Modern Historical Inquiry and the Myth of Relativism

view. The point I was trying to make was that the vast majority do not do it by playing fast and loose with facts, but rather by trying to work with documentary evidence which has been neglected. Additionally even odd points of view like Black Athena which attempted to attribute all of Greek achievement and art to Egyptian sources (true in the case of early figural sculpture) caused a profound re-evaluation of the more traditional view, and a substantial tightening up of the connections of evidence and more research. The traditional view triumphed but was greatly strengthened by its review and re-evaluation. The same is true of the book Centuries of Darkness which called into question the dating of Egyptian kings and pottery. Again the traditional view prevailed but the weak spots in the chronology was tightened up.

Oh, and I apologize for using the word Relativism, when I meant Revisionist.

There is a feeling among some, perhaps many, people that all academics including Historians live in a world separate from the one the rest of us live in, and that their ideas and conclusions are not applicable to the real world.

Now that doesn't mean that they don't have points of view which may cause some people to squirm. The finest historian of the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, A.L.Rowse from the 30's 40's and 50's, was a committed Marxist. Oddly, if you read his work you'd never know. The finest historian I have ever read, Edward P. Thompson whose career ran from the 50's to the 80's was a committed Communist until the early 1960's, but his period of specialization was the 18th and early 19th Century. His great work was the History of the English Working Class, followed by Whigs and Hunters about the abuses of labourers by the landowners. He has written direct political works as well, but they are only tangentially historical and so not part of this discussion.

Now I am not maintaining that there are not idiots out there who play fast and loose with the facts, like that pseudo-Native American who wrote fiction, passed it off as history and got caught and eventually canned. Being well educated doesn't eliminate unscrupulousness, it just gives it new fields in which to operate.

Now truthfully real historians books rarely are published by larger publishing companies. E.P. Thompson is an exception in that he was published by Penguin. The place to find real history is in the academic Journals. Sadly I have to read them at the UofT Library, rather than subscribing to them any more.

Sorry if this does not address sufficiently directly your post, I'm just trying to clarify what I was saying.

Rob

every particular. Jews settled in Germany because Germans tended to be less hostile than other countries in Central Europe despite Martin Luther's unpleasantness. The late 19th Century was a period of resurgence and spreading of anti-semitism. It became fashionable, and became a sort of pseudo-intellectual posturing. Hitler's influences, the people who tutored him in anti-semitism as he attempted to school himself both before and after WWI.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071129220921AAyt3G6
talks about Houston Stewart Chamberlain who wrote and spoke about the strength and rightness of Germanic/Nordic culture, and the racial poison inherent in Judaism. Additionally as pointed out here was the influence of Karl Lueger one time mayor of Vienna. Wagner, while an anti-Semite himself I consider less influential in terms of anti-Jewish sentiments than as a celebrator of Nordic mythology and heroism.

Anti-Semitism is pervasive throughout My Struggle (Mein Kampf, pub. 1924) written in 1923 while in prison. Clearly it was a deeply held belief. The fact that it was a rooted prejudice in Germany at the time was merely convenient. Had it not been present, Hitler would have been pushing it as the explanation for the German loss of the war. The situation was such that the great German loss, in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne, which arguably lost them the war, had a chance to be forgotten. Had they captured Paris, the war would have been over, France out of the conflict, the tiny British Army overwhelmed, though rescuable, and no chance for an invasion to reverse the conflict. Germany was baffled by the collapse in 1918 of its Army, not understanding the impact of 4 years of war, and the Influenza Epidemic killing soldiers without any fighting. All Germans were malnourished due to Britain's blockade, and were thus more susceptible to the illness.

Hitler was raised as a Catholic. The dogma that "the Jews killed Christ" drawn from the Gospels was drummed into him. Incidentally, crucifixion was a punishment for political crimes under the Romans. The Jewish Elders could never have persuaded the Roman governor and his administration to impose it for their purposes.

http://www.h-net.org/~german/gtext/kaiserreich/hitler2.html
" he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that featured Pan- German nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-socialism. These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the Munich revolution of 1918-19. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a Herr Adolf Gemlich was prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the above-mentioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already feeling his way toward a political career; four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (eventually renamed, the National Socialist Workers' Party) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr. In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable and sober antisemite. Compared to the inflammatory mass-meeting oratory that he was soon to make his specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a "rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. Some historians have interpreted the letter's call for the "irrevocable removal [Entfernung]" of the Jews from German life as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. But it is clear from the context and from later statements that, at this point, Hitler meant segregation or expulsion rather than systematic liquidation. The letter, Hitler's first explicitly political writing, impressed his Reichswehr superiors and he soon gained a reputation among radical rightist and socially respectable nationalist conservative groups as a man who could help inoculate the masses against revolution and whose antisemitic rhetoric could help discredit the democratic Weimar Republic. The letter may thus be seen as the launching of his political career."

http://www.porges.net/JewsInVienna/5WasYounghitlerAntiSemite.html
"There can be no doubt that while in Vienna, young Hitler studied anti-Semitism, among other matters. The four politicians who may be called his political models -Sch

Sounds more like you agree with me! You've pretty much reiterated the same points I made.

Probably one of the foundations of Hitler's belief system and also that of the Eugenics groups, and Darwinians. It was a proto-nordic viewpoint, not specifically an anti-semitic one. One might consider it backdoor racism of a sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race

The Passing of The Great Race; or, The racial basis of European history was an influential book of scientific racism written by the American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant in 1916. The book was very influential in United States during the interwar period, going through many reprintings and selling 1,600,000 copies in the United States alone by 1937. The book put forward Grant's theory of "Nordic superiority" and argued for a strong eugenics program in order to save the waning "Nordics" from inundation of other race types.

the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany and a parallel spread of Fascism caused a new interest in the studies of scientific racism. Thus, although Grant's work was an early racialist work espousing Nordic theory his codification of the various disciplines involved in the work under a governing philosophy brought it immediately to the interest of the Nazi German government despite the plethora of other similar authors. Consequently, Grant's was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power in Germany, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant, "The book is my Bible". Mein Kampf was influenced by the book.

them all". Doesn't exist." The documentary evidence is Mein Kampf, so it does exist. It may not say Kill Them All verbatim, but it does say that they were Untermenschen (sub-human), dissolute, criminal, Bolshevist and deliberately preying on the noble German people, and that they deliberately engineered the German collapse in World War 1. What do you imagine was the predictable response to "The Stab in the Back" that Hitler propounded? To phrase the argument in this way, to blame a race for the dreadful loss of life during and after World War 1 and the appalling financial disaster post war is an invitation to scape-goating and a justification for mass murder.
The Holocaust was a natural outgrowth of Nazi philosophy and Anti-Semitism.

First, in 1935, there were the Nuremburg laws which progressively removed Jews from jobs, ownership of businesses, confiscated property and other examples of active racism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws

1938's "Kristallnacht was triggered by the assassination in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew. In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 91 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed, and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo and the SS.[2] Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.[3]
While the assassination of Rath served as a pretext for the attacks, Kristallnacht was part of a broader Nazi policy of antisemitism and persecution ...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

Houston Stewart Chamberlain who wrote and spoke about the strength and rightness of Germanic/Nordic culture, and the racial poison inherent in Judaism.
"Houston Stewart Chamberlain (September 9, 1855 ? January 9, 1927) was a British-born author of books on political philosophy, natural science and Richard Wagner. Chamberlain married the composer's daughter some years after Wagner's death. His two-volume book Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, whose title translates from the original German as The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century and which was published in 1899, became one of the many references for the pan-Germanic movement of the early 20th century, and, later, of the antisemitism of Nazi racial philosophy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Stewart_Chamberlain

Regrettably social Darwinism was one of the outgrowths of Darwin's work, though he himself was never an advocate of that aspect of the work. Truthfully, Darwin himself was reluctant to take on the somewhat hysterical response to the publication of his book, and its defense was handled primarily by Thomas Henry Huxley. Darwin closetted himself at home in Kent and worked on plant breeding and his correspondence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
Herbert Spencer originator of the term " "survival of the fittest," which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species" (1859)."The Gospel of Wealth" theory written by Andrew Carnegie.
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877 ...."

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer

All of this pre-dates the 1916 publication and provides an earlier "Social Darwinist" climate in Germany in which Hitler grew up. Germany like the United States at the end of the 19th Century was greatly influenced by the idea of the survival of the fittest, and they were philosophically inclined to believe that Germany was the most advanced country in Europe reinforced by their economic success and rapid advancement, and the reunification of Germany under Bismarck through 3 separate wars with Denmark, to obtain Schleswig-Holstein, war being a way of drawing the disparate Duchies, Palatinates and other principalities that comprised Germany when Bismarck (from Prussia, the largest and most militarily advanced German Kingdom) began to unite them all under Prussian leadership. The second war against Austro-Hungary caused additional fear in the remaining un-unified segments of Germany, and the final war in 1870 against France which completed the unification, and defeated what was believed to be the dominant military power in Europe. All of this reinforced the concept of "Nordic superiority" which is also was part of Hitler's belief system.

Given the totalitarian regime that was Nazi Germany, who could have authorized anything as large and organized as the Shoah or Holocaust, but Hitler? He was the primary philosophical expositor and decision maker in Germany. If something as large as the Holocaust happened with all of its elements, slave labour, railway allocations, the huge installations of the Concentration Camp system across Germany and Poland and the allocation of troops for Einsatzgruppen, SS Konzentrazionslager staffing, and all of the hardware needed, like Topf cremation furnaces.

Just because no document written and signed by Hitler directly authorizes the Holocaust doesn't mean that he didn't authorize it. Only one set of notes survived from the Wannsee Conference, despite there being 22 of them originally. A lot of destruction in Germany occurred both due to Allied bombing and to Nazi destruction of incriminating documents. Absence of Hitler's signature on the order doesn't mean he didn't authourize it verbally or via documents. It just means we don't have a written document which has survived.

Hitler was a dictator, his word was law, that's all it took.

Rob

is always so much better than history not found. Vacuum of evidence leads plenty of room for historians to play around in. My main point is that Hitler's primary motivation was national, was political, and his "racist" policies were all related to that.

g. If so, I apologize for doing so. What you were saying as I now see it is that there is no documentary evidence connecting Hitler with the Holocaust. You're absolutely correct that there is no documentary evidence connecting him with it. There is circumstantial evidence that it was his wish, but there is no documentary evidence.

Have I got this right?

Rob

hard to separate the racism from the nationalism, the sense of Aryan superiority from the belief in Jewish inferiority and schmutzigen Blut or "cirty blood". One Jewish Grandparent out of 4 meant that the person was classified as Jewish. That's not invented, that's reality.

Rob

can shake hands and agree to our differing points of view. Hope that's okay with you.

Rob