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Ethics and Extermination: Rofloctions on Nari aU Nszi #onoold Michael Burleigh
Cambridge UniversIty Press 1887 pp 211 f12.85 paper, ISBN U 521 58816 2
This is a new collection of essays by one of the most perceptive and humane scholars of the Shoah now writing. Its publication ought to raise renewed questions about how perhaps, indeed, whether - this topic should be taught in secondary schools.
Burleigh's new book follows up the areas he has already explored in three earlier works - the influence of German historiography in legitimising National Socialist claims on eastern Europe; the course of the euthanasia programme which, after 1939, murdered hundreds of thousands of German citizens labelled "unworthy of life"; and the rapid and widespread acceptance of the notion of a racial state following Hitler's assumption of power in 1933.
He now contributes insights into new areas. There is an astonishinq essay on the Russo-German war of 1941-45, which confirms the findings of Omer Bartov's seminal work on the German army on the Eastern Front. Burleigh agrees that the Ostheer was deeply penetrated by racist assumptions and that, for the most part, it was a willing participant in genocide. One does not need to be Daniel Goldhagen - the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners to whom, in an essay on recent Shoah historiography, Burleigh delivers a magisterial rebuke - not to accept any longer the fiction that atrocities were solely the work of the SS.
In a splendid essay on The Nazi analogy and contemporary debates on euthanasia Burleigh argues passionately against the trivialisation of Nazi racism. He observes with dismay the growing tendency to justify or denounce the concerns of today by means of often specious and ill-formed reference to the Third Reich and particularly its policies of extermination. This ought to make us think seriously about the way the Shoah is taught in schools. Remember that virtually all students, by the end of Year 9, will have encountered the Shoah on at least two occasions: it forms part of the Programmes of Study for Key Stage 3 of both History and Religious Education. Many students will then go on to examine it again as part of their Modern World GCSE course. A few of these may encounter...