2023-12-20 10:31:26
by ANTONIO CARIOTI
American Jew of Luxembourg origin, he maintained that the Holocaust did not result from a premeditated plan, but from a decision due to the progress of the war
The American historian Arno Mayer, who passed away at the age of 97, was not lacking in originality; indeed, at times his theses had appeared bizarre, if not provocative. In particular, the book on the Holocaust he published in 1988, translated into Italy by Mondadori in 1990 with the title Soluzione Finale, had aroused much controversy on the part of scholars who accused him of having relativised the crimes of the Third Reich and belittled the importance of the racial motive in determining the extermination of European Jews.
Yet Mayer, born in Luxembourg on 19 June 1926 and lived in that country until the age of 14, was a Jew himself and had escaped the SS only thanks to the presence of mind of his father, who in 1940 had taken the family into car and had fled in a hurry in the face of the German invaders. Then, from France which was also occupied by the Nazis, the fugitives managed to move to North Africa and then, somehow obtaining the necessary emigration visas, they reached the United States via Lisbon at the beginning of 1941. Instead, the Mayer’s maternal grandparents had been deported and his grandfather had died in a concentration camp.
A US citizen since 1944, the year in which he enlisted in the US army, Mayer then successfully turned to historical studies and taught at Princeton from 1961 onwards. A heretical Marxist, he paid homage to the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the dedication of his essay The power of the ancien rgime until the First World War (Laterza, 1982), in which he argued that the political, social and cultural structures of the old aristocratic order had maintained the predominance in Europe, albeit adapting to the times, throughout the nineteenth century and had only been overwhelmed following the First World War, which moreover the traditional quarrels had consciously contributed to provoking.
That was already a book that caused a lot of discussion among scholars, never like Mayer’s subsequent work, Final Solution. Here the historian of Luxembourg origin argued that the Shoah was not the product of a plan concocted by Adolf Hitler already at the time of Mein Kampf and resolutely implemented by him once he had obtained the necessary means. In his opinion, genocide had instead arrived due to contingent circumstances linked to the war and in particular to the campaign of annihilation launched by the Third Reich against the Soviet Union: a battle to the death that the Princeton scholar considered the culmination of a Second Thirty Years’ War (after that of the seventeenth century) experienced by Europe in the period 1914-1945.
If Stalin’s regime had collapsed, according to Mayer, the Nazis would probably have deported Jews en masse to some remote area of Siberia or Central Asia. But the crushing defeat suffered in front of Moscow at the end of 1941 put the Fhrer and his colleagues faced with the feared prospect of losing the war. And the resulting panic in the upper echelons of the Reich determined an irreversible shift towards systematic mass extermination as the only sure way to get rid of the Jewish problem.
This reconstruction was contested by several authors, according to whom the preparations for the genocide had begun months before the invasion of the USSR suffered its first failures. Among others, Christopher Browning wrote that Mayer mistakenly downplayed the importance of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s mentality and ended up reducing the Shoah to a by-product of the aggressive policy implemented by Germany, while the elimination of the Jews had been a priority of the regime.
Mayer’s criticism of the cult of remembrance cultivated by the Jews in reference to the Holocaust had provoked even harsher attacks, which in his opinion had become excessively sectarian and above all functional to the political aims of Israel’s ruling class. Even though his father had been a left-wing Zionist, Mayer was severe towards the Jewish State and had written a decidedly unbalanced history of it in a pro-Palestinian sense with the significant title P lowshares into Swords (Verso, 2008), i.e. plowshares into swords, meaning that Israel, instead of pursuing peace by transforming weapons into working tools (forging swords into plowshares, as a biblical verse says), had done exactly the opposite.
December 20, 2023 (changed December 20, 2023 | 09:30)
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