A Problem of Humankind?

...Rhodes has written many groundbreaking books, among them his Pulitzer Prizewinning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1995), and/1 Hole in the World (1990), about child abuse...

...Originally established to assist the Wehrmacht in completing the "mop-up" of political opponents, partisans and other noncombat personnel in Nazi-occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938-39, the units attained notoriety during the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941...

...disqualifies ideology alone as the enabling mechanism for violence...

...Rhodes' lack of immersion in the literature of Holocaust history probably explains his superficial exploration of the vexing questions he tries to resolve...

...In the wrong hands, these graphic details of death could easily descend into lurid sensationalism...

...Rhodes thus seeks to make the Holocaust less a German problem and more a problem of humankind...

...In fact, he broadens the definition of the Holocaust to include Slavs as well as Jews, quoting sociologist Michael Mann's contention that the Nazi regime "killed approximately 20 million unarmed persons," of which "Jews comprised only a third...

...was intended to be only the first phase of a vast megalomaniacal project of privation, enslavement, mass murder, and colonization modeled on the historic colonization of North and South America and on 19thcentury imperialism, but modernized with pseudoscientific theories of eugenic restoration...

...For the most part...

...Given the current usage of "invention" to refer to the construction of seemingly "eternal" verities, Rhodes' invocation of such a loaded term suggests a desire to challenge the traditional narrow definition of the Holocaust as pertaining exclusively to the genocide of the Jews...

...Their initial targets in June 1941 were almost exclusively male intellectual and political elites, but by July and August women and children were ensnared in their murderous grip as well...

...In describing this, Richard Rhodes focuses on the fluidity of the Einsatzgruppen's approach to killing, both in terms of victims and methods...

...Like Christopher Browning, whose Ordinary Men employed psychologist Stanley Milgram's findings on obedience to authority, Rhodes cites the work of a different social scientist, Lonnie Athens, to rationalize the killers' actions...

...Still, Rhodes'embrace of Athens' theories is revealing because it points to the presence of a broader aim—namely, the desire to universalize the causes and significance of the Holocaust...

...Athens' 1992 analysis of criminal behavior, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals, asserts that human beings commit violence only after being socialized into a culture of violence—a process that transpires in four distinct stages of increasing intensity and virulency...

...Other historians have tried to contextualize the Holocaust within a broader project of imperialistic population transfer (driven by economic—read capitalist—goals...

...The Nazis' consistency of purpose with respect to the Final Solution shows it was never merely a matter of imperialism...

...It appears to merely recount in disturbing detail the atrocities committed by Heinrich Himmler's SS-Einsatzgruppen, or special task forces, in World War II...

...In the case of the Final Solution's origins, for example, he fails to mention the three-decades-old debate between "functionalist" and "intentionalist" historians on the precise timing of, and Hitler's role in, the order to kill the Jews of Europe...

...Moreover, Rhodes disregards, or is unaware of, recent Germanlanguage studies of the Holocaust, including the part played by the Einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied Poland, Galicia and White Russia...

...To what extent was the Holocaust unique in the annals of human carnage...

...Rhodes clearly intends those figures to demonstrate that anti-Semitism alone was not what drove the Nazis to kill...

...In broadening the context for the Holocaust, though, Rhodes ignores several crucial points that undermine his approach...

...As part of Operation Barbarossa, four separate brigades totaling around 3,000 troops followed the German Army into the Baltic states, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea, and began a prolonged, unprecedented slaughter...

...How were the rank-and-file members of the forces psychologically able to murder innocent men, women and children...

...The book's most gruesome sections track the transition from mass executions by firing squads to the advent of mobile gas vans—with digressions into even more harrowing experiments such as killing by slaked quicklime (in which the victims were "chemically burned to death" in pits), and the best way to stack and dispose of corpses...

...Rather, the book is largely informed by the spadework of scholars like Yitzhak Arad, Ernst Klee and Andrew Ezergailis...

...use of violence," he writes, "that distinguishes it from other...

...But at the same time the author affirms German historian Christian Gerlach's much more controversial and conflicting recent claim of an early December 1941 decision to eliminate the Jews...

...In the hands of more polemically minded historians, challenging the Holocaust's uniqueness has functioned as an overt political gesture designed to attract attention to other groups' historic suffering...

...Yet that he does so at all is significant in and of itself, for it reflects an increasing readiness to question the Holocaust's singularity...

...Instead, he simply reaffirms the traditional intentionalist claim that Hitler conceived the Final Solution (and even implies his exhibiting a desire to murder Jews as far back as 1925...

...Since the book just restates both theses, it does not offer anything new about the origins of the Final Solution...

...For one thing, he neglects to engage the voluminous material on the subject of the Holocaust's uniqueness...

...His rejection of the Holocaust's uniqueness is virtually done in passing...

...In contrast to the views of Daniel Goldhagen (and many before him), Rhodes wants to de-emphasize the role of ideological factors (specifically, anti-Semitism) in elucidating the Holocaust...

...The overall reason for their wartime atrocities, he goes on to argue, was the vision of a racially cleansed, agrarian Eastern empire—outlined in the notorious SS plan known as "Generalplan Ost...

...were the most numerous victims—3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens, and 3.3 million Soviet POW's...

...By comparing the two, Rhodes lends a degree of rationality to the Holocaust that it does not deserve...

...unique in human history...

...His assertion that "Violence begot violence," however, is reductionist and hardly sufficient as an explanation...

...while] Slavs...

...But it is really an attempt to provide incisive answers to the grand questions that have preoccupied scholars of the Holocaust for decades: What motivated the Nazi leadership to wage a war of extermination against the Jews...

...Indeed, the bibliography reveals virtually no primary sources...

...After all, the British and the French were presumably equally brutalized by the Great War experience, yet did not fall prey to the culture of violence that permeated Nazi Germany...

...But this new volume is nearly entirely composed of material drawn from pre-existing literature on its subject...

...Most of all, perhaps, Masters of Death testifies to the subtle ongoing universalization of the Holocaust in the American consciousness...

...Reviewed by Gavriel Rosenfeld Assistant professor of history, Fairfield University...

...Consequently, he does not confront the contrast between the Nazis' attempt to kill every last Jewish man, woman and child, and their apparent willingness to allow remnants of other persecuted peoples to survive...

...But if killing Jews in the East was really just a part of reordering the demographic map of Eastern Europe, why were Jews in far-flung places like Greece, Scandinavia and the Channel Islands targeted by the Nazis...

...To Rhodes' credit, his indictment of the Einsatzgruppen never slips from its strict moral framework, and is greatly strengthened by victims' accounts of their suffering taken from postwar sources...

...Masters of Death leaves those questions in the background as it presents a gripping, if familiar, tale of the Einsatzgruppen...

...author, "Munich in Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich" This is a book with a subliminal agenda...

...He argues that many of their leaders (especially Hitler and Himmler), as well as their average followers, were socialized into a broader culture of violence as a result of World War I—an experience that prompted them to embrace violent solutions for the perceived problems of their era...

...As he sums it up, "the Final Solution...

...Rhodes' book reveals no signs of a political objective...

...Masters of Death is less successful, though, as an analytical work of history...

...It was the "scale of [the Third Reich's...

...He rejects any notion of its uniqueness: "The Nazi hecatomb was not...

...In the end, Masters of Death is a forceful but puzzling book—right down to its subtitle referring to the "Invention of the Holocaust...

...In Masters of Death, Rhodes uses this model to explain the Nazis' propensity for mass murder...

...It was accomplished with the same simple equipment as the slaughters of European imperialism and, later, Asian and African civil war...

...On the issue of why the killers killed so easily, Rhodes demonstrates more originality, yet is also unconvincing...

...Nevertheless, his own discarding of ideology— that is, his not facing the question of why the Germans so hated the Jews—leaves the Holocaust as mystifying as it has ever been...

...At the same time, the perpetrators— especially Einsatzgruppen leaders like Artur Nebe, Paul Blobel and Friedrich Jeckeln—experimented with improving their methods...

...regimes " correctly pointing out how Goldhagen's thesis "fails to explain the Third Reich's fervor for murdering not only Jews but also Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled...

...Rhodes notes that Athens' "violent socialization...