Tom Lawson,Debates on the Holocaust

Reviewed by: Steve Hochstadt, Illinois College, USA

So much has been published on the Holocaust, especially during the past few decades, that the historiography is rapidly multiplying. Tom Lawson structures Debates on the Holocaust by isolating eight issues over which scholars have disagreed, and then tracing the historiographical development of each debate as a chapter. Through this focus, Lawson is able to persuasively demonstrate that fundamental sources of conflict lie outside the study of Holocaust documents. Rather, ‘fundamental questions of moral and political identity, nothing less than existential questions about the human condition’ (3) shape historical debates. More than most historiographical treatments, Lawson situates Holocaust writings within the larger Western context, stressing shifts in the historical profession, such as the changing influence of social history and post-modernism, and world political events, including the end of the Cold War and the Rwandan genocide. This allows him to develop persuasive explanations for why writers about the Holocaust debated particular issues. Each chapter confirms that ‘History (whatever the role of documentary evidence) is about now as well as then’ (186).

Lawson thus finds the argument between functionalists and intentionalists to be more than rival historical explanations of the Holocaust; they are positions about the construction of historical metanarratives, ‘the purpose of historical explanation itself’ (74). This debate was influenced by questions of personal responsibility raised at the trials of perpetrators. Then the two warring Holocaust metanarratives broke down after the end of the Cold War with more open access to eastern European archives and the growing realization that there was no longer one Holocaust historiography, but many differing national narratives.

The debates about bystanders and what they should or might have done differently were informed by the politics of the late twentieth century and critical choices about the responsibility of those who see genocide occurring. Lawson points out the anachronistic elements in the often emotional arguments about whether the Allies should have done more to prevent or interrupt the Holocaust, such as by bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. In 1944 a planned genocide of millions was not yet comprehensible to policymakers or to anyone else, except the Nazis themselves. Lawson does not try to exonerate the Allies for indifference to what they did know. He does, however, place too much weight on the polemic presented by William Rubinstein in The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies could not have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London 2000), which is not scholarship, but special pleading.

Lawson demonstrates in every chapter the great strides made by Holocaust researchers in grasping what happened by their inclusion of an ever wider basis of sources. Yet he worries that the importance of the changing present in the development of Holocaust historiography might have deleterious consequences: ‘The Holocaust thus becomes reduced to the terrain on which a much wider debate about who and what we are is conducted’ (226). I would argue the opposite. The Holocaust is not only a historical subject, but also a contemporary one. If our debates about ourselves and our societies continue to be reflected through debates about the Holocaust, that ensures both further engagement by historians and its continuing relevance to contemporary life.

I have two complaints about this book. More superficially, it needs copy editing. Lawson's punctuation is idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and often wrong, such as beginning sentences with ‘But,’ or using semi-colons instead of commas to separate subordinate and main clauses. The useless ‘as such’ appears hundreds of times, occasionally twice in the same sentence. These weaknesses do not detract from the clarity and logic of his arguments, but do impair their readability. My second objection is about Lawson's exclusion of one of the fundamental debates about the Holocaust: was the Holocaust exclusively about Jews? From the beginning, he equates the three concepts: Holocaust, Shoah and the genocide of the Jews. The thoughtful discussions of how ‘the Holocaust has been constructed, and reconstructed, in the post-war world’ (5) do not address whether Gypsies, the handicapped, Soviet POWs, Catholic intellectuals, Polish elites and Belorussian peasants should be considered victims of the Holocaust.

His argument for excluding historiographical disagreements about the ‘exclusivity’ of the Holocaust as the ‘universal signifier of the Nazi campaign against the Jews' is that he is a ‘prisoner of [his] sources’ (8). Although Lawson himself believes that ‘the term Holocaust should include all victims of national Socialist exterminationist policies’, he apparently feels alone in this contention. Lawson's claim that historians ‘overwhelmingly’ apply ‘Holocaust’ only to Jews is not an accurate depiction of the modern historiography. Throughout the book, he treats histories which place the murder of the Jews into contexts in which others died, too. The first work of historical scholarship that Lawson discusses, Philip Friedman's This Was Oświęcim from 1946, analysed Auschwitz as part of Nazi mass murder of Jews, Christian Poles and Soviet POWs. Historians today approach the Holocaust with a variety of definitions of its scope. Why not treat this issue as a debate to be analysed?