Hitler's Silent Majority? Conformity and Resistence Under the Third Reich (Part Two)

The first part of this essay, in the Spring issue of MQR, discussed the broad patterns of historical scholarship on the Third Reich since the beginnings of serious archival research, drawing out the main changes separating the 1970s from now. It argued that the early growth of scholarly interest coincided with the great social history wave emerging from the 1960s, which seemed to promise the best means of understanding the forces that generated Hitler's movement and shaped the Nazi state. During the 1980s the emphasis shifted just as markedly toward cultural history. In the process, the earlier commitment to studying a separable "society" distinct from the Third Reich, stubborn in its continuities and partially resistant to the Nazis' appeals, drastically diminished. "Race" trumped "class" as the main organizing category. The pervasiveness of Nazism's impact on German society focused historians' interests rather than the practical "limits of Hitler's power." Attention shifted from the 1930s to the war as the context in which Nazi goals came fullest to fruition. For the first time the genocide of the Jews started to occupy the centerground of German historiography.

To illustrate the extent and consequences of these changes in the perspectives of historians, I used the first part of this essay to consider a series of new general works with major resonance beyond the circumscribed networks of specialized research: Ian Kershaw's magisterial new biography of Adolf Hitler, a useful synthesis by Pierre Ayçoberry of the earlier social histories, and an imposing general account of the Third Reich by Michael Burleigh. In this second part of the essay, I turn to the more specific question of "coercion versus consent" by considering two new studies of the Gestapo and its impact on German society by Robert Gellately and Eric Johnson. After a brief discussion of the David Irving trial, I conclude by discussing Mark Roseman's remarkable life of Marianne Ellenbogen, which sheds fascinating light on where historians may be going next.

Judging the "Nazi Consensus"

One of the weakest parts of Michael Burleigh's general history deals with the German resistance, and this is directly connected with his choice of political religion as an explanatory framework. For that concept leaves little intermediate scope for identifying forms of collective agency beyond the determinative power of Hitler's demagogic messianism on the one hand and the ideological prostration of the general populace on the other.[2] It sees few tensions between the irrationalist and "herd-like" submissiveness of the vast majority of ordinary Germans and the pervasiveness of Hitler's influence as their pseudo-messiah. Because German society contained no organized bases after 1933-34 from which the regime might be opposed, accordingly, opposition could only come through personal acts of ethical refusal, anchored in the character of exceptional individuals or the inspiration they took from a surviving pre-Nazi value system. In Burleigh's account, cultural capacities of that kind were sheltered mainly in certain quarters of the aristocracy, where family pedigrees and traditions of military or bureaucratic service could fortify a few exceptional individuals against the Nazi state's demands. The prime exemplars for Burleigh were the noble conspirators behind the July Plot, who still lived "by simple codes of honor and sacrifice," by disdain for the vulgarity of the mob, by belief in the spiritual and cultivated life, and by possession of what Englishmen of Burleigh's persuasion used to call "breeding," a term which fortunately he prefers not to call upon here.

Otherwise, Burleigh deals with questions of resistance situationally via concrete illustrations taken from the case records of the Nazi institutional complex. We encounter the dilemmas of collusion and complicity mainly through the vivid use of localized and everyday experiences in this way—through the particular stories of the victims of the T-4 program, for example, or through the records of this or that psychiatric nurse or doctor enlisted in T-4's implementation. True to the dictates of the totalitarian model, the chances for non-compliance with Nazi policies are reduced to the existential choices of atomized individuals, because once the protections of the rule of law had been destroyed during 1933-34, and the parties and associations were banned, organized resources for opposition had by definition gone. The perspective is also very much "top-down," with little interest in the resistant qualities of popular culture or working-class community life. For Burleigh, all those potentials were washed away in a tidal wave of popular irrationalism and mass despair. All the subtleties and gradations of German society's response to the Nazi system found by social historians like Broszat, Peukert, and Mason are ignored. Measured against the power of political religion's totalizing drive, they become purely academic in weight.

This is consistent with the more general approach to Nazi domination gathering force during the 1990s. As discussed in the earlier part of this essay, the social historians of the 1970s decisively dismantled an older dichotomous framework that pitted Nazi fanaticism against a cowed and terrorized general populace, alternately drilled into conformity by the Gestapo and whipped into enthusiasm by Goebbels. That earlier black-and-white contrast between the regime and its subjects gradually blurred into a new image of inconclusive and ambiguous complexity, in mottled blends of browns and grays, all deceptive angles and hidden depths. If "resistance" transmuted thereby into subtle repertoires of refusal and non-compliance, or "refractory behavior" and boundary drawing, sometimes consciously oppositional but as often not, then collaboration and accommodation acquired an equally ambivalent edge. If Broszat's Bavarian team pioneered this push toward ambiguity, moreover, they were hugely reinforced by the mushrooming of local history projects under the sign of Alltagsgeschichte in the 1980s.

But in the process the older problematic of "resistance" became all but eclipsed. Popular attitudes toward Nazism were now discussed mainly in the language of complicity, conformity, collaboration, and consent. Earlier tales of coded and displaced opposition gave way to an encompassing story of popular inactivity and acquiescence. Few Germans were seen any longer to have been immune from the values of the regime, rather than being insidiously coopted into them via the structures and modalities of everyday life. Christopher Browning's trope of "ordinary men" became emblematic for seeing Nazism's popular credentials in this way, with its stress on the situational logic of genocide's participatory roster, which faced even rank-and-file auxiliary policemen of no particular Nazi background with the dailiness of mass murder and the normalizing of killing and abuse.[3] The presence of forced foreign labor in the war economy, the racialization of social policy, the connections between racial hygiene and women's reproductive health, the massive impact of the Eastern Front—all these became paradigms for showing how the Third Reich and its criminality took up residence in the lives of the ordinary German people.

As interest in resistance ebbed, belief in the centrality of terror to Nazism's hold over the Germans has also declined. Long-needed studies of policing and Nazi judicial practice found the Third Reich far less dependent on surveillance, intimidation, and violent coercion than once was thought, for example, so that it functioned less by the depth of the Gestapo's penetration into average Germans' lives than by society's own collective self-regulation. As Eric Johnson observes in summarizing these findings, "the Gestapo often had less manpower, fewer spies, and less means at its disposal to control the population than had been assumed by nearly everyone since the Nazi period came to an end."[4] Indeed, the police state acquired much of its intelligence from the spontaneous input of a willing citizenry, whose supply of political denunciations enabled the Gestapo to keep its ear to the ground. Moreover, motivations had little to do with Nazi ideology per se: "Angry neighbors, bitter in-laws, and disgruntled work colleagues frequently used the state's secret police apparatus to settle their personal and often petty scores."[5]

Two new books examine this societal interface between the police state's exercise of its powers and the mundane ways in which most Germans continued to live out their lives. Building on his earlier pioneering study of the Gestapo in Würzburg, which persuasively outlined the more scaled-down version of the extent and intrusiveness of the Nazi police state, Robert Gellately now paints these arguments onto the larger national canvas. In Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, he shifts the emphasis more markedly than ever before toward a consensual view of the Third Reich's domestic stability, expanding his case for the Gestapo's limitations into a more ramified argument about the regime's popularity. Organized into chapters on the various facets of Nazi repression—from the immediate assaults on Communists in 1933 through the new systems of "police justice" and concentration camps to the hardening wrought by the war, with its vicious targeting of "social outsiders," Jews, foreign workers, and "enemies in the ranks"—this book mounts a cumulative case for seeing the regime as securely founded in majoritarian German support.

We should be as clear as possible about what this means. Gellately continually pushes his evidence into a generalized interpretive framework of conformity and acquiescence, while often implying something much more, namely positive endorsement for the regime's core values on the part of "most Germans." This requires a marginalizing of the evidence of dissent and nonconformity, as well as a flattening of the manifold differences within German society which social historians have focused on since the 1970s. It also requires playing down the extraordinary volatility and divisiveness dominating German society on the eve of 1933 itself. It involves relegating the anti-Nazi opposition of that time to marginal significance relative to German society's centerground, which according to Gellately the Nazis decisively controlled. The absence of formal democratic mechanisms notwithstanding, he avers, Hitler spoke after 1933 for a majority of Germans. The Nazis' ruthless efforts at concentrating legitimacy in the Volksgemeinschaft, ordered around Hitler's charismatic authority, actually worked. Gellately acknowledges the "more openly terroristic" dictatorship of the final year of the war (3), but fundamentally confirms the Third Reich's popular credentials: from 1933 to 1944, the German people had the political regime they really desired.

He cites two main kinds of evidence, both based on a type of inference. The first is the fact of denunciations: because the Gestapo benefited from citizens' readiness to inform on their fellows, ipso facto the system enjoyed consent. Secondly, he uses a survey of the Nazi press to show that knowledge of the coercive apparatus was easy to acquire: so far from seeking to conceal this, the regime proudly displayed its effects. This was true of the camps, imprisonment of political opponents, attacks on the Jews, punitive application of the race laws, criminalizing of "social outsiders," wartime executions of criminals and "saboteurs," summary acts of police justice, the solution to the "Jewish problem," and so forth. Again, the absence of inhibitions or embarassment around these policies, and the visibility of the regime's carceral and judicial violence—its transparency, we might say—implied a high degree of popular support. In Gellately's view, "the Germans generally turned out to be proud and pleased that Hitler and his henchmen were putting away certain kinds of people who did not fit in, or who were regarded as 'outsiders,' 'asocials,' 'useless eaters,' or 'criminals'." So far from wanting "to cower the German people as a whole into submission," the Nazis sought "to win them over by building on popular images, cherished ideals, and long-held phobias in the country." (vii)

Gellately's argument is matched in many ways by a cognate work, Eric A. Johnson's Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, the Jews, and Ordinary Germans, which uses a rare set of extant Gestapo records to explore the practice of Nazi policing in one particular set of localities, the major city of Cologne and neighboring towns of Krefeld and Bergheim. Known previously as a social historian of crime, Johnson joins a careful quantitative analysis of some 1,100 surviving Special Court and Gestapo case files to the telling deployment of individual stories and detailed portraits of the local Gestapo perpetrators to produce a richly concrete account.[6] He agrees with Gellately that the regime's drive against the Jews was widely known, accepted, and understood: from the systematic stigmatizing of Jews after 1933 and their removal from the economy on through the physical violence of November 1938 to the deportations and killings of the war years, the public din of anti-Semitism was unavoidable. At the very least, non-Jewish Germans learned to live with it; large numbers were happy to profit from it; and when the deportations began in fall 1941, most realized what was happening, even if the details of the killings remained hazy. Johnson also scales the Gestapo's everyday presence down to size—as he points out, "less than one percent of the ordinary Krefeld population had any brush with the Gestapo at all" during 1933-39. (286) He affirms the now conventional view that Nazi rule rested on broad foundations of popular acquiescence.

But he also provides a clear perspective on the overall trajectory of Nazi repression after 1933. Like Burleigh, he stresses the initial violence of the destruction of the rule of law, for in that first year there was nothing modest or limited about the terror. It was wielded not by designated police organs alone, but via the collective violence of the SA and party thugs, with a ferocity felt by Communists and Social Democrats above all. Once the political Left had been broken, the more modulated institutional surveillance by the Gestapo then became reattached to troublesome clergy and religious sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses, while the remaining resistance by leftists continued to be attacked. Homosexuals were also targeted, if more unevenly than might have been supposed. Meanwhile, of course, discrimination was continuously tightened around the Jews, whose predicament dramatically deteriorated with Reichskristallnacht and the outbreak of war. Johnson follows Gellately in emphasizing denunciations, but assigns their importance mainly to cases where the victim's category was already in the Gestapo's sights, whereas accusations divorced from such default vulnerability had less dire results.

This is a crucial distinction. In Gellately's interpretation, dependence on civilian denunciations made the Gestapo into mainly a "reactive" organization, which trusted German society's willingness to police itself. And here Johnson disagrees. The Gestapo was "reactive" mainly "in cases of little consequence," and often discarded those denunciations when they lacked connection to an already stigmatized identity. In pursuit of its primary agendas, in contrast, the Gestapo stayed ruthlessly and proactively on message. (373) It used its resources selectively, "which made the terror less than blanket perhaps, but all the more efficient." (151) In effect, this produced a baleful modus vivendi between the Nazis and the people: while the regime silenced its opponents, extinguished "life unworthy of life," and dispossessed and murdered the Jews, the conformist majority kept their silence; and when the latter stepped out of line with petty infractions, the regime looked the other way. This makes the purposes of terror for Nazi rule more precise, but hardly less crucial overall. Indeed, it restores violence to its rightful centrality in the Nazi political system, which Gellately's book badly occludes.[7]

Johnson is less successful in reasserting the Gestapo's specific culpability as perpetrators, which he thinks the new stress on popular consent has started to obscure. (19) He wishes to see Gestapo officers as worse than "normal" men, finding Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" and other constructions of the "ordinariness" of the functionaries incommensurate with the ethical monstrousness of their misdeeds. (79) Yet he never manages to capture this criminal singularity beyond the clear and unsparing description of what Gestapo officers did. To find an illuminating analytical context, in fact, we need to invoke exactly the syndrome of amoral professional ambition and expertise—rationalizing, efficiency-driven, goal-directed, technocratic and scientistic, project-oriented, enthused by modernity—that Johnson finds so unhelpful. In one characteristic commentary on this syndrome, in a statement that Johnson specifically disavows ("There is something wrong in this"), another pioneering historian of the Gestapo, Gerhard Paul, links its operation to a new authoritarian ethos within a syndrome of ruthlessly objectifying bureaucratic power: "corrupted by a cold objectivity and emotional distance and fixated in an undoctrinaire fashion on the goals of the state," [the typical Gestapo man] "led security police operations without giving them much thought."8 Of course, from Broszat through Peukert to the current arguments of Browning, Aly, and other specialists on the Holocaust, it is precisely this "normalizing" analytic that has allowed us to appreciate the continuities between Nazism and the surrounding society. To push past it, a different discussion was needed than the one Johnson provides.

Johnson's sense of disablement before the evil of Nazism, I'd argue, comes partly from the individualizing logic of his approach. His use of "flesh-and-blood narratives" (8) is one of Nazi Terror's powerful strengths, and at one vital level the Nazi system was certainly constituted through "the voluntary choices and local actions of individual Germans." (27) Johnson's skillful and moving use of case records and testimonies carries his arguments along throughout the book. But this aggregation of local transactions also needs a stronger contextualizing thrust. Johnson provides some helpful commentaries on treatments of the Nazi state and its social underpinnings in current historiography, but the main momentum is always back to the local settings and the individual lives—he tells us far more about "the role of individuals, such as Gestapo officers and ordinary citizens," than about "the role of the society in making terror work." (8) In this, moreover, he has much in common with Gellately's Backing Hitler. Both of them approach "society" primarily through the use of case records, and this has some limiting effects.

For one thing, neither historian grasps the full import of the divisiveness in German society during 1930-33. Johnson certainly describes the viciousness of the terror applied against the Left after January 1933. But one would hardly know from Gellately's book that Communists and Social Democrats recorded a million-and-a-half votes more than the Nazis in the last free elections of November 1932 (37.3 against 33.1 percent of the total), and even retained almost a third of the voting electorate in the face of the intolerable intimidation of March 1933. Gellately shrinks the meaning of these affiliations by his language, counterposing them against an undifferentiated category of "the Germans," as if thirteen million voters were somehow an insignificant minority existing beyond German society's core. In consigning such huge categories of people to the margins, where according to Gellately they were considered to be outside the legitimate nation, he comes uncomfortably close to replicating the Nazis' own rhetorical violence. During early 1933, massive attacks were launched against the Left's strongholds in urban neighborhoods and working-class communities in an exclusionary rampage that was soon extended to wider sectors of society, from the Jews to the various categories of "asocials," like the 100,000 indigents arrested in the police sweep of September 1933 alone.[9] Later in the decade, there can be little question that the regime had stabilized its dictatorship around the established normality of exclusions like these. But that system had to be first put into place through a founding act of mass violence during the dictatorship's early phase, laying down a powerful climate of fear for the future.

If the Gestapo came to presume society's self-policing capacities later in the 1930s, therefore, this presupposed the massive wielding of coercive terror against broadly based dissent earlier on. Moreover, if both Johnson and Gellately neglect the traumatizing after-effects of this founding period, they also isolate the Gestapo too much from the wider machinery of the Nazi state. Johnson confines himself strictly to the Gestapo in an institutional sense and neglects the wider system of social discipline emanating from national and local government, including the welfare and youth agencies, health offices, hereditary health courts, Winter Aid, Labor Front, the mass organizations of women and youth, and so on.[10] As the 1930s drew on, this reknitting of the social fabric, which profoundly reordered the boundaries of state and civil society, became ever more ramified. The populace was already caught in a fine net of surveillance and registration long before the Gestapo needed to exercise its more brutal attentions, and arguably it was this that allowed terror's deployment to be so selective in the first place. Oddly enough, Gellately sees this wider field of intervention, arguing that the state "encroached into ever more areas of social and intimate life," so that "the entire thrust of the new system was to expel or exclude ever wider categories of people who would not, or could not, fit in." (258) Yet when he addresses the primary issue of coercion or consent, this fades from the account.

A lack of precision in handling this central binary of "consent and coercion" ultimately vitiates Gellately's discussion. The foundational consequences of the immediate violence of 1933 for the regime's permanent comportment is one aspect of this subject, so that whatever consensual acceptance it enjoyed in the future was always already structured around this explicitly terroristic starting point. Moreover, to the bloody example of 27 February 1933 (the savage repression of the Left surrounding the Reichstag fire) were added the further demonstration effects of 30 June 1934 (the Night of the Long Knives against the SA) and 9 November 1938 ("Crystal Night"). Given the spectacular quality of these events and their pervasive effects, Gellately and Johnson take a surprisingly literal-minded view of Nazi repression. The inhabitants of the Third Reich hardly needed to be hauled off for Gestapo interrogation to feel the presence and efficacy of Nazi terror. If I know that on the next block several homes have been ransacked and the inhabitants beaten up and imprisoned, or that a sizeable contingent of my militant workmates have disappeared, and if I see political differences being settled by concentration camps and summary executions, or notice the plentiful evidence of bloodied sidewalks and broken glass, I might be forgiven for internalizing some fears. I might also be forgiven for choosing not to express these anxieties or talk about them with family and friends. I might certainly be forgiven for not voicing them in public.

To reduce this dialectic to a straightforward thesis about "consensus" is too much like the sound of one hand clapping. While Gellately never hides the coerciveness of Nazi rule—indeed its horrendousness is vital to his case—he constantly downplays its reach, making the victims into easily scapegoated marginals whose disappearance left the heartland of German society intact. But the commonplace climate of terror mentioned above meant that the violence couldn't be contained as easily as that. What Gellately calls "a murderous game of pillorying, excluding, and eventually eliminating unwanted social 'elements' and 'race enemies'" (262) was always more extensive in its lessons. In the first six months of 1943, for example, there were 982 convictions for treason, with 948 executions; 8,850 Germans were charged with leftwing activity, 8,727 with "resistance", and 11,075 with "opposition"; and 10,773 were arrested for fraternizing with prisoners of war and foreign slave laborers.[11] By any standard, these are huge figures, which have to trouble the meanings of "consent." In the continuing reappraisal of the Gestapo's history, Gellately's has been a valuable voice. But when he concludes that "the Nazis did not need to use widespread terror against the population to establish the regime," something has gone seriously awry in his account. (257)

Gellately sustains certain of his arguments very well. He shows that the persecution of Jews, foreign workers, and "social outsiders" required the active participation of the general population, including the desire for private gain, whether by denouncing personal enemies or plundering Jewish property.[12] He also confirms that knowledge of the concentration camps was inescapable: the system's wartime proliferation carried satellite camps, labor camps, and assignments of camp labor into most parts of German society, from industrial centers and factory sites to small villages and countless public places.[13] Likewise, the open reportage of the camp system and most aspects of the regime's racialist and anti-Semitic actions in newspapers and magazines made it impossible for Germans to avoid such awareness. Yet this is precisely the point, I would argue, where "consent and coercion" became dialectically entwined. The parading of the achievements of the camp system might certainly imply widespread popular endorsement of the Third Reich's "law and order" society, as Gellately claims. But it also reminded potential dissenters of the fates in store. Unrestrained public display of the regime's carceral zeal engendered fear, anxiety, and intimidation as often as the support and reassurance Gellately prefers to diagnose. Not to see these "coercive" dimensions is surprisingly one-sided.[14]

In the end, tackling each of these issues effectively—the motivations of individuals, the extreme dividedness of German society in 1933, the enduring consequences of the regime's founding act of violence, the place of coercion in consent, will require a more complex approach to ideology. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the social histories emerging from the 1970s tended to view "social context" and "ideology" dichotomously, with the first receiving clear analytical priority over the second. And if the next scholarly wave of the 1980s took the social efficacy of ideas more seriously, it did so more by looking at particular fields of knowledge or the prevailing philosophies in particular professions than by theorizing the penetration of Nazi values into everyday life. In the meantime, we have also learned much about the extended ideological context of the Third Reich's policy-making from historians like Götz Aly, Ulrich Herbert, Saul Friedländer, Henry Friedlander, and Michael Burleigh, whose studies of particular aspects of the "racial state" bring us much closer to the full scope of the Nazis' intended goals. Using a single career, for example, Ulrich Herbert's biography of the senior SS officer Werner Best provides a devastating insight into the ideological synergy forged by intellectual ambition, racialist philosophy, and technocratic reason in one particular Nazi life.[15]

We now need to go further by analyzing ideology inside the apparently "unpolitical" realm of everyday transactions that Gellately and Johnson find so vital to the vaunted breadth of the pro-Nazi societal consensus. If that consensus was less securely founded upon "consent" than they think, requiring both constant attention to social divisions and palpable sanctions of violence, then the regime's ability to insinuate itself into ordinary life was still extremely impressive. And it was there that the broader repertoire of Nazi public intervention became so crucial—namely, all those areas of state-directed action that Johnson and Gellately bracket from the narrowly drawn compass of Gestapo-organized terror, but which were nonetheless intimately linked to coercion, from the Hitler Youth, the League of German Maidens, and the National Socialist Womanhood to the People's Welfare and the increasingly elaborate regulations defining marriage, sexuality, child-raising, and reproduction. To them may also be added the Nazi public sphere of elaborately staged mass events, which instituted the "aestheticization of violence" through the regimented rallies, festivals, commemorations, associated monumental architecture, and spectacular ritualizing of public transactions.

Together, these organized interventions filled up the space of public life while corroding previously tolerated private domains. The Volksgemeinschaft was an immensely coercive abstraction in that sense, concentrating all allowable affiliations into a single and aggressively wielded exclusive loyalty. The mass voluntarism of Nazi public culture was in reality its very opposite—a repressive and authoritarian coerciveness that belies the more limited definition of "Nazi terror" Johnson and Gellately seek to apply. As Burleigh points out using the example of Winter Aid, participating or not participating in the state's obligatory charitable drive could bring either the warmth of patriotic sentimentality or the opprobrium of exclusionary disgust: "Overt threats followed, for not fulfilling one's sacrificial duty implied a hostile attitude toward the collective educational goals of the National Socialist state. A choice had become a potential political crime."[16] And just beyond this moral coercion, of course, lay the physical coercion of the camps.

Public Remembering and Exemplary Lives

If one thing remains clear, it is the enduring fascination of the Third Reich for wider publics. For large audiences in Europe, Israel, and North America, often poorly informed but passionately engaged, the Nazi past continues to exert its power. Since the late 1970s its perceived threat against civilized political values has been repeatedly recharged by fresh controversies and scandals. In one of the most recent of these the U.S. Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books successfully defended themselves in London against a libel suit brought by the British historical writer David Irving, who charged that Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust falsely accused him of distorting the historical record for the purposes of Holocaust denial.[17] The resulting trial was a major spectacle, drawing intense publicity and international attention. By the time Judge Charles Gray delivered his 350-page final judgment on 11 April 2000, Lipstadt was fully vindicated at the expense of Irving's scholarly reputation: "Irving treated the historical evidence in a manner which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian," the judge said; he "misrepresented and distorted the evidence which was available to him"; it was "incontrovertible" that "Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier."[18]

Richard J. Evans, a leading German historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, acted as chief historical adviser in Penguin's and Lipstadt's defense. He worked with two research assistants for eighteen months gathering and sifting through the relevant documentation, checking it painstakingly against the claims made by Irving in his writings and speeches, and examining the accuracy and probity of his use of evidence. After submitting his 740-page report in July 1999, he then testified as the main expert witness for the defense at the trial. His book, Lying About Hitler, is a devastating exposure of the tendentiousness of Irving's works, from his very first book on the Allied bombing of Dresden through the studies of "Hitler's War" to the most recent biographies of Nazi leaders. At the trial itself, Evans provided exactly the meticulous and unbending attentiveness to archival veracity the proceedings required, recalling Irving's questioning repeatedly to the documentary record, and clarifying what the latter could authorize and what it could not.[19] In the book, he demonstrates Irving's misuse of sources in compelling detail across four prime areas—Hitler's demonstrable attitudes toward the Jews, Hitler's relationship to the "Final Solution," Irving's own record in relation to Holocaust denial, and the bombing of Dresden.[20]

With this book, Evans wishes to uphold the importance of the historian's craft, not as a system of guild-like privileges and formal credentialing which would allow non-professionals without a Ph.D, like Irving, to be dismissed, but as a set of rules and procedures for judging evidence and its uses. As he says in his very first sentence: "This book is about how we can tell the difference between truth and lies in history." (xi) That issue of "the falsification and manipulation of the historical record" was far more vital, Evans claims, than the trial's politics, the matter of "Irving's racism and anti-Semitism" (xii), or the "moral issues or lessons of any sort for future generations, if indeed there were any." (259) "The real test of a serious historian," in fact, "was the extent to which he or she was willing or able to subordinate political belief to the demands of historical research." (35) Armed with this precept, Evans moves scrupulously back and forth between Irving's statements and the evidence they corrupt: "What a professional historian does is to take the whole of the source in question into account, and check it against other relevant sources, to reach a reasoned conclusion that will withstand critical scrutiny by other historians who look at the same material." (250)

Evans is at his best when exposing the speciousness of Irving's claims to scholarship or indicting the sloppiness of most journalistic commentary on the trial. From historians, in contrast, we expect a truthfulness whose tedious and demanding prerequisites are all too easily taken for granted or dismissed as pedantry.[21] As The Guardian commented on the verdict, truth "has to be worked at. . . . Even a casual reader of the case reports could quickly see how painstaking genuine historical scholarship is: it builds detail upon detail, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction."[22] For Evans, this was above all what the trial vindicated—"truth established in this way over many years." The judgment against Irving was "a victory for history, for historical truth and historical scholarship." It "demonstrated triumphantly the ability of historical scholarship to reach reasoned conclusions about the Nazi extermination of the Jews on the basis of a careful examination of the written evidence." (266, 265)

This is compelling stuff. But when Evans works it into a normative description for history at large, doubts creep in. He finds too easy an equivalence between "the rules of evidence in court" and "the rules of evidence observed by historians." (190) For the two settings really are not the same—not because those rules are not essential for historians, but because the respective institutional contexts, logics of enquiry, and regimes of knowledge do play a part as well. We can surely uphold the one—the necessity of "constructing an accurate picture of what happened by the discovery of verifiable facts" (187)—without denying the force of the other, namely, everything else acting consciously and unconsciously on historians when doing their work. The historian's agency reflects far more than the virtuous and self-denying labors foregrounded by Evans. Conversely, he draws the trial's meanings too exclusively around history's evidentiary rules. If "the decisive issues" before the court were indeed "intellectual and legal rather than moral or political ones" (198), that hardly means they lacked ethical and political content. The trial was heavily laden at every level with such meanings, and to deny their seepage seems obtuse. Moreover, "If Irving had won," it would not "have been a resounding defeat for professional history rather than for collective memory." (265) At a level of principle, both would have suffered. But historians of Nazism would have gone on living their lives and doing their work just as before, though doubtless feeling more resentful against the indifference of the wider public.

The boundaries isolating "professional history" from other things—politics, journalism, other academic fields (like Holocaust studies, which Evans treats with particular disdain)—are not quite as sharply drawn as Evans might wish. We do not have to compromise our commitment to the archive, or to a proximate and pragmatic goal of objectivity, in order to see all the complex ways in which historical agendas become composed. Nor do we have to embrace everything done in the name of Holocaust studies to welcome a great deal of the knowledge they inspire, often beyond the disciplinary boundaries of history in Evans's rather narrowly drawn sense.[23] Indeed, the very ability of historians to recognize the Holocaust's centrality to German history, and even to the study of Nazism, has owed as much to the pressure of extraneous political, cultural, and intellectual forces during the last two decades, including journalism, testimony, memorializing, lawsuits, fictions, television, and film, as it has to the spontaneous trajectory of German historians if left to themselves. In that sense, history's perimeter fences cannot be as easily secured as defenders like Evans would like—nor should they be.[24] While we certainly need first-rate academic historians like Evans to provide the richly grounded knowledge by which historical claims can alone be judged, theirs is not the only way historical questions tend to be posed.

Mark Roseman's A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany brilliantly captures these "un-disciplined" potentials, because neither in its archive nor in its conceptual framework—nor for that matter in its writing strategies—does it much resemble the conventional scholarly monograph. It tells the story of Marianne Ellenbogen (born 1923), daughter of a prosperous Essen grain merchant Siegfried Strauss, and his wife, Regina, whose family history in many ways typified the Jewish German experience of the twentieth century. Observantly Jewish and ardently German, both sides of the Strauss family revealed the trajectory of "acculturation" which by 1900 was separating Germany's Jews from their co-religionists in the east.[25] The twin brothers Siegfried and Alfred built their grain and cattle-feed business after four years of military service in World War I, which had also claimed the life of a younger brother, Richard. Under the Third Reich, of course, neither these patriotic credentials nor their social standing protected the family from the Nazi onslaught. While various members of the extended family managed to emigrate and some younger cousins escaped, Marianne's parents and younger brother, her grandmother, her paternal uncles and aunts, and her mother's sister and husband were all deported to the east and killed. Marianne herself survived the Third Reich, married a British officer in Düsseldorf after the war, and lived in Liverpool until her death in 1996.

In these bare outlines the story sounds familiar, appending a finely drawn miniature to the known record—a microcosm of the general processes analyzed by Kershaw and Burleigh, and a vivid biographical counterpoint to the Gestapo studies of Johnson and Gellately. Roseman observes "the extraordinary insouciance" with which Marianne's parents dealt with the Third Reich, for instance, as they sought to minimize the effects of the tightening legal restrictions and hostile public climate, while continuing to deflect the frightening implications. Likewise, consistent with Kershaw's and Burleigh's general accounts and Johnson's analysis of the Düsseldorf Gestapo jurisdiction (which also included Essen), he shows the traumatic worsening brought by Reichskristallnacht, with its shocking eruption of brutality. The wanton destruction of property, violence against persons, and deportations to Dachau made the stakes irrevocably clear. After his three weeks in Dachau, Siegfried Strauss was "a changed man

. . . shrunken and embittered," silently seeing the consequences. (79) After November 1938, the net tightened. Germany's Jews became more isolated, economic coercion hardened, and with the outbreak of war the door for emigration largely closed. As the Strauss family slowly succumbed to this fate, their experience seems horribly predictable, "more or less the same as those of many other patriotic, well-to-do, provincial, middle-class German Jews." (128)

Yet in other respects, their story strikingly differed. For one thing, they were reprieved from deportation on 26 October 1941, dismissed from the Essen assembly point at the last minute by the Gestapo and sent home.[26] "Snatched from the grave digger's spade," as Siegfried put it (128), they were protected by a hidden skein of relations running from the family banker, Friedrich W. Hammacher, to the Abwehr, the Army's intelligence arm, which under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Major General Hans Oster was stealthily obstructing Nazi policies from 1938 until mid-1943. One of the Abwehr's achievements, we now know, was to have protected a small number of Jews, usually veterans with a good war record, by allowing them to leave as refugees on the pretext of using them for intelligence purposes in the Americas. On this basis, an intricate dance with the Gestapo ensued behind the scenes as the Abwehr sought to give the Strauss brothers time to organize their emigration. After excruciatingly tortuous negotiations with Gestapo, associated SS offices, tax authorities, the Currency Office, and other agencies, the family was finally approved to leave for Cuba in August 1943 only to have the Gestapo abruptly pull the rug from under them. On 31 August, the family were given two hours to prepare for deportation. The future collapsed like a house of cards.[27]

Roseman's uncovering of these details is fascinating and sobering. Its revelations of the limited interconnections that survived Jewish ostracism between the Nuremberg Laws and deportation, even after the violence of "Crystal Night" and the outbreak of war, suggest both the persistence of nonconforming behaviors and their painfully prosaic scope. Any continuing intercourse between Jews and their fellow citizens oozed the ambivalent and compromised meanings that social historians from Broszat to Peukert have stressed. Any willingness to help was laden with self-interest. Self-interest came alone from the hopelessly incommensurate exchanges imposed by anti-Jewish regulations under the shadow of "Aryanization," whatever the individual motivations. Property and possessions committed by departing Jews to the safe-keeping of "Aryan" friends or neighbors were often presumed to be permanent gifts. Under such conditions, friendship circulated in a seller's market. Where the chance to be supportive came from a prior business relationship, altruism and human sympathies easily "merged with legal opportunities for enrichment, which in turn merged with outright corruption on the part of the Gestapo and city officials." (137) As Roseman shows, family histories like the Strausses' are excellent for opening such questions to public scrutiny.[28]

Roseman offers an unsparing but patient accounting of these ambiguities, which left the openings for ethical behavior under the Third Reich so fogged. Yet he also provides evidence of extraordinary altruism, which takes us to the heart of Marianne's own story. In late 1941 she fell in love with Ernst Krombach (born 1921), son of David Krombach, a leading Essen lawyer, whose family "belonged to the same assimilated, patriotic wing of the Essen Jewish community as the Strausses." (150) Wrenchingly, a few weeks after the couple became secretly engaged, the Krombachs were deported on 22 April 1942 to the transit camp of Izbica Lubielska, midway from Lublin to the newly opened killing center in Belzec.[29] As Roseman explains, the Essen deportees were stalled in Izbica for several months, temporarily saved by "a series of logistical hiccups in the killing machinery." (211)[30] Remarkably enough, the two lovers stayed in contact, managing an intense if truncated correspondence through legal channels as late as August 1942, beginning with cards sent by Ernst from the train journey itself during 22-24 April and including over a hundred small care packages scrounged together by Marianne.

Most amazingly of all, Marianne found a direct link to the camp. Twenty-eight-year-old Christian Arras owned an Essen truck dealership and repair shop doing military contract work. He was acquainted with the Strauss family, knew Ernst and other Jews deported to Izbica, and decided to go there at huge risk to himself, offering to take letters and some goods. On the pretext of accompanying repaired Army trucks, he reached Izbica on 19 August and bribed his way into the camp. He returned with a bundle of letters and an eighteen-page report from Ernst for Marianne on camp conditions, plus a four-page "task list" of possible contacts and instructions. This document's unique qualities—likely the sole contemporary account of Izbica and a rare report by a German Jew on the experience of deportation written at the time—were matched by the startling incongruity of Arras's role: an unpolitical non-Jewish German, apparently patriotically loyal to the regime, certainly with no record of dissidence, volunteering to serve as a courier; in Marianne's memory he was also "SS," which made his actions still less legible and confusingly suspect. But by patient corroboration, including interviews with Arras's widow and two other Jewish witnesses to his deed, plus an entry from a diary held by the Essen city archive, and the absence of a party or SS personnel file on Arras, Roseman reaches a firm conclusion: Arras was acting courageously out of human decency, "an unlikely hero"; ". . . a good guy; he put his own life in jeopardy." (210)[31]

Marianne's story becomes still more extraordinary. After losing contact with Ernst in late summer 1942 and learning of Izbica's virtual liquidation by December, her final efforts at tracing him were rebuffed by the Berlin Red Cross in April 1943, forcing her slowly to accept his loss.[32] After fresh deportations in June-July 1942, her own family's economic straits and isolation steadily deteriorated. Essen's remnant of Jews "were picked off one by one for deportation," until by July 1943 the Strausses became "probably the last full-Jewish family in the city, perhaps in the region." (243) On 31 August, after the Abwehr's hidden protection fell away, two Gestapo officials arrived with the deportation order. Sometime during the next two hours, Marianne's father slipped her a wad of banknotes, and while the Gestapo were distracted, she escaped. After being held for a week at Essen police headquarters, her parents, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and great-aunt were deported to Theresienstadt. Marianne went successfully underground.

This escape was feasible because of Marianne's links to an obscure Essen socialist network called the Bund. Gemeinschaft für sozialistisches Leben (The League. Community for Socialist Life), which had formed in 1924 around Artur Jacobs, a charismatic teacher in the Volkshochschule (people's further education) movement, and his wife Dore, who ran dance and movement classes from the Blockhaus, which the Bund had opened as its Essen home in 1927. Like much wider left-wing activity during the Weimar Republic, disconnected from parties and informally based, the Bund joined a Marxist critique of capitalism to a Kantian conception of the ethical life: "Jacobs combined a belief in the historical mission of the proletariat with an intense concern for the moral choices that face individuals in their daily lives . . . The Bund's aim was to create a socialist way of life that would incorporate the whole person—body, mind, and soul." (232-3) It survived 1933 by its charismatic organization around Jacobs, strict secrecy, and small size. Marianne had met Jacobs through the Krombachs and after their deportation took solace in the Jacobses' company and the Bund's small clandestine subculture.[33] During July-August, as the Strausses were preparing their Abwehr-expedited emigration, Jacobs let Marianne know that she could turn to the Bund in a crisis. After she eluded the Gestapo on 31 August, she took refuge in the Blockhaus.[34]

For the rest of the war Marianne was sheltered by Bund members dispersed across northern Germany—in Göttingen and Braunschweig, as well as in Remscheid, Mülheim, and Burscheid closer to Essen—sometimes hidden, but more often living openly under a variety of covers.[35] Frequent changes of refuge also meant some forty to fifty hazardous train and tram journeys across the country, all taken without valid papers at constant risk of exposure. Roseman depicts this underground life superbly, elucidating both the mundane practicalities of everyday survival and the quality of solidarity delivered by the Bund's collective milieu. His invaluable guide was Marianne's diary at the time, which opens singular access to her intellectual and emotional inner world, including her impassioned belief in the importance of philosophically mastering her fate, the quality of the human relationships she found in the Bund, and the sovereign self-control she exercised in the interests of self-preservation. As well as recording practical experiences, she reflected on the Bund's "basic principles," reported her dreams, meditated on nature and landcape, probed the quality and conditions of friendship, and mourned the loss of Ernst and her family. Far more than a descriptive record, the diary is a moving document of interiority and courageous self-exploration, opening a fascinating window onto an obscured and dissident cultural history of the 1930s, fully comparable to the often celebrated personal correspondence of aristocratic outliers like Adam von Trott and Helmut James von Moltke.[36]

With his brilliant reconstruction of one person's odyssey through the world the Nazis made, Roseman suggests some of the ways in which studies of the Third Reich might be moved forward. His success in capturing the unique drama of Marianne's story alone would qualify his book for distinction, because it defamiliarizes our imagery of the period in so many unexpected ways—from its disclosure of the family's protection by the Abwehr through Marianne's clandestine communications with the camp at Izbica to the revelations of the Bund's activities and the details of Marianne's life underground. If exceptional in these ways, Marianne's story casts vivid light into some of the Third Reich's shadowed corners. By its very singularities—she survived, she enjoyed relations with non-Jewish Germans of perduring genuineness, she kept an intimate personal record—it bridges to contexts that otherwise remain closed. Throughout, Roseman succinctly connects Marianne's particulars to the general historical picture—whether in relation to schooling and further education, or to the impact of Reichskristallnacht and Jewish economic deterioration, or to the central stations of Jewish persecution. The same may be said of the liberation, where Marianne's political activism "amid the ruins" of postwar Düsseldorf affords fascinating materials for further reflection.

There has been wider interest recently in approaching the history of Nazism using exemplary lives—the impact of Schindler's List reflected this, as did the attention given to Victor Klemperer's diaries, and the continuing large market for autobiographical writing about the Third Reich; Browning and Goldhagen each posed their questions of responsibility by the graphic examining of individual acts, as did Jan Gross in his similar study of the atrocities at Jedwabne.[37] Partly, this is a matter of pure drama: personalized analyses render the Third Reich's horrendousness all the more immediate. Such interest also evokes the contemporary discourse of restitution, "truth and reconciliation," and accountability for injustices in the past. Much also concerns the reworking of memory as World War II recedes further away—the fragility of the sense of the past, as well as the terrible power it continues to exert. Most of all, the exemplary biography takes us much further inside the terrible arduousness of making a life under Nazi rule, of dealing with the unmanageable tensions its intrusive everydayness imposed. The ethical dimension is most painfully and precisely engaged at this individual level, especially when approached retroactively by the complicated dialectics of memory and guilt.

Here Roseman has two countervailing themes. One concerns the surprising "normality" of the life Marianne fashioned under Nazism—even under the constrictingly oppressive straits of Jewish isolation and of living on the run. This was notably true of her schooldays, at least after Jews were formally expelled from state schools on 15 November 1938: after a year at the Yavne school in Cologne, the region's only Jewish secondary school, she recalled her time at the Jewish College for Kindergarten Teachers in Berlin in 1939-41 as a time of liberation ("I really blossomed"). (95)[38] Indeed, for Marianne the downward trajectory of Jewish degradation became superimposed onto the more personal drama of trying to emancipate herself from the family. Both the wider horizons she explored in Berlin and the rapture of her romance with Ernst (which began after she returned in October 1941) enabled the marking of independence in that sense. But if the love relationship expanded voraciously into the psychic space of the final eighteen months before the Strauss family's deportation, imparting energy and direction to Marianne's behavior, Roseman makes her larger joie de vivre equally plain. The ability to sink her identity into the collective ethos of the Bund, to the seeming effacement of any specifically Jewish predicament, bespoke the same earnest and impassioned commitment to life as such.

In his insightful reading of Marianne's relationship with the Bund, Roseman returns several times to the question of "passing." While underground, Marianne was managing three distinct identities: for a few of the inner circle she was "a Jew on the run," for other Bund members she was "a politically endangered Aryan," and for the world at large she was "quite simply an ordinary German" (330-31). Her strength was precisely to have refused the fatefulness of the regime's racialized objectification. Her diaries are filled with abstract reflections on history and the philosophical problems of the present, and the Bund's holistic credo encouraged this identification with a future Germany capable of realizing the ideal of a generalized humanity. Such an ethos allowed the group to "[break] through the sense of isolation that characterized daily life in Nazi Germany."[39] Marianne herself did not embrace the identity of persecuted Jewry. At one level, of course, the grand narrative of "the Holocaust" had still to be supplied.40 But more fundamentally, "the diary suggests that Marianne was 'passing' not only on the outside but also within her most intimate self. She refused to internalize the category 'Jew' which the Nazis imposed on her. In the company of the Bund and inspired by their philosophy, she sloughed off her former identity and slipped into being one of them." (338) Within the Bund's enclosed and self-protective milieu, simply to deny the inevitability of the Nazis' racialized categories was the profoundest form of resistance available.

If existentially this was a defeat of necessity by freedom, however, it came at a huge price: for if Marianne survived, her fiancé and family did not. Roseman's book pivots around Marianne's decision to save herself in a chapter called simply "The Escape," which is positioned roughly halfway through the account:

With devastating irony, this act of courageous self-preservation came amidst acute disaffection from her parents. She felt after one conflict a few months before "that there is nothing left to tie me to my parents" and longed for a physical separation. (242)[42] In this context, the escape acquired an unbearable allegorical charge. Becoming an adult under the best of circumstances requires extricating oneself from the wholeness of family and its promises, accepting its loss, and putting a part of one's past away. But in Marianne's case, this "normal challenge of emotionally disengaging from rather overbearing parents" was massively overdetermined by the deadly logic of Jewish persecution under the Third Reich. (242) The public and the private converged in an unthinkably cruel manner.

The lifelong consequences of this personal tragedy for Marianne move Roseman to the general reflections on memory and history that form the larger framing of this work. When Marianne emerged from hiding at the end of the war, most of her past failed to resurface. Once the fates of her loved ones had been ascertained, she kept few contacts with any surviving Essen family and friends. Apart from doggedly pursuing restitution claims in West Germany during the 1950s, with all the usual dispiriting and demeaning encounters, she showed little interest in the Essen past. She seems to have discussed the wartime experiences with neither Basil Ellenbogen, the Jewish doctor and British officer she married in 1946, nor her new Liverpool friends. For her children, Vivian (born 1947) and Elaine (1951-69), "the past made itself felt, above all, as unearthly, heavy silence." (407). Jewishness was likewise a thin and ambivalent source of identification, based neither on her husband's Orthodoxy nor on any relationship to the ethical and ecumenical Judaism she shared with Ernst during 1942. The one main exception was the contact to the Bund, which remained active throughout the postwar time. When in 1996 she finally reentered the past, it was from "a binding duty" to honor the Bund's fellowship. (418) But at the same time, in talking to Mark Roseman she kept her experiences since 1946 "largely off limits." She continued keeping "her pre- and postwar lives" strictly apart. (421)

While insisting on her privacy, paradoxically, Marianne had kept everything. Her Liverpool home disclosed a rich personal archive, containing her wartime diaries, her love letters with Ernst, and his Izbica report, as well as the immediate postwar correspondence and all the elaborate documentation assembled for the needs of restitution. In her sessions with Roseman she released bits and pieces of this hoard, but it surfaced mostly after she died. Together with the other sources Roseman painstakingly massaged into existence, the archive not only grounded and elaborated Marianne's spoken story, but also revealed memory's fallibility—not over the fundamentals but over the significant detail, by which the horrors of an atrocity might be magnified or a conflict among friends effaced, and occasionally an element in a key story changed. Roseman came to conclude that Marianne's memory engineered such adjustments to negotiate the enormities of loss and guilt—guilt at survival, but also at her "sense of growing disconnection from the past." In this view, "the 'gesture' of reworking the past" was meant either "to try and keep it alive," or else "to impose some mastery on the moments that caused such pain." For Marianne, revisiting the past—the "traces of my childhood . . . all these experiences, which are bound up with one's existence"—proved deeply unsettling. The gap between "memory" and "reality" could only frighten or disappoint. In that sense, Roseman suggests, she "saw herself as more the victim than the master of her memory." (411-12)

Finally, Roseman brilliantly vindicates the necessity of oral history. Time and again, he revises or completes the voice of the "official" archive (like the Gestapo records) by mobilizing contemporary informants via interviews or correspondence. He found himself checking the conventional documentation against the evidence of the testimony as frequently as the other way round. Even more, in this case the historian's knowledge materialized not by the stereotypical progression from research proposal via the archives to the printed page, but by the splendid serendipity of chance encounters, unexpected suggestions, and hidden connections—"this subcommunity of hidden knowledge!", Roseman exclaims after one of these surprises. (209)[43] His trails constantly intersected with those of others—journalists, lawers authenticating restitution claims, individuals seeking their severed pasts, museum and exhibition curators, other historians. In constructing his history, moreover, Roseman interweaves the story of his own progress through the vagaries of the multiple categories of documentation, gradually adding ever richer layers of understanding from the moving margin of his knowledge. His ability to move back and forth between the telling of Marianne's story and the self-narrative of the unfolding of his own understanding produces a masterly meditation on the historian's craft.[44]

There are many further themes arising from this superlative book. The strains placed on "family" as a central value of Jewish (and German) social life by the Third Reich would be one, and the ineluctable "Germanness" of the Essen Jews when confronted with the "Easternness" of their co-religionists in Izbica would be another. Moreover, one of the most arresting aspects of the story is precisely the one blocked by Marianne's ground rules, namely the fifty years of her life that fell after 1946, as against the eight years central to this book. So far, the burgeoning literature on "memory and history" still focuses on what rememberings can tell us about the Nazi time per se; in the future, the insights for the postwar years—when the reworking of memories occurred—may be just as rich.

Conclusion

Over the past two decades historical understanding of the Third Reich has made extraordinary strides. The sheer scale and intensity of research alone are impressive. But some distinctive perspectives have also emerged. While these lack the sharp "culturalist" edge so characteristic of historical thinking in the discipline at large since the 1980s, they have nonetheless moved decisively away from the earlier ground of social history.[45] As I argued in the first part of this essay, the resulting scholarship takes two main directions: while substituting race for class as the main organizing concept, historians have grown profoundly skeptical about German society's capacity for resistance. Against Tim Mason's search for the "workers' opposition," Martin Broszat's concept of Resistenz, and similar arguments about the recalcitrance or defensiveness of ordinary life, few historians believe any longer that Nazism's intrusiveness could be kept meaningfully at bay. Instead, the pervasiveness of Nazi impact on German society is broadly acknowledged. The overbearing moral coerciveness of the Volksgemeinschaft, historians now argue, legislated by the regime's machineries of exclusion and braced by Gestapo repression, caught anyone not directly debarred from its embrace in unavoidable logics of complicity. If we have learned anything from all the powerful new scholarship, it concerns this necessary tainting of everyday transactions.

Other ideas follow. One concerns the growing centrality of "biopolitics" for how the relationship of Nazism to German society is now understood—not just in terms of the Nazis' overt goals and deliberate project, moreover, but also as a broader repertoire of policies, fields of knowledge, and types of expertise. Whole areas of public policy, including public health, sexuality and family life, child-raising and education, work and recreation, and all forms of social welfare, became claimed during the early twentieth century for an aggressively expanding bio-medical vision. For many historians, this "biologizing of the social" has become increasingly the key to the dynamism of the Nazi new order.[46] But if for the social historians of the 1970s "society" denoted the crucial limitations on the Nazi system of rule, this new understanding of "the social" suggests the very opposite, namely an all-pervasive culture of racialized domination, which emptied "society" of any autonomous or intact meanings.

Converging with this work and further strengthening it, the new historiography of the Holocaust forms another vital stream. During the 1980s and early 1990s, exhaustive empirical studies of many aspects of Nazi racial policies, extending across not only the persecution of the Jews, but also the wider targeting of excluded and stigmatized groups, as well as the ramified systems of surveillance, incarceration, and killing, finally brought the previously discrete historiographies of Nazism and the Holocaust together. The pioneering research of Götz Aly, Suzanne Heim, and others on Nazi population policies for eastern Europe and the occupied Soviet Union, the pathbreaking studies of Ulrich Herbert on forced labor, and the increasingly compelling accounts of warfare on the Eastern Front all broadened the context for considering the Judeocide while bringing it properly to the center of the German historian's agenda. Likewise, the remarkable flourishing of scholarship on all aspects of the Jewish experience of Nazi domination makes it now much harder for German historians to bracket this as a separate specialism. In a quite new way, studies of the Third Reich and studies of the Holocaust are now bound inextricably together.

This is a signal achievement of the past two decades, to which each of the reviewed works gives testimony. Yet there remains a certain unresolved tension. If historians of Nazism increasingly relate anti-Jewish policies to the broader context of population planning, racialized social engineering, and the biopolitical utopia of the "racial state," historians of the Holocaust steadfastly reiterate their subject's transhistorical singularity, and neither group has yet been very ready to explore the possibilities for genuine cross-society comparison. The recurrence of recent discussion so frequently to crises, logics, or predicaments of "modernity" only reemphasizes the urgency of that need. Precisely in order to bridge these current indeterminacies—between the Holocaust's uniqueness and the genealogies of the racial state, between National Socialism's German particularities and the more generic causalities entailed in "a crisis of classical modernity," or for that matter between the new focus on the war years and the older focus on the 1930s—the receding ground of social analysis will surely need to be reclaimed once again.

NOTES

1. The following books are reviewed in this two-part essay: Hitler. 1936-45: Nemesis. By Ian Kershaw. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Pp. xlvi + 1115. $35.00. The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945. By Pierre Ayçoberry. New York: The New Press, 1999. Pp. 380. $30.00 (hb); $15.95 (pb). The Third Reich: A New History. By Michael Burleigh. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Pp. xxvi + 965. $40.00. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. By Robert Gellately. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 359. $35.00. Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans. By Eric A. Johnson. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. xx + 636. $35.00. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. By Richard J. Evans. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Pp. xiv + 318. $27.00. A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany. By Mark Roseman. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Pp. xvi + 491. $27.50.

2. Collective agency does not have to imply collective action. All action is borne ultimately by individuals, whose agency can certainly acquire collective form or resonance by participating in shared organizations or organized contexts of one sort or another. But individual acts can also draw collective meaning from less formal but equally efficacious common affiliations, including a subculture, identification with a political tradition, a religious value system, an ideological community, and so on.

3. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).

4. Johnson, 15, also for the following quotation.

5. The key works are those by Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1992); Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, "Allwissend, allmächtig, allgegenwärtig?: Gestapo, Gesellschaft und Widerstand," Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 41 (1993), 984-99; Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul (eds.), Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realität (Darmstadt, 1995); also Reinhard Mann, Protest und Kontrolle im Dritten Reich: Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft im Alltag einer rheinischen Grosstadt (Frankfurt am Main, 1987). For denunciations specifically: Robert Gellately, "Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic," Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 931-67; Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Politische Denunziation im NS-Regime oder die kleine Macht der "Volksgenossen" (Bonn, 1995).

6. See also Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany 1871-1914 (Cambridge, 1995).

7. See Johnson's clear summary on page 20: ". . . the key to understanding the sometimes brutal, sometimes quasi-legalistic, but always effective Nazi terror lies in its selective character. Never implemented in a blanket or indiscriminate fashion, it specifically targeted and ruthlessly moved against the Nazi regime's racial, political, and social enemies; at the same time it often ignored or dismissed expressions of nonconformity and mild disobedience on the part of other German citizens. Thus dualistic treatment of different sectors of the German population helped the Nazi regime garner legitimacy and support among the populace."

8. Gerhard Paul, "Ganz normale Akademiker: Eine Fallstudie zur regionalen staatspolizeilichen Funktionselite," in Paul and Mallmann (eds.), Die Gestapo, 250.

9. See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 170; also Wolfgang Ayab, "Asoziale" im Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1995), 24.

10. This literal construction of "policing" to apply to the Gestapo per se rather than to wider processes of social discipline allows "asocials" and other criminalized categories of people to drop out of Johnson's field of vision, even though arguably they were profoundly "terrorized" by the Nazi state. In these terms, Burleigh and Wippermann's Racial State presents a more accurate and well-defined account of Nazi terror than either of the books under review. See Ayab, "Asoziale"; Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1997), 117-46; Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.), Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 2001); and the various volumes edited by Götz Aly et al. in the series (Berlin, 1987).

11. See Francis L. Carsten, The German Workers and the Nazis (Aldershot, 1995), 157.

12. For a case study of "aryanization" of Jewish property, see Frank Bajohr, "Arisierung" in Hamburg: die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer, 1933-1945 (Hamburg, 1997).

13. Gellately's chapter on this subject, "Concentration Camps in Public Spaces" (204-23), builds on the now incontrovertible evidence provided by the detailed studies of particular camps, localities, and businesses accumulating during the 1990s.

14. In some places Gellately acknowledges this intimidatory function, but elides the complexity in his general conclusions. E.g., page 201: "The evidence suggests that in Hitler's dictatorship the police thrived not only on what happened to victims before the courts, but as much and even more on the stories and myths that spread about what happened or could happen to anyone who had a brush with the police."

15. Werner Best (1903-89) was a highly educated lawyer who rose through the ranks of the SS, helped build the Gestapo, assisted Heydrich in the SS central administration until 1940, and became Reich Plenipotentiary over Denmark. Formed politically in the radical nationalist and anti-Semitic milieu of the völkisch Right, he made a post-Nazi career in the West German Free Democratic Party. See Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903-1989 (Bonn, 1996).

16. Burleigh, 227.

17. Beginning with The Destruction of Dresden (London, 1963), David Irving had published around thirty books mainly on military aspects of the Second World War, whose provocative claims often attracted noisy publicity. By the time of Hitler's War (New York, 1977), which sought to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Judeocide, or even knowledge of the extermination policies until late 1943, he was regarded as a willing controversialist sympathetic to Hitler, whose apparent assiduousness as a researcher was counterbalanced by troubling revisionist proclivities. Irving's more recent works included: Rudolf Hess (London, 1988); Hess: The Missing Years (London, 1989); Göring (London, 1989); Hitler's War and the War Path (London, 1991); Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (London, 1996); and Nuremberg: The Last Battle (London, 1997). In Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London, 1994), Deborah Lipstadt mentioned Irving as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Scholars "had accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes . . . skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler." (Quoted by Evans, 6). Irving issued his libel writ against Lipstadt and her publisher in September 1996, and the trial convened in London between January and April 2000.

18. These statements from the judgment are quoted by Evans, 227.

19. Rather than employing counsel, Irving chose to represent himself in court. As Evans observes, this was one of three unusual features of the trial, the others being the absence of a jury and the exceptional centrality of the expert witnesses, who in this case were professional historians (especially himself). Ibid., 191-93.

20. Here is Evans's verdict after the first of these discussions, concentrating on Irving's "depiction of the anti-Jewish outrages of 9-10 November 1938": Irving "falsely attributed conclusions to reliable sources, bending them to fit his arguments. He relied on material that turned out directly to contradict his arguments when it was checked. He quoted from sources in a manner that distorted their authors' meaning and purposes. He misrepresented data and skewed documents. He used insignificant and sometimes implausible pieces of evidence to dismiss more substantial evidence that did not support his thesis. He ignored or deliberately suppressed material when it ran counter to his arguments. When he was unable to do this, he expressed implausible doubts about its reliability." Ibid., 70.

21. The simultaneous publication of a second book on the Irving trial by D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial (New York, 2001), makes for a telling juxtaposition. Its author, a U.S. journalist resident in London, provides a wider-ranging commentary on the broader public and moral-philosophical ramifications of the trial, but his account suffers from glibness, frequent missteps, and a limited grasp of the relevant contexts. These weaknesses emerge in ironic counterpoint to the "pedantry" he dismissively attributes to Evans on the witness stand, as the latter's understanding of the larger questions remains much the superior. Among the exceptions to the shallowness and poorly researched tendentiousness of most press coverage, Evans mentions Eva Menasse of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, plus Jonathan Freedland and other writers in The Guardian and Independent.

22. Evans cites the reporter Cal McCrystal of the London Evening Standard complaining about the "stupefying" overload of documentation, whose "sheer volume of information" seemed "almost a barrier to historical truth": "Stacked in teak bookshelves around the walls are nearly 400 files of information. Teak tables groan beneath the weight of further boxes, books and laptops." McCrystal was "simply unfamiliar," Evans comments archly, "with the enormous quantity of source material with which modern historians customarily work." (189-90)

23. Evans confines "historical scholarship" somewhat tautologically to the work done by professional historians themselves according to the procedures described in Lying About Hitler. But if historical understanding can be furthered by other methods and forms of analysis too, using a different kind of archive or inspired by different disciplinary traditions, then historical knowledge can clearly originate in other fields like Holocaust studies (where for Evans the dominance of "literature and aesthetics" seems to make this unlikely). Among many possible examples, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998); or Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999). Of course, Holocaust studies also contains many historians in the professional sense, including Robert Gellately, who now holds a chair at Clark University's Center for Holocaust Studies. Rather dubiously, Evans also draws an equivalence between "political exploitation of the Holocaust" and "the political payoff of Holocaust denial," using as an example the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's "marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews." (261) Despite that Museum's imperfections, this mischaracterizes its activities rather unfairly and simplistically, as a visit to its website, <http://www.ushmm.

org>, will quickly confirm.

24. See also Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York, 2000), which uses an ideal of objectivity to draw the boundaries around the discipline of history in a particularly question-begging way.

25. For the advantages of "acculturation" as a term over "assimilation," see Marion Kaplan, "Tradition and Transition. The Acculturation, Assimilation, and Integration of Jews in Imperial Germany. A Gender Analysis," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 27 (1982), 3-36.

26. For a succinct account of the decision to expel the German Jews and its place in the chronology of the "Final Solution," see Kershaw, Nemesis, 472-87.

27. Roseman's account of the Abwehr's role in protecting the Strauss family can be found on 129-45 and 250-53. See especially Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben. Eine Rettungsaktion für vom Holocaust Bedrohte aus dem Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main, 1993).

28. Two illustrations are especially telling. One concerns the confusing ramifications of Friedrich Hammacher's help for the Strauss family. If he offered the lifeline to the Abwehr from human feelings for a respected associate, Hammacher also used his connections in the Essen Nazi party and Gestapo to purchase the Strauss residence, which during the abortive deportation of October 1941 reverted to the city. He let the family continue living in the house, but on deportation made sure to pick over their abandoned furniture. This "murky world hidden from the official records" was exposed in the postwar restitution proceedings as an extensive network of bribery, payoffs, and private enrichment ("between Hammacher and the Abwehr, Hammacher and the party, Hammacher and the city administration, Hammacher and the Gestapo"). Whereas historians previously doubted such corruption, here "private testimony undermines the official record." (137-8) The second case was that of Maria and Wilhelm Jürgens, who stored some of the Strauss family possessions. When Marianne claimed the trunks after the war, they insisted the contents had been a gift, thereby necessitating "a miserable fifteen-year struggle over family property that was one of the low points of Marianne's postwar life." (343) For "Aryanization", see Bajohr, "Arisierung"; for the economics of Jewish exclusion, Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation. The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover, N.H., 1989); and more generally on corruption, Frank Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure: Korruption in der NS-Zeit (Frankfurt, 2001).

29. Until Roseman's account, virtually nothing was known about the Izbica camp, which helped feed the extermination camp at Belzec following the Wannsee conference in January 1942. The standard work on deportations from Germany is still Hans-Günther Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen, 1974); also Michael Zimmermann, "Die Deportation der Juden aus Essen und dem Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf," in Ulrich Bosdorf and Mathilde Jamin (eds.), Überleben im Krieg. Kriegserfahrungen in einer Industrieregion, 1939-1945 (Hamburg, 1989), 126-43.

30. Deportations to Belzec were halted to allow a larger and more efficient killing facility to be built. Sobibor filled the gap in May-June, only for non-military transports to be halted in the interests of the summer military offensive. In August, Lublin resources were directed toward the "Great Action" against the Warsaw ghetto, where 300,000 were deported mainly to Treblinka. When large-scale deportations from the Lublin district resumed, technical problems with the rail link to Sobibor still slowed the pace. "In early October 1942, as the killing machine came closer, Izbica was again spared because the main extermination effort was to the north of the district." (211) The essential account is in Dieter Pohl, Von der "Judenpolitik" zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements, 1939-1944 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 128-39; and for a rare eyewitness account of Izbica, Thomas Tovia Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor. A Story of Survival (Evanston, IL, 1997). This is a good example of how carefully Roseman matches his oral history with the available documentary record. At Marianne's end, the resumption of the transports severed her postal link.

31. The first quote is Roseman's; the second is from his interview with Hanna Aron, daughter of the secretary in the Essen Jewish community offices. As Roseman shows, Arras was not in the SS but a noncommissioned officer in the Army in Poland, France, and Poland again, before receiving reserved occupational status. Survivor recollections often "blur German uniforms—whether the Wehrmacht, as in this case, or railway officials, or the police—into the evil, threatening outfit of the SS." (210) His discussion of Arras can be found in 201-11. Ernst's report from Izbica is printed with minor omissions on 186-97.

32. As with all aspects of Marianne's story, Roseman reconstructs this process of dogged persistence and eventual grieving in meticulous and moving detail. Arras brought direct news from further visits to Izbica, but had not been able to see Ernst: by December 1942, most deportees had been killed or transported; Ernst's father had died of "pleurisy" and his mother had disappeared; Ernst himself had been blinded by an "accident." See 211-18.

33. When Jewish pupils were excluded from normal opportunities in 1933, Marianne had been sent as a child for dance classes with Dore Jacobs. She met Artur Jacobs again only on the evening before Ernst's deportation at the Krombachs' apartment. (237)

34. Virtually nothing was known of the Essen Bund, whose thin network extended elsewhere in the Ruhr and Wuppertal, until Roseman stumbled on its existence, after which Artur Jacobs's manuscript diary, held in the Essen city archive, proved a key source. See also Monika Grüter, "Der 'Bund für ein sozialistisches Leben': Seine Entwicklung in den 20er Jahren und seine Widerständigkeit unter dem Nationalsozialismus," Dissertation, University of Essen, 1988. Roseman is now writing a book on the Bund. See Past in Hiding, 231-41, 264-338, 340-47, 360-63, 415-16.

35. Some of her protectors were unconnected with the Bund, including a distant cousin married to a non-Jew near Bremen, the sister of a former colleague in Barmen (also in a mixed marriage), and her aunt's former housekeeper in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. See 278 and more generally 272-92.

36. See Klemens von Klemperer (ed.), A Noble Combat: The Letters of Sheila Grant Duff and Adam von Trott zu Soltz, 1932-1939 (Oxford, 1988); Hedley Bull (ed.), The Challenge of the Third Reich: The Adam von Trott Memorial Lectures (Oxford, 1986); Beate Ruhm von Oppen (ed.), Helmut James von Moltke. Letters to Freya: 1939-1945 (New York, 1990); Freya von Moltke, Erinnerungen an Kreisau, 1930-1945 (Munich, 1997).

37. See Yosefa Loshitzky (ed.), Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perpsectives on Schindler's List (Bloomington, 1997); Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1945, 2 vols. (New York, 1998, 2000); Browning, Ordinary Men; Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001); Browning, Nazi Policy, 89-169. Johnson and Burleigh both have in common the use of case records for individualized stories.

38. Until November 1938, Marianne attended the Luisenschule (girls' grammar school) in Essen, where she enrolled in April 1933 after four years of Jewish elementary schooling. Roseman's chapter ("Schoolgirl in the Third Reich") brilliantly weaves together Marianne's own recollections with those of her contemporaries and written documentation, complemented by relevant historiography. The Yavne school was mainly supported by Orthodox families until 1933, when "the liberal-minded Jewish middle class" began seeing it as an alternative to the Nazified state schools. (89) While Jews were banned from state schools and higher education, the Nazis still permitted certain Jewish vocational qualifications in agriculture, domestic science, nursing, and education: "The Jewish College for Kindergarten Teachers in Berlin was unique in that it provided a state-recognized qualification." (93) Marianne cut her studies short in October 1941, returning abruptly to Essen on her family's receipt of deportation orders. After the reprieve from the latter, she went back to Berlin in February 1942 and passed the final qualifying examination, which was duly ratified by the authorities: ". . . a month after the Wannsee conference, Jewish kindergarten teachers in Berlin were still graduating with the Staatsexamen, even as the their potential charges were being transported to Lodz, to Minsk, and to Riga." (117) The College was closed on 1 April 1942.

39. "The diary is not a stream of consciousness or unmediated outpouring of emotion but a remarkably composed document. It was clearly influenced by a genre of reflective journal-keeping that sought to probe the essence of things, rather than record the day-to-day. . . . The diary was also clearly a way of regaining balance, finding her feet, a deliberate counterweight to the fears of the day. She was able to apply (and be quite conscious of applying) a kind of psychological censorship. The letters to Ernst from 1942 showed her capacity to exclude from her writing the daily threats and humilations, and to focus on what was enriching or constructive. This did not mean that, off the page, Marianne was not aware of those threats or that they did not influence her sense of identity." See 329.

40. "In 1942 . . . Europe's Jews were not operating with a collective concept of the 'Holocaust' that gave shape and 'logic' to their experiences. They probably did not yet know what the endpoint was. Until the moment they were selected for murder, life went on, in the nooks and crannies between the Nazi ordinances." (197)

41. The reworking of this and other incidents of loss in Marianne's memory during the intervening five decades becomes central to Roseman's reflections on the difficulties of mastering the past. In each case, the redescription altered part of the event without affecting either its human awfulness or the narrative's basic structure. That these memory slips seemed disconnected from processing of guilt or responsibility drew Roseman to their symptomatic meanings. He concluded that the reworking either rendered the pain of loss and the associated burdens of survival slightly less unmanageable, or else solidified the memory's resilience by enhancing its drama. Reaching these conclusions required patiently measuring Marianne's initial recollections against all the available oral and documentary evidence, private and official, painstakingly assembled with the historian's true persistence and ingenuity.

42. When Marianne was summoned for Gestapo interrogation in November 1942, her parents checked her diary and letters for incriminating material in the event of a search. She was enraged at the violation of privacy, withdrew from them, and removed her belongings from the house. She recorded: "Unspoken and spoken accusations against the bad, cold daughter who shows her loved ones only ingratitude, egotism, and lack of trust. I am used to them and they affect me no more now than before." (242)

43. See 7-11. In September 1989, Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen for an exhibition at Essen's Ruhrland Museum on life during the war: five years before, she had published an article about her underground life, and Roseman's British nationality and Essen connections qualified him to make the contact in Liverpool. The interview left them feeling "that we had both survived a painful immersion in her memory" (7). In 1996 he contacted her again for a TV documentary about the allied occupation of Germany. By then extremely ill, she agreed to record her life story, managing three meetings before she died on 22 December 1996. Roseman then worked through the Strauss family files in the Düsseldorf Gestapo records, sorted the extraordinary profusion of family documents, pursued the trail through the official archives, and traced surviving witnesses across various parts of the world. Marianne's original article was published at the urging of the Bund. See Marianne Ellenbogen, "Flucht und illegales Leben während der Nazi-Verfolgungsjahre, 1943-1954," Das Münster am Hellweg, 37 (1984), 135-42, reprinted in Alte Synagoge (ed.), Stationen jüdischen Lebens. Von der Emanzipation bis zir Gegenwart (Bonn, 1990), 248-52. Roseman was a member of the Jewish community in Essen during his dissertation research in 1981-4. See Mark Roseman, Recasting the Ruhr 1945-1957. Manpower, Economic Recovery and Labour Relations (New York, 1992).

44. "As in a detective story, I also felt my way, initially rather blindly, along an extending chain of witnesses. I found business contacts of Marianne's parents, distant relatives, ex-schoolmates, members of the Bund, and postwar friends. My search led me across Germany, Israel, the United States, and Argentina and brought me correspondents and contacts in Canada, Australia, France, Sweden, Poland, and the Czech Republic—a poignant reminder of the fate of German Jewry." (10)

45. None of the authors reviewed in this essay could be described as a culturalist. Four of them (Ian Kershaw, Pierre Ayçoberry, Richard Evans, Robert Gellately) were formed in the social history heyday, the others (Eric Johnson, Michael Burleigh, Mark Roseman) somewhat later. Their latest books vary in focus—for example, Kershaw's biography of Hitler necessarily takes a strongly political and institutional approach—but with the exception of Burleigh, whose work resists easy classification, their main works strongly reflect the social history of the 1970s. Among the works reviewed, Roseman's shows the clearest opening toward the new cultural history.

46. For the phrase "biologizing of the social," see Ulrich Herbert, "Rassismus und rationales Kalkül," in Wolfgang Schneider (ed.), "Vernichtungspolitik": Eine Debatte über den Zusammenhang von Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Hamburg, 1991), 28. Tim Mason was an early commentator on this trend, distinguishing "biological politics" as a key theme to emerge from a conference on "Reevaluating the Third Reich" held at the University of Pennsylvania in April 1988. This was also the first time I remember encountering the idea in a meeting of German historians. Mason was responding partly to the work of Detlev Peukert, partly to the ideas of the New York-based German Women's History Study Group, each of which shaped those Philadelphia discussions. See Tim Mason, "Whatever Happened to 'Fascism'?", in Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge, 1995), 328, together with Caplan's comment in her "Introduction," 27; also Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984); and Detlev J. K. Peukert, "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science", in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds.), Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York, 1993), 234-52.