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Leider nur in englisch trotzdem interessant. Was haltet ihr davon????
Bryan Mark Rigg’s book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, created a historical stir when it first came out.
It was well received by historians of various stripes, including late British military historian John Keegan, Michael Berenbaum of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nathan A. Stoltzfus of Florida State University, Norman Naimark of Stanford, military historian Dennis E. Showalter, military historian Geoffrey P. Megargee, Jonathan Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania, etc.
Yet one scholar who dismissed Rigg’s study without an iota of evidence was the late Raul Hilberg of the University of Vermont. Hilberg was one of the first individuals to have written about the Holocaust and has been extolled as, “the world’s pre-eminent Holocaust scholar… His magisterial three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), has informed such diverse Holocaust projects as Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah documentary (1985) and Jonathan Littell’s prizewinning novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Benevolent Ones, 2006).”[1]
Hilberg declared that Rigg’s book was “preposterous,” claiming it “is not a bombshell” because Holocaust writers like himself “have known that there were thousands of [Mischlinge] in the German army.”
Rigg is not an unruly scholar. During his graduate years at Yale and doctorate program at Cambridge, he went to great lengths to collect archival documents, oral testimonies of at least 400 soldiers in the Nazi army, collect army papers, personnel files, government letters, diaries, and all kinds of documents which had never been examined before.
Some of his professors were even discouraging him from doing it. Henry Turner, one of his professors at Yale who happened to write Hitler’s Days to Power, told him point blank: “I told him he was wasting his time.”[2]
But other professors were impressed by his intellectual rigor and honest research. Paula E. Hyman, another professor at Yale who died at the end of 2011, was shocked at one point when she realized that Rigg even went to Washington to get original documents for his term paper. Hyman chuckled and then said, “Most undergraduates don’t do that. That was when I realized that he was very serious about his research.”[3]
Unlike Goldhagen, Rigg did not fabricate those documents. Yet all of that work is dismissed by Hilberg with one word: “preposterous.” David Cesarrani, a professor of modern Jewish history at Southhampton University and editor of The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, agreed. Rigg’s study, he said, is “of little significance to either the Third Reich or the persecution and mass murder of the Jews.”[4]
In a similar vein, Jewish historian Peter Gay, author of My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin, declared, “I can’t imagine what difference [this research] would make.”[5]
When Rigg argued that at least 150,000 people of Jewish descent were in the Nazi army, Hilberg declared,“This mathematics escapes me. Great caution is required here.”[6]
Now Hilberg was not that stupid. He spent page after page desperately trying to tabulate the number of Jews who died in concentration camps, but Riggs’ mathematics escaped him! (Riggs consulted with mathematicians and statisticians in order to get accurate figures.) Instead of giving credit where it is due, Hilberg moved on to say that Riggs’ research is “publicity stunt.”[7]
If the job of the serious historian is to report and explain what actually happened, as A. J. P. Taylor put it, why didn’t Hilberg report this historical fact in his three-volume set The Destruction of the European Jews, which is more than one thousand pages?
Why did Hilberg and others leave the inquiring mind in suspense for years and then attack those who actually said the obvious? Well, the stakes are too high.
Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California argues indirectly that Jewish history in many instances has been hoodwinked by ideology precisely because many Jewish historians tend to either exaggerate the actual accounts or fail to give a fair balance of the historical data.[8] This point is not far-fetched.
For example, Russian Jewish historian Oleg Budnitskii of the International Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewish Studies declared on the very first page of his book that
“From 1918 to 1920, Russian Jewry suffered persecution and devastation on a scale that had not been seen since the Khmelnitskii Uprising in the seventeenth century. Of all the tragedies in the annals of Jewish History, only the Holocaust would surpass this period in savagery and wanton murder.”[9]
Budnitskii on some occasions does talk about Jewish participation in revolutionary movements, but more often than not he prefaces his remark by implying that they were reacting to anti-Jewish provocations or pogroms. For example, he writes that
“From 1901 to 1903, Jews composed of 29.1 percent of those arrested for political crimes. From March 1903 to November 1904 more than half of those investigated for political activity were Jews. This fact can most easily be explained as a reaction to the Kishinev and Homel pogroms.”[10]
Quelle und weiterlesen....
Ich gebe zu, ich habe in der Schule leider nichts über die russische Revolution und dem Fall des russischen Zaren lernen können. Denn der Lehrer war schon froh wenigstens nur den zweiten Weltkrieg lehren zu können. Bei mir fehlen wesentliche Teile unserer Geschichte, dafür entschuldige ich mich jetzt, weil ich noch nicht selber recherchiert habe um diese Lücke zu füllen.
Ich persönlich finde es schon faszinierend, wie viel Macht die Juden im damaligen Russland gehabt haben, ohne Antisemitische Hintergedanken, falls das jemand denken sollte.
Bryan Mark Rigg’s book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, created a historical stir when it first came out.
It was well received by historians of various stripes, including late British military historian John Keegan, Michael Berenbaum of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nathan A. Stoltzfus of Florida State University, Norman Naimark of Stanford, military historian Dennis E. Showalter, military historian Geoffrey P. Megargee, Jonathan Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania, etc.
Yet one scholar who dismissed Rigg’s study without an iota of evidence was the late Raul Hilberg of the University of Vermont. Hilberg was one of the first individuals to have written about the Holocaust and has been extolled as, “the world’s pre-eminent Holocaust scholar… His magisterial three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), has informed such diverse Holocaust projects as Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah documentary (1985) and Jonathan Littell’s prizewinning novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Benevolent Ones, 2006).”[1]
Hilberg declared that Rigg’s book was “preposterous,” claiming it “is not a bombshell” because Holocaust writers like himself “have known that there were thousands of [Mischlinge] in the German army.”
Rigg is not an unruly scholar. During his graduate years at Yale and doctorate program at Cambridge, he went to great lengths to collect archival documents, oral testimonies of at least 400 soldiers in the Nazi army, collect army papers, personnel files, government letters, diaries, and all kinds of documents which had never been examined before.
Some of his professors were even discouraging him from doing it. Henry Turner, one of his professors at Yale who happened to write Hitler’s Days to Power, told him point blank: “I told him he was wasting his time.”[2]
But other professors were impressed by his intellectual rigor and honest research. Paula E. Hyman, another professor at Yale who died at the end of 2011, was shocked at one point when she realized that Rigg even went to Washington to get original documents for his term paper. Hyman chuckled and then said, “Most undergraduates don’t do that. That was when I realized that he was very serious about his research.”[3]
Unlike Goldhagen, Rigg did not fabricate those documents. Yet all of that work is dismissed by Hilberg with one word: “preposterous.” David Cesarrani, a professor of modern Jewish history at Southhampton University and editor of The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, agreed. Rigg’s study, he said, is “of little significance to either the Third Reich or the persecution and mass murder of the Jews.”[4]
In a similar vein, Jewish historian Peter Gay, author of My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin, declared, “I can’t imagine what difference [this research] would make.”[5]
When Rigg argued that at least 150,000 people of Jewish descent were in the Nazi army, Hilberg declared,“This mathematics escapes me. Great caution is required here.”[6]
Now Hilberg was not that stupid. He spent page after page desperately trying to tabulate the number of Jews who died in concentration camps, but Riggs’ mathematics escaped him! (Riggs consulted with mathematicians and statisticians in order to get accurate figures.) Instead of giving credit where it is due, Hilberg moved on to say that Riggs’ research is “publicity stunt.”[7]
If the job of the serious historian is to report and explain what actually happened, as A. J. P. Taylor put it, why didn’t Hilberg report this historical fact in his three-volume set The Destruction of the European Jews, which is more than one thousand pages?
Why did Hilberg and others leave the inquiring mind in suspense for years and then attack those who actually said the obvious? Well, the stakes are too high.
Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California argues indirectly that Jewish history in many instances has been hoodwinked by ideology precisely because many Jewish historians tend to either exaggerate the actual accounts or fail to give a fair balance of the historical data.[8] This point is not far-fetched.
For example, Russian Jewish historian Oleg Budnitskii of the International Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewish Studies declared on the very first page of his book that
“From 1918 to 1920, Russian Jewry suffered persecution and devastation on a scale that had not been seen since the Khmelnitskii Uprising in the seventeenth century. Of all the tragedies in the annals of Jewish History, only the Holocaust would surpass this period in savagery and wanton murder.”[9]
Budnitskii on some occasions does talk about Jewish participation in revolutionary movements, but more often than not he prefaces his remark by implying that they were reacting to anti-Jewish provocations or pogroms. For example, he writes that
“From 1901 to 1903, Jews composed of 29.1 percent of those arrested for political crimes. From March 1903 to November 1904 more than half of those investigated for political activity were Jews. This fact can most easily be explained as a reaction to the Kishinev and Homel pogroms.”[10]
Quelle und weiterlesen....
Ich gebe zu, ich habe in der Schule leider nichts über die russische Revolution und dem Fall des russischen Zaren lernen können. Denn der Lehrer war schon froh wenigstens nur den zweiten Weltkrieg lehren zu können. Bei mir fehlen wesentliche Teile unserer Geschichte, dafür entschuldige ich mich jetzt, weil ich noch nicht selber recherchiert habe um diese Lücke zu füllen.
Ich persönlich finde es schon faszinierend, wie viel Macht die Juden im damaligen Russland gehabt haben, ohne Antisemitische Hintergedanken, falls das jemand denken sollte.
