Olzog Verlag, München, 2011. 206 pages, Index, facsimiles, ISBN 978-3-7892-8329-1. 26 Euros.
In his foreword the late Professor Dr. Karl Doehring, former Director of the Max Planck Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht in Heidelberg notes that the mechanism of secrecy was crucial for carrying out the mass murder, and that the de Zayas book will be indispensable to all future researchers into the questions who knew what when about the Holocaust.
The author of this study is a retired UN lawyer, a former Chief of Petitions with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Secretary of the Human Rights Committee. He is an expert on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and has published pertinent books, including the 2009 handbook United Nations Human Rights Committee Case-Law (Kehl, N.P.Engel) a 2010 legal opinion on The Genocide against the Armenians (Beirut, Haigazian University Press), and a study on ethnic cleansing and the remedies available to victims Heimatrecht ist Menschenrecht (published only in German by Universitas, Munich 2001). He is also a historian, with a doctorate from the University of Göttingen and book publications on Nuremberg, minorities, refugees, etc., including Nemesis at Potsdam (London, Routledge 1979) and A Terrible Revenge (New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
“Genocide as State Secret” was written originally in German and the author is currently preparing an English-language version. At present de Zayas teaches public international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy where he offers, inter alia, a master’s seminar on ‘history, genocide and law,’ which gives contour to this well-organized and challenging book.
The subject matter is troubling: the ominous “Endlösung.” Millions of innocent human beings persecuted and murdered under the cover of the war. Why this insanity? Which were the mechanisms of destruction? How many Germans and non-Germans participated in the murder campaign? How many knew about the Final Solution? De Zayas started tackling these questions in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, when he wrote his Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau (Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press 1989; preface by Howard Levie), a study of the specialized bureau in the legal division of the Wehrmacht that investigated the violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions during World War II, similar to the war crimes offices in Washington and London. He was the first historian to examine the seven meters of previously classified German files, including judicial evaluations, sworn witness testimony, trial transcripts and internal correspondence, which he then compared with the related records of the Wehrmachtführungsstab, war diaries, German Foreign Office white papers and diplomatic notes. The Protecting Power exchanges with Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, etc., were consulted, always with a critical eye for possible exaggerations, fabrications or propaganda.
In the course of writing this book, de Zayas was confronted with the anomaly that 226 volumes of records on war crimes included not a word about the Final Solution, not even a comment on the margin. Were all traces erased? How much did the old judges of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau actually know about the Final Solution? That was the genesis of this book.
As shown in the hundreds of footnotes, de Zayas’ methodology did not stop with archival research in Germany, Switzerland, France, the United States and Great Britain. He went out of his way to personally interview those who knew, including Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Nuremberg prosecutors and Nuremberg defence attorneys, the prosecutors and defence lawyers of Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, German Wehrmacht judges – and surviving victims. As the footnotes abundantly manifest, de Zayas is keenly aware of the secondary literature in the field. He takes issue with some of the conclusions of historians like Goldhagen, Gellately, Longerich and Bankier, and tends to agree with the analysis of Michael Marrus, Gordon Craig, Peter Hoffmann and Hans Mommsen. But while he carefully considers the opinions of other scholars, he does not rehash what is already in the secondary literature – he takes a fresh look at the evidence, poses new questions – and proposes possible answers, avoiding guessing and extrapolation. He places the evidence in historical context, avoiding the anachronisms that some historians indulge in. What is the added value of this book?
Crucial in his analysis is the totalitarian context, the ubiquitous role of the Gestapo, the prohibition of listening to foreign radio transmissions, the atmosphere of terror and denunciation. An essential element of the mechanism of secrecy was Hitler’s Order No.1 of 11 January 1940. This was the infamous Führerbefehl Nr. 1 on secrecy, that hung in every office, and which prevented the passing information to persons who were not directly involved with a particular task, and made it impossible to ask questions or engage in any kind of independent investigation. A facsimile of Führerbefehl Nr. 1 is reproduced in the annex. The questions of who knew what and when and how much are not new. The prosecutors in Nuremberg asked them of Dönitz, Speer, von Schirach, Jodl, Ribbentrop, etc. De Zayas is thorough in reviewing the answers and is rightly sceptical about the attempts of the accused to deny the bulk of the charges against them. But one thing does emerge from the Nuremberg evidence: the enormous effort put in by the Nazis to keep the Holocaust secret, to deny any rumours, to imprison anyone who would photograph executions or talk about them. Himmler’s speech to senior SS killers in Posen on 4 October 1943 reveals the mechanisms of secrecy, and the abstruse combination of ‘mission’ and ‘patriotic duty.'
De Zayas gives much space to the testimony of SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who in 1943 learned about the crimes in Lublin-Majdaneck and Auschwitz, indicted several SS killers and even attempted to get Adolf Eichmann indicted. This is heavy stuff. But it is all in black and white in the Nuremberg records. The Nuremberg Diary of the American psychologist at Nuremberg, Gustave Gilbert, and the reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its mitigated efforts on behalf of Jewish internees, in particular on its visits to concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, underline the amazing and consistent efforts at secrecy and denial.
How does this book conform to what is generally believed? De Zayas claims that certain popular simplifications have taken hold that should be put to the test. Among many historians there is a ‘collective guilt’ mentality that takes shortcuts and postulates knowledge of the Holocaust by a large majority of the German population – or even connivance and approval by them. Although none of these historians have succeeded in proving their thesis – they repeat it so often, that many believe it. De Zayas questions and rejects all extrapolations. A piece of the mosaic is not the mosaic. A rumour is not proven knowledge. A letter from a soldier in the field reporting on a massacre is not equivalent to knowledge of the Holocaust. One thing is to know that massacres occur in wartime, another is to know that these massacres were official, systematic and aimed at the extermination of a people. This was a relatively new concept – already tried successfully during the Ottoman destruction of the Armenian people 1915-1918. But even there, the genocide was secret and officially denied. And to this day the Turkish government continues to deny it.
Since de Zayas is not only a historian but also a lawyer, he insists on solid proof of the crimes (abundant) and on equally solid evidence of the knowledge about the crimes (fragmentary, imprecise, non-existent) – and he listens to all sides. Audiatur et altera pars characterizes best the methodology of this study, since de Zayas looks at the evidence from all sources, including denials by the killers, and he evaluates them in the light of all available evidence. In the case of the Holocaust he illustrates how the fragmentary knowledge by Wehrmacht officers of what was really going on drove them to various assassination attempts against Hitler, including the failed coup d’état of 20 July 1944.
Why is this book important? If one accepts de Zayas’ basic thesis that secrecy is a facilitating and even a constitutive element of genocide – maybe the international community does have a possibility of developing preventive mechanisms and recognizing ‘early warning’ signs. Secrecy certainly facilitated the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the massacres of Halabja and Srebrenica. The secrecy surrounding the crimes also makes it possible for persons not directly involved to deny them – out of falsely understood patriotism (‘our soldiers do not do that’, or ‘my country right or wrong’) and a reluctance to accept that one’s leaders may be criminals. This is a neglected element in understanding the phenomenon of ‘negationism,’ because not everyone who denies the Armenian Genocide does it because he hates Armenians. Some will continue to deny a crime until the overwhelming weight of the evidence leads them to psychologically accept its cold and depressing historicity.
In short: this is a mature and distanced study of one of the most difficult issues of World War II: the mechanism that made it possible to murder six million Jews. How could something like that occur in Europe? How could something that grotesque occur in the land of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller and Kant? This book recognizes the banality of evil, the power of indoctrination, the human tendency not to see what one does not want to see, and yes, the crushing force of totalitarianism.
The question remains how did the Holocaust go beyond Hitler’s insane fantasies into the realm of reality? A combination of secrecy, deception, war psychosis and terror. De Zayas takes a methodically careful approach, does not stop at the necessary archival work, goes out and interviews witnesses, the accused, prosecution lawyers, defence lawyers, victims. He evaluates the existing scholarship and builds on it. He expresses the hope that the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the establishment of the UN Office of the Special Advisor of the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide may help the international community in banning forever the ‘ultimate crime’."
Bibliographic Note: A slightly longer version of this review was published in the Netherlands International Law Review, 2011, pp. 139-142 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&pdftype=1&fid=8266566&jid=NLR&volumeId=58&issueId=&aid=8266565
The present article was prepared by the author specifically for GPN Genocide Prevention Now.
Professor Dr. Johannes van Aggelen, now a Professor at Brasilia, is a Docteur en droit, University of Nijmegen,Holland(1976) and a Doctor of Civil Law, Mc Gill University (1989),where he worked with the late John Humphrey, one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and with Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Minister of Justice and a long standing defendant of the Russian dissident Nathan Sharansky. Dr. Aggelen worked for the Human Rights Department of the United Nations in Geneva,1980-2007. He has published over 200 publications in 6 languages on international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as criminal law issues.