How Do We Know Anything about the Holocaust?

Apr 10, 2019 by Susan Rosenbluth

By Alex Grobman, PhD

Historians who tackle the effort of writing anything credible about the Holocaust must know from the outset that their daunting task is part of the struggle to overcome the attempts of those who seek to deny that the planned genocide that resulted in the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children ever occurred. As Michael Shermer and I noted in our book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, published in 2000, the only way the past can be known is through a convergence of evidence.

There are a number of sources that historians can rely upon. First and foremost, there are written documents, the hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.

Then there is eyewitness testimony, the accounts that have been given by survivors and Sonderkommandos (Jews who were forced to load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria). There are depositions from commandants and senior-level Nazi officials who openly declared that the Nazis had been engaged in mass murder. There is evidence that has been provided by local citizens.

Photographs, Sites, Studies

Taking advantage of modern technology, historians of the Holocaust often use photographs, film that was obtained from official military sources as well as from the press. Civilians took photos as did Jews, often clandestinely. Aerial photographs have been preserved as well as footage taken by Germans and the Allies. Often unofficial photographs filmed by members of the German military have been most revealing.

The camps themselves—concentration, extermination, and labor sites—still remain in different states of originality and reconstruction and can be examined.

In addition, historians use inferential evidence, including population demographics from the pre-World War II era and afterwards, leading to the question: If six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them?

Convergence of Evidence

The benefits of using a convergence of evidence can be seen in the 2002 book Auschwitz by social historian Debórah Dwork and architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt, who set out to discover whether Auschwitz had been initially conceived as an extermination or if the builders had something else in mind.

By examining original architectural blueprints, historical photographs, and existing ruins together with requisition documents, transportation receipts, development authorizations, bills of sales, and sales’ receipts verified by eyewitness statements, confessions, and diaries and letters, they constructed a compelling account about the role of the camp and were able to reach a conclusion: Auschwitz had not been planned as an extermination camp, but, rather, had evolved into one.

Sometimes the evidence that needs to be converged depends on allowing insights to come from other professionals. Leading Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer suggested that, to tell the story, writers, musicians, psychologists, and theologians can help “probe deeper into the darkness.”

Passion to Testify

No one, however, has ever suggested that anything is more helpful to understanding what transpired than witnesses’ written and oral testimony. From the diaries and letters of those who were murdered, we learn not just how they died, but also how the Jews of that time period lived and dealt with the moral dilemmas they encountered.

Not that the Nazis made documentation easy. Real attempts were made to thwart the Jews from documenting their experiences. Nevertheless, Jews succeeded in establishing the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw and the Mersik Archive in Bialystok, and leaving numerous memoirs, diaries, and letters that have since come to light.

Before and, of course, after the war, nothing could stop Jewish survivors and historians from writing. As Elie Wiesel said in One Generation After, “There was a veritable passion to testify for the future, after death and oblivion, a passion conveyed by every possible means of expression.”

“The Real Crime”

Sarah Bick Berkowitz wrote in Where Are My Brothers?: “Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

In At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Jean Améry noted, “I can do no more than give testimony.”

He found that “you do not observe dehumanized man committing his deeds and misdeeds without having all of your notions of inherent human dignity placed in doubt.”

Rebbetzin Esther Farbstein, the leading hareidi scholar of the Holocaust, has provided us with an area of documentation that had been sorely missing: the remnants of Torah leadership during the Shoah.

Her book, The Forgotten Memoirs, presents moving personal accounts from rabbis who survived the Holocaust. She has also written Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halacha, and Leadership during the Holocaust and Hidden in the Heights: Orthodox Jewry in Hungary during the Holocaust.

Fear of Being Disbelieved

Their fear was that future generations would not believe what the Jews had experienced during the Holocaust.

“Everything depends on who transmits our treatment to future generations, on who writes the history of this period,” Dr. Ignacy Schiper, one of the leading Jewish historians of interwar Poland, confided to Alexander Donat while the two were held in the Majdanek extermination camp.

Dr. Schiper died in Majdanek in 1943; Mr. Donat survived and, before his death in 1983, wrote copiously about his wartime experiences, collected documents, and published the narratives of others.

“As if We Had Never Existed”

Dr. Schiper recognized that history is usually written by the victor and that “what we know about murdered peoples in only what their murderers vaingloriously care to say about them.”

“Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders. Their every word will be taken for gospel. Or they may wipe out our memory altogether, as if we had never existed, as if they had never been a Polish Jewry, a Ghetto in Warsaw, a Majdanek. Not even a dog will how for us,” he said.

However, Dr. Schiper, who firmly believed Jews would eventually “write the history of this period of blood and tears,” also accurately foresaw that the truth would be disbelieved “because our disaster is the disaster of the entire civilized world.”

“We’ll have the thankless task of proving to a reluctant world that we are Abel, the murdered brother,” he said.

Dr. Grobman is a Hebrew University-trained historian, senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, and member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East