Wolfgang Benz (1) (1941–)

A German Historian Examines the Genocide by Wolfgang Benz is a good but quick read--156 astringent pages, describing the events and individuals who determined the fate of millions of Jews. The author is a German, not a Jew, and his task is analytical, not explanatory. The Holocaust avoids the questions that drive most books about its subject. It does not delve into the origins of National Socialism or the question of why Germans allowed the Holocaust to happen. Instead, Benz begins by describing the Wannsee Conference, which planned "to rid all German territory of Jews by legal means," and then describes the laws that allowed discrimination against Jews, the destruction of civil rights for Jews, and the creation of ghettos and concentration camps. His nonideological analysis of the genocide is far from amoral, however. Every page of this German's account of the holocaust rings with the mournfulness of a man who must take stock of the hardest parts of his history, in preparation for understanding that history. And although some scholars may argue there is no such thing as objectivity, Benz's account of the political genesis of genocide comes awfully close. "Not a single line of this book can be contested or argued out of existence," says Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg in his introduction to The Holocaust. "All of these events took place, and they happened in the order in which he puts them." Simply having these facts so clearly and succinctly described will help many readers prepare to grapple with the raging moral questions raised by the Holocaust.

Benz (anti-Semitism research, Technical Univ. of Berlin) is the author or editor of over 100 volumes, most available only in German. In this book, first published in 1995 and ably translated here, Benz provides an overview of the Holocaust in under 175 pages, covering a wide variety of topics, from the initial discrimination against German Jews and "Gypsies" to extermination by Einsatzgruppen and in the death camps. Benz shows an easy mastery of the primary-source material, although the book disappointingly lacks footnotes. He deliberately avoids many of the historical controversies, refusing, for example, to be drawn into the debate between functionalists and internationalists, although he does take a somewhat unpopular position by defending some of the leaders of the Judenrate.… (mais)