to separate their petit-bourgeois lives from their criminal enterprise.”16

Within this category, in Mommsen’s  opinion, were those who perpetrated the crimes against the Jews until the “Final Solution” could be fulfilled. Here lies much of the answer to the question of how the quintessential nation of writers and philosophers could metamorphose into a nation of murderers and executioners?

Mommsen did not overlook the intent to arrive at radical solutions. Instead, he distinguished between propaganda and plan and was well aware of other realities in which radical desiderata were expressed (including those relating to the Jewish issue) but not carried out. The question he asked was how intention translated into action; here func- tionalism was the key. His answer was “[a] process of cumulative radi- calization” — the translation of a wish and an intention into the phras- ing of a problem and, in turn, of a solution that flows from the terms of the framework. In the Jewish matter, Mommsen claims, this process can be proved. Thirty-five years ago, he presented the gist of his functionalist doctrine to an Israeli audience:

Bureaucratic mechanisms [played] a role, at least equal in importance to antisemitic sentiments, as the deportation and murder operations were being carried out. Had it been only antisemitic fanatics who implemented the Final Solution policy at all ech- elons of the SS hierarchy with the help of the Wehrmacht and the civilian apparatuses, then preventing antisemitism would be the necessary way to prevent the recurrence of such cases. Such, however, was not the case. Many acted due to “blind” obeisance, misguided calculus of efficiency, career motives, or simply of a wish to get along.17

Mommsen adhered to this interpretation to the end.

In his foreword to the German edition of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Mommsen ultimately defended the “banality of evil” perspective and agreed with Arendt that “the road to the ‘Final Solution’ is not explained mainly by the continuousness of antisemitic currents.” It is no surprise that Mommsen referred to Eichmann in this foreword as a “low-ranking bureaucrat” (admittedly, one with much ability to cause harm) and made several pointed remarks at the expense of Zionism, thus, of course, angering Israelis as well as many other opponents of his approach.18 Lecturing at a conference on Arendt in Jeru- salem in 1997, devoted largely to the dynamics of totalitarian rule and featuring no shortage of criticism, Mommsen noted with satisfaction that Arendt, too, had reached the conclusion that antisemitism was less important for understanding the Holocaust than had been thought at first. Just the same, he defended Arendt against the charge of having become a “defector from the Jewish camp.”19

“The road to Auschwitz,” Mommsen stated in his article on the status of the Führer, entailed many interim measures that appear only ex post as the fulfillment of a clear intent; instead, it was the outcome of various initiatives emanating from diverse interests of different wield- ers of power. Mommsen often quoted the title of Karl Schleunes’s book, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz,20 because it reinforced his approach toward the Nazis’ way of solving the “Jewish problem.” Mommsen never yielded in his view that “a formal order by Hitler for a ‘Final solution to the Jewish question’ had never been given”:21 Hitler’s speech on January 30, 1939, he said, was not a program but rather a propaganda measure relating to the Jews’ status as hostages — a perception to which Hitler stubbornly adhered.

The “territorial solution” that crested with the Madagascar scheme, Mommsen opines, indicates that no extermination plan was on the table until 1941. Even after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its treatment of the “Jewish problem” was still characterized by differences among regions and among different potentates. What could be done in the occupied Soviet territories by means of the Einsatzgruppen could not be done in the Generalgouvernement. If so, Globocnik’s and Katzmann’s program of “murder by labor” marked a stepwise escalation in the sense of its real contribution to the cumulative radicalization (kumulativ Radikalisierung). This escalation was connected with an earlier leap forward (qualitative Stufe) — Hitler’s and Himmler’s decision on September 17, 1941, to start deporting the Jews of the Reich to the East, a decision that generated pressure on the Wartheland and led, among other things, to the decision to establish the Chełmno extermination camp.

Here, by the way, arose the only dispute between me and Hans Mommsen in the aftermath of the publication of the book that I had co-authored on the German Foreign Ministry’s involvement in the “Final Solution.” It seemed to him that I and the co-authors had returned to the “Führer’s order” and even moved up its date.22 I still find this dispute puzzling, because the conclusion of our investigation of the German Foreign Ministry only confirms Mommsen’s hypothesis with respect to both cumulative radicalization and the complicity of the respectable bourgeoisie — the Foreign Ministry diplomats in this case — in the Jewish context of the process. The instructions handed down in October 1941, still — so we argued in our book — preceded the full-scale “Final Solution.” Mommsen completely rejected Christian Gerlach’s attempt to date Hitler’s decision at roughly the time of his meeting with the Gauleiters on December 12, 1941.23 Mommsen did believe, however, that “the Holocaust was well under way before it became a systemic governmental program.” That is, the process that we call the “Holocaust” — the mass extermination of European Jewry by the Third Reich — had already moved on to the implementation phase before the date that he considers so important, July 17–18, 1942. This was when Himmler  visited Auschwitz and issued an instruction there to “cleanse” the Generalgouvernement of Jews by the end of that year.24

The “cumulative radicalization” of which Mommsen spoke is an appropriate way to describe the Jewish policy already in the pre-World War II Altreich and a fortiori in the rest of Europe once the war began. The vacillations and disarray that typified the application of the various solutions until the invasion of the Soviet Union, including the Mada- gascar Plan, attest to the absence of a program and to confusion and conflicts of interest among different institutions and in different areas in the Reich for more than two years after the war began. It is Momms- en who called attention to the contradiction that arose between what was to be done during the war and what should have been a “postwar” program under the conditions of uncertainty that prevailed before and after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Had a systematic program in- deed existed, it would have depended on the course of the war, which of course was unforeseeable and uncontrollable.

If so, the gist of things, according to Mommsen, was: “The Holocaust was not based upon a programme that had been developed over a long period. It was founded upon improvised measures that were rooted in earlier stages of planning and also escalated them.” Today even erstwhile non-intentionalists  can accept this conclusion. Typically, Mommsen added that the stain of overt or covert antisemitism among the conservative elites compromised their ability to resist and made the radical and utterly unlawful outcome possible.25

Finally, Hans Mommsen invested much effort from the outset of his career to the topic of opposition to Hitler, a mirror image of support for the Führer. It was none other than his teacher, Rothfels, who, in 1947, published the first book about the resistance movement (pursuant to this, as noted above, and not only due to Rothfels’s Jewish origins, Mommsen loyally deflected any censure of his mentor, even though Rothfels represented the conservative bourgeoisie that Mommsen targeted for criticism throughout his career). By 1966, Mommsen had already published his first article on German opposition to Hitler. Here, too, it is evident that the riddle that he sought to solve centered mainly on the contribution  of the conservative nationalist forces. In this context, he devoted attention, although not central attention, to the Jewish aspect. In a lecture before an Israeli audience in 1984, mark- ing the fortieth anniversary of the attempted assassination of Hitler, he still disregarded this specific topic26 but was impelled by the lecture of his colleague Christof Dipper to get to the root of the matter. In his articles on opposition to Hitler that appeared about a decade and a half later, he added a new article about the resistance and the Nazi persecution of the Jews.27  Here he not only defined the Jewish matter as negligible in this context but concluded that Hitler’s opponents in the circle that carried out the attempted putsch on July 20, 1944 — both officers and representatives of the civilian bourgeoisie — were perceptibly ambivalent toward antisemitism and took no principled stance against it.

Mommsen differentiated, for the sake of argument, between dis- similatory antisemitism (the kind that aims to reverse the Jews’ emancipation and social assimilation) and racial völkisch antisemitism. He claimed that most opponents of the regime were tainted with “only” the first type of antisemitism, which was typical of this branch of the bour- geoisie ever since the “Tivoli Program” (apart from conspirators such as Berlin Chief of Police Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, an extreme antisemite, and Artur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B). Reviewing the list of conspirators, however, he found that for many of them, sooner or later, disgust over the extermination of the Jews became one of the motives behind the failed coup. All in all Mommsen’s conclusion strove to reach the same destination that he labored to attain in his study of other aspects of the Third Reich mystery: on the fertile soil of dissimilatory antisemitism, into which the decent bourgeoisie had also sunk roots, the Nazi movement could successfully construct its radical solution to the “Jewish problem.” Furthermore, had the insurrection against Hitler succeeded, the extermination efforts would indeed have stopped, but the road to equal rights for Jews in Germany would not have been reopened. Even Karl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig who had been designated to become chancellor after the assassination of Hitler — Mommsen was very close to his daughter — gave expression to the antisemitic legacy of his social group. Admittedly, in the announcement of the government that was intended to arise after Hitler’s assassination, it was stated explicitly that the shameful and inhuman persecution of the Jews would be halted. Back in 1938, however, after visiting mandatory Palestine, Goerdeler had expressed the belief that the Jews should be given statehood (although not in Palestine, which he believed lacked the capacity to solve the problem). In other words, even he favored dissimilation and not emancipation.

Never straying from his way of thinking, Mommsen staked out a position in the public arena so that the topic of Nazism and the Holocaust would not remain the exclusive property of the historians’ guild and the ivory tower. In this arena he was a social democrat through and through. He vehemently disagreed with some of the conventional wisdom about the lesson that the Federal Republic should learn from the Weimar Republic and defended the latter against unfair criticism.28

In a key development in the postwar history of German historiography, the Historikerstreit (the “historians’ controversy” that Ernst Nolte touched off in 1986), this context was clear even to those who did not keep up with Hans Mommsen’s writings in the German daily press. He interpreted the Federal Republic in the Adenauer era to a certain extent as a contemptible continuation of the historical right-wing conservative tradition from which the historical misinterpretation of the Third Reich had flowed. The explanation that the Third Reich had been “imposed” on the German people from the outside invoked the concept of totalitarianism in order to blur the difference between Communism and Nazism, or to present as worthy any stance against Communist Eastern Europe. Again true to his path, Mommsen placed Nolte and his supporters within the situation of German society at the time of the dispute; that is, in the Germany of the conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s.29

In the debate over Daniel Goldhagen’s “eliminationist antisemitism,” Mommsen, despite opposition by the “guild,” again maneuvered a discussion of the topic at the 1996 annual conference of German historians (Historikertag). There he rejected Goldhagen’s sweepingly deterministic argument but did not offer an alternative version that would mitigate the German nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

He was a man of controversy. He sought it out and found it, sometimes at a considerable personal price. On the one hand, he was highly loyal to colleagues such as Wolfgang Schieder, Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw, and Bernd Weisbrod. On the other hand, he sometimes clashed even with researchers whom he appreciated, such as Norbert Frei, Otto Dov Kulka, Christof Dipper, and others. He was profoundly offended at what the historian Nicolas Berg wrote about him in his book on German historiography and the Holocaust concerning his inability or unwillingness to renounce the previous generation’s attitudes and his attempts to upgrade accomplices in the crime to the level of only “passive partners.” He construed this as a settling of scores.30 From his standpoint the outcome of the debate over functionalism was that others, such as Christopher Browning (inter alia), accepted and internalized some of his functionalist contentions. In contrast, in June 2012, at a conference at the Institute for the History of the German Jews (Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden), as he drew up a balance sheet of German historiography, Mommsen found it difficult — in a performance that was also something of a personal retrospective — to internalize the fact that, although initially he had behaved like his colleagues and had left this chapter to Jewish historians, he had become, among other things, a highly influential historian who aroused controversy in the Jews’ historiography as well.

Translated from Hebrew by Naftali Greenwood

• 1. Hans Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im Habsburger Vielvölkerstaat 1867–1907 (Tübingen: University of Tübingen, 1959).
• 2. Waldemar Besson, ed., Das Fischer Lexikon: Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1961), p. 91.
• 3. Hans Mommsen, “Hans Rothfels zwischen den Epochen,” in Hans Mommsen, Zur Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert: Demokratie, Diktatur, Widerstand (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010), pp. 333–348.
• 4. Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1966).
• 5. The studies that Wilhelm Mommsen published during the Third Reich era were interpreted as support of the regime’s stances. An article of his that I encountered at the beginning of my career as a historian about Friedrich Naumann, founder of the German Democratic Party in 1919, demonstrates this approach. In it Mom- msen presents the establishment by Naumann of the National Social Association in 1896, as a stage on the road to National Socialism. One may construe the piece as an obsequious nod to Nazi ideology, but one may also interpret it as a subversive statement in favor of more enlightened fundamentals in the integration of Nation- alism and Socialism. Mommsen fils, Hans, repeatedly stressed that to interpret utterances from the period of the Third Reich correctly, one needs interpretative tools that stem from that era; otherwise they may very easily be misinterpreted. See Wilhelm Mommsen, “Zur Biographie Friedrich Naumanns,” Historische Zeitschrift, 161 (1940), pp. 539–548, and interview with Hans Mommsen: “Neu- beginn und Entwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in den 1950/60er Jahren,”
• 6. Hans Mommsen, “Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker, eds., Der Führerstaat. Mythos und Realität (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 43–72; idem, “Die Realisierung des Uto- pischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im Dritten Reich,“ Geschichte und Gesell­ schaft, vol. 9 (1983), pp. 381–420 (appeared in English as “The Realization of the Unthinkable” The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich’,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany [London: Unwin Hyman, 1986], pp. 93–144).
• 7. Hans Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit. Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang 1918 bis 1933 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1989); idem, “Von der Weimarer Republik zum nationalsozialistischen Führerstaat,” in Zur Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010), pp. 19–37.
• 8. Hans Mommsen, Zur Geschichte Deutschlands, p. 174.
• 9. Hans Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942. Der Weg zur europäischen ‘Endlösung’ der Judenfrage (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), Chapter 1.
• 10. Hans Mommsen, “Interwar German Nationalism,” in Moshe Zimmermann, ed., Crises of German Nationalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982), p. 108.
• 11. “Anti-Hitler Resistance and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews,” in Hans Mommsen, Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance under the Third Reich (Princeton: Princ- eton University Press, 2003), p. 255.
• 12. Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- anstalt, 1966), pp. 14–15.
• 13. Ibid., chapters 3–5.
• 14. Hans Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942, p. 41; idem, Das NS­Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014).
• 15. Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich, p. 98, n. 26.
• 16. Mommsen, “Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem.”
• 17. Mommsen, “Interwar German Nationalism,” p. 108.
• 18. Hans Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt und der Prozess gegen Adolf Eichmann,” Intro- ductory Essay in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Munich: Piper, 1986), pp. i-xxxvii.
• 19. Hans Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence,” in Steven E. Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 231.
• 20. Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews: 1933–39 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
• 21. Mommsen, “Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem.”
• 22. Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, and Moshe Zimmermann, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepub­ lik (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010).
• 23. Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, The Fate of German Jews, and Hit- ler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate all European Jews,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 70, no. 4 (1998), pp. 759–812.
• 24. Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942, pp. 118, 125.
• 25. Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable,” p. 126.
• 26. Hans Mommsen, “The German Opposition to Hitler — Forty Years Later,” in Moshe Zimmermann, ed., Opposition to Nazism (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), pp. 15–28.
• 27. Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler Resistance and the Nazi Persecution of Jews,” pp. 253–276.
• 28. Hans Mommsen, “Ist die Weimarer Republik an Fehlkonstruktionen der Reichs- verfassung gesheitert?” in Michael Schultheiss and Julia Rossberg, eds., Weimar und die Republik — Geburtsstunde eines demokratischen Deutschlands (Weimar: Weimarer Verlagsgesellschaft Ltd., 2009), pp. 105–124.
• 29. Hans Mommsen, “Suche nach der ‘verlorenen Geschichte’?” in “Historikerstreit.” Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialis­ tischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1987), pp. 156–173.
• 30. Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust and the West German Historians (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).