Tag Archives: Hitler

Cuius Culpa?

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Eighty-four years ago in 1939, almost to the day, World War II broke out. Twenty years ago in 2003, again almost to the day, I gave a the following interview on the topic to the right-wing German news magazine Focus. Comments, welcome.

FOCUS: Professor van Creveld, why did Hitler attack Poland?

MvC: There can be no question but that one of Hitler’s primary objectives had long been the revision of the Versailles “Diktat” by returning to Germany the territories it had lost to Poland after World War I and adding to them if possible. This in turn was to be the first stage in the realization of his long-term plans to acquire Lebensraum for the German people. Yet the timing of the attack seems to have been determined by a different factor. Ever since 1937, when he was 48 years old, Hitler had looked at himself as a man past his prime. He believed that, health-wise he only had limited time left to carry out his plans.

FOCUS: Why did Stalin attack Poland?

MvC: That is very simple. Before 1918, much of Poland had belonged to Russia. In that sense, Stalin was doing no more than take back what was his in any case.

FOCUS: But together they unleased World War II. Right?

MvC: That is a way to look at it. But you could also argue that it was Britain’s guarantee to Poland that did the trick. Before the guarantee was given, Stalin feared, not without reason, that he might have to face Hitler on his own. After the guarantee he knew that this would not be the case. This left him free to conclude the non-aggression pact with Germany, which opened the road to the war.

FOCUS: Did Stalin deliberately wait for two weeks so as to make Hitler bear the full burden of having unleashed the war?

MvC: I am unaware of any historical source that makes this point; considering that he once said that “gratitude [and presumably other moral qualities as well] is something suitable for a dog”, I think it unlikely. Probably he needed some time to prepare and, cautious as he was, he also wanted to see what was happening first.

FOCUS: You say that Hitler attacked because he wanted to rectify the loss of territory Germany had suffered under the Treaty of Versailles and, if possible, acquire more. Yet in the documents of the German Foreign Ministry the words “encirclement” and “threat” keep appearing, Polish politicians often expressed their aggressive designs on Germany, and indeed the idea that the Polish-German border should run along the Oder goes back as far as the 1920s. Given these facts, would you say that Poland must bear part of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war?

MvC: The Franco-Polish Mutual Assistance pact dated to 1925. Ten years later, any significance it had ever had was nullified by the conclusion of the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact. Next, on 28 April 1939, Hitler cancelled that pact almost by a slight of hand, simply saying that “the basis on which it rested” no longer existed. One may accuse the Poles of many things. However, except for insisting on their territorial integrity in the face of Hitler’s demands and threats I do not see how one can blame them for the outbreak of World War II.

FOCUS: However, there is also a statement by Hitler, dating to the spring of 1939, in which he said that all he was trying to do was to apply some pressure to Poland over Danzig. That apart, though, he was prepared recognize Poland’s border; “he would not be the idiot who would start a war over Poland.” What did he mean by that?

MvC: At about the same time, Hitler also told his generals that “further successes in Europe without bloodshed are not possible”. So I would not attribute too much weight to this statement or that; the fact is that, having dismissed the nonaggression pact with Poland, Hitler staged a border incident (the occupation of Gleiwitz radio station) on 31 August 1939 and went to war early on the next day.

FOCUS: Was Poland ready for war?

MvC: This is a strange story indeed. By one account, weeks before the war a Polish general in Warsaw told a French delegation that, in case hostilities broke out, the French should worry about their eastern border while they themselves marched on Berlin. If that is true, then rarely in history can any military have overestimated itself to such an extent.

FOCUS: This confirms a statement by the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski. Just one day before the outbreak of the war he said he did not have to worry about negotiations with Germany, given that Polish troops would soon be marching on Berlin. Did the Poles believe Britain and France would immediately come to their aid?

MvC: The Poles seem to have understood that the British and French could no longer avoid their obligations, and in this they proved right. However, they proved very wrong in estimating their own capabilities. In any case, as I said, it was not they who started the shooting war.

Had there been no Western commitment, would the Poles have accepted Hitler’s demands and would the outbreak of war on 1 September have been avoided? Perhaps. Would that have been better for the world? I doubt it.

FOCUS: During the years after 1939 Hitler revealed himself as a criminal, automatically causing his proposals to be discredited. However, this was 1939. The return of Danzig, an extra-territorial motor- and railway across the Polish Corridor, and a long time agreement concerning the border between the two countries. Would you say that, right form the beginning, these demands were illegitimate? 

MvC: First, I hope you agree with me that Hitler was a criminal long before 1 September 1939. Second, what do the terms “legitimate” and illegitimate” mean in this context? If Hitler’s demands were legitimate, then so, for example, was Clemenceau’s suggestion in 1919 that Germany be dismantled by taking the Rhineland and perhaps Bavaria away from it. Perhaps the only thing wrong with that proposal is that it was never carried out!

FOCUS: Supposing the world “legitimate” is out of place, do you think that for any German to seek a revision of the Treaty of Versailles was “normal” and indeed to be expected?

MvC: Normal? With Pontius Pilatus, I answer: what is normal? Perhaps you are right: the victors of 1919 should have anticipated that no German government could live with the terms they imposed. Either they should have relaxed them, or else they should have followed Clemenceau’s ideas.

In fact, they failed to do either and fell between the chairs. By this interpretation, they did in 1945 what they should have done twenty-six years earlier.

FOCUS: Did Polish abuse of the German minority in the Corridor play a role in Germany’s decision to go to war?

MvC: Yes, clearly, but perhaps more as an excuse than as a real cause. In any case I doubt whether it was for Nazi Germany, of all countries, to complain about the way minorities were treated.

FOCUS: How strong was the Polish army??

MvC: The Poles’ main problem was not the number of troops, nor their training, nor their motivation. It was the absence of a modern industry that could have provided them with modern arms. To this were added a hopeless geographical situation and Stalin’s stab in the back.

FOCUS: Is it true, as the German Center for Political Education maintains in one of the books it promoted, that the attack on Poland was “the opening stage in a war of extermination”?

MvC: From everything I have ever read it would seem that Hitler, while determined to destroy first the Jews and then uncounted numbers of Russians, had always known that the most drastic measures would only be possible under the cover of war. So the answer is, yes.

FOCUS: Did the Wehrmacht in Poland wage a war of extermination against the civilian population?

MvC: No. But it certainly stood by and even provided support as the SS did so.

FOCUS: Did you visit the exhibition, “Germans and Poles”, in Berlin’s Haus der Geschichte?

MvC: Yes, I did.

FOCUS: Do you think the exhibition provides the visitor with a good idea of what took place?

MvC: The answer is both yes and no. I thought that the parts dealing with World War II were very good—it is impossible to exaggerate the misery that the German occupation forces inflicted on the Polish people during that period. On the other hand, I thought that everything before that was presented in a very one-sided way. It was as if, starting with Frederick the Great, the Germans had always been criminals and the Poles, angels. If I had been a German, this part of the exhibition would have made me extremely angry.

FOCUS: The fact that, during World War II, Germany committed untold atrocities in Poland is beyond doubt. However, Polish efforts to drive Germans out of Poland began much earlier. So why, in your opinion, why wasn’t this fact mentioned in the exhibition?

MvC: If you want to compare Polish atrocities with German ones, then I do not agree. If you want to say that the Poles were anything but angels, then I have already said what I think.

FOCUS: But do you agree that the organizers of the exhibition, in emphasizing German mistreatment of Poland, should also have devoted at least some space to the Poles’ treatment of ethnic Germans?

MvC: It is as I told you; if I were a German, parts of this exhibition would have made me very angry.

FOCUS: Looking back from the perspective of 2003, you could argue that, of all the states involved in unleashing the war, it was Poland that gained the most. The Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia’s border has been pushed 1,000 kilometers to the east. The British Empire no longer exists. Germany lost a third of its territory. France remains France. By contrast, the poor abused Poles have reached the Oder-Neisse frontier. Danzig has become Gdansk and Upper Silesia belongs to Poland. The irony of history?

MvC: May I tell you a story? My late father in law, Gert Leisersohn, was born in Germany in 1922. His father had fought for Germany in World War I and was wounded, yet in 1936 he and his family had to flee for their lives, going all the way to Chile. He once told me that, on 1 September 1939, he felt that while he hated war as much as anybody else, he was very happy that this one had broken out because it was the only way to get rid of Hitler.

FOCUS: Are you saying that anyone who fought Hitler’s Germany was automatically and completely in the right?

MvC: Do you know a greater wrong than Auschwitz?

Barbarossa

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Barbarossa (Redbeard) was the nickname of the medieval German Emperor Frederick I (reigned, 1155-90) whose image graces this post. More pertinent to our business today, it was the name Hitler gave his campaign against the Soviet Union which got under way on 22 June 1941, i.e eighty years ago. Today I want to discuss a few outstanding aspects of the campaign—such as used to shape history throughout the Cold War and in some ways continue to do so right down to the present day.

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First, at the time Barbarossa opened on 22 June 1941 the idea of gaining Lebensraum (living space) for the German people had been obsessing Hitler for almost two decades. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always on his mind. Barbarossa, in other words, was the culmination of everything Hitler had ever sought. The loadstar, so to speak, that, along with the destruction of the Jews, seemed to make sense of the gigantic enterprise on which he embarked, causing all the other pieces to fall into place.

Second, Barbarossa was the largest military operation of all time. 3,500,000 men, over 3,500 aircraft, 3,500 tanks, 20,000 artillery barrels, and 600,000 vehicles (most of them horse-drawn and used for supply as well as dragging the artillery) of every kind. The total number of trains that deployed these forces stood at 17,000; that of railway wagons, at about 850,000. Initially the front was 1,500 miles long. Later it extended over 2,500 or so. Nothing like it had been seen before. Thanks to the introduction and spread of nuclear weapons, capable of taking out entire armies and cities almost instantaneously, nothing like it is likely to be seen again.

Third, it was deliberately planned not simply as a war between states but as one of extermination. First, of any Red Army commissars—political officers—who had the misfortune to fall into German hands. Second, of millions of Red Army prisoners who surrendered and were held under such atrocious conditions as to cause about two thirds of them to die. Third, of the Jews. Fourth, of as many as thirty million civilians in the occupied Soviet territories. The territories themselves were to be occupied and opened to settlers—not just Germans but Dutch and Scandinavians as well.

Fourth, it almost succeeded. By the beginning of December 1941 the forward most German troops were so close to Moscow as to enable them to watch the Kremlin’s spires through their binoculars. The city contained the most important railway knots in the entire USSR; including its immediate suburbs, it also accounted for about forty percent of Soviet industrial production. To say nothing of its symbolic value. As Pushkin wrote, it was welded into the soul of every Russian. Whether the fall of Moscow would have caused Barbarossa to end in some kind of German victory is hard to say. Most certainly, though, it would have prolonged the war and claimed even more victims than it actually did.
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Fifth, the most important factors that led to the German defeat were as follows. A. The sheer size of the theater of war in which entire armies could easily get lost; to this must be added its underdevelopment in terms of transportation, communications, and the like. B. the climate which, in October-April each year, hampered operations by making much of the terrain impassable; first by covering it by mud, then by bringing freezing cold, and then by melting the snow. C. The growing numerical superiority of the Red Army—both in manpower and in resources—which increasingly made itself felt from at least the end of 1941 on. D. The fact that Germany, engaged in a war in the west as well as the east, was never able to concentrate all its resources against the latter; that was particularly true from late 1942 on. E. A command system which, especially at the top and starting from the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, was as good as any and probably superior to the increasingly erratic German one.

Sixth, the German attack almost certainly saved Stalin and the Communist system. Ever since it was founded, the Soviet Union had always been held together in large part by terror. Barbarossa, by bringing the system to verge of destruction and threatening much of the Soviet people with extermination, provided a much-needed boost for that terror. Had it not been for the legacy of the war, the Soviet Union might have collapsed much earlier than it did—and, I suspect, amidst much greater bloodshed too.

*

Now for a larger perspective. Starting in the eighteenth century, first Russia and then the Soviet Union was one of several great powers contending for mastery in Europe as the subcontinent that increasingly dominated all the rest. Now with less success, as in 1854-56 and 1914-1918. Now with more, as in 1813-1815 and 1941-45. The German invasion and its aftermath, by leaving the Soviet Union stronger not only than any other European country but than all of them combined, put an end to this situation. It turned the Soviet Union into a world power, rivalled only by the USA with which it engaged on a “Cold War” that lasted forty-five years.

In 1991, largely owing to internal problems rather than external pressure, the Soviet Union collapsed. And Russia, minus much of the territory and the population that had once belonged to it, reverted to its traditional role—that of one power among several. One that, like all the rest, has its own agenda and its own peculiarities. And with which, willy-nilly, the world will have to live.

The Blueberry Fräuleins and The Frivolity of Evil

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By Bob Barancik

 

Historians estimate about 1,000,000 Jews were exterminated at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland by German Nazi military personnel during World War II.

Another 200,000 innocent people were also murdered there. They included non-Jewish Poles, the mentally challenged, Roma people, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Auschwitz has become the ultimate symbol of man’s inhumanity to man and a stark warning where unchecked antisemitism ends up — at gas chambers and smoking crematoria.

One might easily conclude that the Nazis who organized, administrated, and operated the death camps were raging lunatics and sadists who were consumed by a burning visceral hatred of non-Aryans deemed “life unworthy of life.”

But the reality often is much different and more nuanced.

The first major scholar to publicly expose the more mundane aspects of the world-shattering human evil unleashed by Adolf Hitler was Hannah Arendt. It was her 1963 feature article in the New Yorker Magazine titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem” that brought attention to the routine bureaucracy of mass murder.

Adolf Eichmann was the “architect of the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem.” He was a key operator in the Holocaust, responsible for the assembly and transportation of many of the victims from their countries or origin, mainly the West and the Balkans, to the death camps.

Eichmann had recently been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem for public trial. The popular image of him was as a monster “in the glass booth.” But Arendt saw this genocidal mastermind as “banal,” i.e., ordinary, unexceptional, diminutive, boring.

This led to the conclusion that average, everyday people can easily commit acts of savage brutality and murder under certain types of extreme conditions. Modern social science has largely validated that concept.

But there is another aspect to the personalities of Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust that is seldom talked about or explored. It is the “frivolity of evil” in the hearts and minds of the perpetrators.

By that, I mean a lightheartedness, a silliness, and lack of seriousness.

The Nazi genocide of the Jews required many hundreds of well-trained secretaries, typists, stenographers, clerks, and office supervisors. Although they did not directly work with the Jewish prisoners, these minor administrators were on the premises of the killing centers. This large personnel pool was composed of average young women, largely recruited from the German lower and middle classes.

At Auschwitz, these young women were under the command of senior male military officers. The chief adjutant to the commandant of the camp was a man named Karl Höcker. He was quite respected by his boss and enjoyed hobnobbing with Auschwitz’s elite.

Höcker informally documented many official and unofficial moments of an officer’s life at Auschwitz. The photo album was for his personal enjoyment and a valued souvenir of his military service.

There were many historically significant images among the photos. But the ones that caught my eye and captured my imagination were taken at Solahütte, a little-known rustic SS resort some 20 miles south of Auschwitz. it was a place where the camp’s senior officers and select underlings could go for rest and relaxation from their various tasks. Their leisure pursuits continued even towards the end of the war.

These images were of happy, healthy young women on a fence rail eating fresh blueberries.

The following insights about these photos are from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. (The USHMM now owns the Höcker Album.)

“Several pages are devoted to a day trip for SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries, young women who worked for the SS as communications specialists) on July 22, 1944. They arrive at Solahütte and run down a ramp accompanied to the music of an accordionist. A full-page spread of six photographs entitled ‘Hier gibt es Blaubeeren’ (Here there are blueberries) shows Höcker passing out bowls of fresh blueberries to the young women sitting on a fence. When the girls theatrically finish eating their blueberries for the camera, one girl poses with fake tears and an inverted bowl. Only miles away on the very same day, 150 prisoners (Jews and non-Jews) arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work and killed the remaining members of the transport in the gas chambers.”

The frivolity of the situation, captured on black-and-white film, is deeply consequential because of being so inconsequential. If the viewer does not know the context of these images, one could easily mistake them for public relations photos for a countryside resort or wholesome berry product.

For me, it is not just that normal human beings can be so sadistic or apathetic to the suffering of others — but that their core happiness might not be affected by daily exposure to mass murder.

In a media-saturated online world, horrible events and despicable people become pixelated figures of fun and momentary celebrity. It becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate one’s moral compass when staring at a screen. Disturbing situations that should make us indignant or sick to our stomachs often just get laughed at or intentionally ignored in the endless cavalcade of audio-visual stimulation.

It is easy to condemn these normal fräuleins who could eat fresh blueberries after participating in the mass murder of innocent Jews from a vantage point of 75 years after the end of World War II.

Metaphorically, we are all sitting on a fence rail eating berries. But we can choose to stand up and begin to walk away from our prejudices and hatreds. That is much easier said than done. But even small change of mind and heart can make a difference for the better.

Below are relevant web links for further information on the subject:

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Bob Barancik is an award-winning painter, print maker, and video producer. He received an M.A. from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, dual degrees in fine arts and architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and did postgraduate work in organizational development at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City  He was an active member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Middle East Forum, both in Philadelphia.

His videos on Holocaust and political themes have been screened internationally, including the JVC Tokyo Video Festival and Toronto Jewish Film Festival. In 2010, the Florida Holocaust Museum gave him a large retrospective exhibit from its archive of his artwork.

He and his wife Amy are full-time residents of St. Petersburg, Florida. They also maintain deep connections to Philadelphia and Maine.

My Uncle Aaron

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My late uncle Aaron served in the Jewish Brigade. For those of you who have never heard the term, it was a brigade-strength formation raised by the British among the Jewish population of what was then Mandatory Palestine. Organized and trained in British-occupied Egypt, later it was transferred to Italy where it saw limited, action during the final stages of World War II. Limited not because the soldiers did not want to fight—they did—but because the British did not quite trust them.

Italy, Aaron once told me, was in ruins. As they proceeded south to north from one city to the next, all they saw was ruins. And more ruins. Still more. With people living among them like rats. With no utilities. On the brink of starvation. Begging to sell anything they had—from antiques to their sisters’ bodies. Writing about Nately’s Whore’s kid sister, Joseph Heller in Catch 22 did not have to invent anything. A point Heller did not dwell on was that the Italians may have been even more suspicious of each other than of the conquerors. Their civil war, which had started in 1943 and claimed tens of thousands of lives, was still in progress. Albeit that, as more and more provinces fell under Allied control, it was slowly dying down.

The guy who had started it all, Il Duce Benito Mussolini, was still alive. But not for long. On the 30th of April 1945, while trying to escape into Switzerland, he and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were discovered by left-wing partisans and shot.

Our understanding of the reasoning that drove Mussolini into the war—the kind of reasoning which, he once claimed, King Vittorio Emanuele III had called “geometrical”—is as good as it can be. It all began in 1935-36 when Britain and France disapproved of Italy’s adventure in Ethiopia, driving it into Hitler’s arms. It went on when Mussolini visited Germany in November 1937 and was given a tumultuous reception that greatly impressed him. In March 1938, he did not try to resist the German annexation of Austria, thereby granting Hitler the greatest triumph in his career until then. In May of that year the two countries signed an offensive alliance to which Mussolini gave the name, Il Patto d’Acciaio, The Pact of Steel. However, when Germany went to war in September 1939 the Italians did not join it. Instead, feeling they were not ready, they presented their German friends with a long list of demands for fuel, raw materials, and weapons. So formidable was it that, in the words of Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, it would have killed an ox—if an ox could read it.

Rather than live up of their commitments under the Pact of Steel, the Italians invented a new concept in international law: Nonbelligerenza (non-belligerence). It put them in a very favorable situation, what with both sides currying favor with them. However, it did not last. As France was overrun by Hitler’s legions, Mussolini thought that his hour had struck. All he needed, he told Ciano, was a few thousand dead; they would serve as his entry-ticket to the peace conference he expected.

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This is not the place to list the factors that were responsible for these failures. Including a shocking lack of economic-logistic-technical preparation. Including the failure to set up a combined command organization with Germany similar to the one the U.S and Britain had. Including armed forces that were underequipped with modern weapons. Including a supreme command structure—ironically, named Superesercito, Supermarina, and Superaereo—that did not function as it should. Including low morale both in the forces and among the population in general. When Italy entered the war the latter, called out by the Fascist authorities, demonstrated in favor. But it was not long before any enthusiasm there may have been disappeared.

Instead of assisting its ally, Italy became a burden on it. When the war ended the country lost its colonies as well as some territory in the northeast. That apart, though, the it remained intact. Internally, as already described, all was chaos. But the chaos did not last for very long. Thanks partly to the Marshal Plan, but mainly to Italy’s own efforts, the recovery was rapid. Japan apart, for two decades after 1950 no country showed faster rapid economic growth than Italy did.

For Italy as for much of the world, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which was followed by the oil crisis, proved a turning point. Later, too, there were all sorts of ups and down. Still the country and its system of government survived. Sustained by its own corruption and cumbersome bureaucracy, some people said. As of the time that Corona broke out, the recent financial crisis having been overcome, the country was as prosperous as at any time in its history. And looking forward to a future that would hopefully be no worse.

And why am I telling you all this? Because yesterday, 10 June, was the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war.

Just Published! A Biography of Conscience

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M. van Creveld, A Biography of Conscience, London, Reaktion, 2015.

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Many would consider conscience to be one of the most important, if not the most important, quality that distinguished humans from animals on one hand and machines on the other. However, what is conscience? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely human invention? If so, how did it come into the world? Who invented it, where, when, and against what social background? What did the ancient philosophers have to say about it? How does it relate to religion, Judaism and Christianity in particular? How did conscience survive the secularization of the Western world after 1600 or so, and where is it today? Are there any societies that, not recognizing the idea of conscience, have developed and used other methods for internalizing social control? If so, what are those mechanism like?

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The present volume, the only one of its kind, attempts to provide answers to these and other questions. Well-documented but written in simple, jargon-free language, it starts in ancient Egypt. From there it leads all the way to present day campaigns aimed at hammering issues such as human rights, health and environmental into our consciences. Readers will learn about the Old Testament which, erroneously as it turns out, is normally seen as the fountainhead from which the Western idea of conscience has sprung. They will also meet Antigone, the first person on record ever to explicitly speak of conscience, syneidēsis in Greek, as a basis for action.

Next they will encounter the philosophers Zeno, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca; outstanding Christian thinkers such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and, above all, Luther with his famous saying, “here I stand, I cannot otherwise;” as well as modern intellectual giants. The list opens with Machiavelli, the man who, drawing a sharp line between private and public behavior, admitting conscience into the former but not into the latter. Next come Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Burton Skinner.

Separate chapters are devoted to Japan and China. Both are societies that, rather than relying on conscience as a method of social control, put their trust in shame and reverence instead. There are chapters dealing with the Nazis—starting with Hitler and proceeding downward, did the Nazis have any kind of conscience at all?—as well as the most recent discoveries in robotics and brain science. On the way readers will follow the evolution of conscience in many of its numerous, occasionally strange and even surprising, permutations.

The book concludes by arguing that, the claims of workers in artificial intelligence and brain science notwithstanding, we today are no closer to understanding the nature of conscience than we have ever been. In the words of one contemporary computer expert cum psychotherapist, probably we shall be able to build machines able to mimic conscience before we ever know what conscience really is.

The Fall and Rise of History

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I well remember the time when I fell in love with history. This was 1956 and I was ten years old, living with my parents in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. While rummaging in a storage room, I came across a book with the title (in Dutch), World-History in a Nutshell. Greatly impressed by the story of the small, but brave, ancient Greek people fighting and defeating the far more numerous Persian army, I quickly read it from cover to cover. Much later I learnt that the volume was part of a series issued by the Dutch ministry of education and updated every few years. To the best of my memory the one in my hands did mention World War I but not Hitler; hence it must have dated to the 1920s when my parents went to school.

It was World-History in a Nutshell and the wonderful tales it contained that made me decide I wanted to study history. In 1964 this wish took me to the Hebrew University where I started thinking seriously about what I was trying to do. From beginning to end, my aim was always to understand what happened and why it happened. Though it took me a long time to realize the fact, in doing so I, like countless other modern historians, was following in the footsteps of the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel’s most important propositions, as I came to understand them, could be summed up as follows. First, the past had a real, objective existence. It was, so to speak, solidified present, more or less covered by the sands of time; which meant that, given sufficient effort was devoted to removing the sand, “the truth” about it could be discovered. Second, in the main it consisted not of the more or less accidental, more or less cranky deeds of individuals but was pushed ever-onward by vast, mostly anonymous, spiritual, economic—this was Marx’s particular contribution—social and technological forces none could control. Men and women were carried along by it like corks floating on a stream; now using it to swim in the right direction, now vainly trying to resist it and being overwhelmed by it. Third, the past mattered. It was only by studying the past that both individuals and groups of every kind could gain an understanding as to who they were, where they had come from, and where they wanted to go and might be going.

Starting around the time of Hegel’s death, these assumptions were widely shared. All three of the most important ideologies of the period 1830-1945, i.e. liberalism, socialism/communism and fascism subscribed to it. None more so than Winston Churchill, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Adolf Hitler. The last-named once said that a person who did not know history was like a person without a face. As religion declined in front of secularism history, with Hegel as its high priest, became the source of truth, no less.

To be sure, there were always those who cast doubt on the enterprise. Whether seriously and out of ignorance, as when Henry Ford famously said that history was bunk; or only half-so, as in Walter Sellar’s hilariously funny 1931 best-seller, 1066 and All That. The outcome was a vast outpouring of written works—later, movies as well—and an ever greater increase in the number of students both in- and outside academia.

At the time I took on my studies in 1960s, few people doubted that finding out the historical truth was an important objective in itself. Then, around 1970, things started changing. This time the herald of change was a Frenchman, Michel Foucault (1926-84). The way Foucault saw it, post Hegelian historians—and, looming behind them, his own countryman Rene Descartes—were wrong. Contrary to their delusions, such thing as an objective fact, event, process or text did not exist. Rather, each person interpreted—“read” was the term Foucault’s followers invented for this—each text, process, event and fact in his or own way. Assuming, that is, that these things had any kind of objective existence at all and were not imposed on history ex post facto. The choice of interpretation was determined by each person’s experience and personality; in reality, therefore, the number of possible interpretations was infinite. If, as sometimes happened, this interpretation or that was widely accepted, then this fact only showed that it suited the psychological needs of many people, not that it was more “correct” than any others.

Since then this view has been eating up the study of history like a worm eating up an apple from within. Previously people had written learned tomes about, say, Greek antiquity; how it came into being, what its main characteristics were, how it unfolded, expanded, passed away, and so on. Now they did the same about the way historians had “discovered” or “invented” that antiquity. The same applies to “the middle ages,” “the renaissance,” “the enlightenment,” “the industrial revolution,” and so on and so on. This came dangerously close to saying that history was but a fairy tale and any attempt to write about it was not “science” but fiction—good or bad.

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The implications of this view were tremendous. If all the study of history was capable of yielding was some kind of subjective tale, then of what use could it be in establishing “the truth”? And if it could not help in establishing “the truth,” then what could be the purpose of engaging in it? And how about the remaining social sciences such as political science, international relations, sociology, and so on? Weren’t they, too, based on the assumption that an “objective” past did exist and could be used to understand the present?

For a century and a half it had been assumed that a firm grasp of these subjects would qualify those who had it for many kinds of work not only in academia but in both the public and the private sphere. Now, increasingly degrees in these fields were seen as useless. The more useless they appeared to be, the less capable they were of providing their owners with a reasonable income as well as an acceptable position in society. The less capable they were of providing their owners with an acceptable position in society and a reasonable income, the smaller their perceived uselessness.

And so began the decline of the humanities and many of the social sciences that we see all around us. The lives of an entire generation of young academics have been blighted, given that nobody any more is interested in whatever they may have to say. Finding work outside the universities is even harder; instead of degrees, prospective employers demand “experience” above everything else.

Does that mean that books and movies that deal with the past will soon disappear? Of course not. Rather, it means that the purpose of reading those works has shifted. Instead of analyzing underlying factors and trying to extract “lessons,” people started looking for stories with heroes and villains in them. Instead of looking for the general picture they took an interest in the details; often, needless to say, the juicier the better. Instead of asking, “how we got to where we are now,” they wanted to know what life in the past had felt like. Nowhere was this more true than in my own field, military history. The reason, presumably, being that the vast majority of people in advanced countries no longer had any personal experience of warfare.

Where the demand exists supply will follow. Contrary to the situation as it existed a few decades ago, the most important historians writing today are not academics. They are popular writers, with his difference that the adjective “popular” is now as likely to be used in a complimentary way as in a derogatory one. By and large they do not reflect on underlying theoretical principles, create frameworks, or provide deep analysis. Yet from Antony Beevor in Stalingrad through Max Hastings in Catastrophe to Keith Lowe in Savage Continent, they have a vivid sense for detail and know how to spin a tale. Those tales may be useless in the classroom—having tried to use them there, I know. Yet judging by sales they seem to be filling the psychological needs of many people.

The king is dead; long live the king.