Why Did the Heavens Not Darken

by Arno J. Mayer

Book Overview

This highly acclaimed book presents a radically new view of the origins of the Holocaust. Mayer argues that the slaughter of the Jews was not part of Hitler's plan from the start, but came about only when the Nazis' massive campaign aagainst Russia foundered. Illustrated.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394571541
• ISBN13: 9780394571546
• Release Date: December 1988
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 492 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Nazi Genocide of Jews in the Context of Nazi Genocides of Non-Jews

In most Holocaust materials, the Nazi murders of non-Jews are ignored or relegated to a footnote. In contrast, Mayer consistently interweaves the fates of Jews and non-Jews, finding parallels in the escalations of Nazi acts against both groups. He takes a strongly functionalist (as opposed to intentionalist) view of the Holocaust, and rejects the premise that the mass killings of Jews by the likes of Einsatzgruppen units on the Russian front in 1941 were already the fruits of an exterminationist policy. He contends that the turning point in the war came in late 1941, when Nazi Germany failed to force the collapse of the USSR. It was at this time that the Nazi movement became desperate and self-radicalized. Hardened by its military misfortunes and the increasing savagery of the war, it then turned fully against the Jews. The author dispels some Holocaust myths. To begin with, he realizes that the 1939 German conquest of Poland was motivated by lebensraum, not by any desire to exploit and exterminate Poland's Jews. (p. 11). The same holds for the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. We have heard the bizarre argument that, whereas Jews had no choice but death, the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis had a choice. Mayer dispels this nonsense. In speaking of all those who died in WWII, he comments: "Easily over 50 percent and probably closer to 70 percent of the dead were noncombatants. Among Europe's 18 million civilian war dead, the bulk was Russians and Poles, without counting Russian and Polish Jews." (p. 13). Mayer doesn't dichotomize the usually-slow deaths of inmates at Nazi concentration camps and the quick deaths of inmates at extermination camps. (e. g., p. 349). Both were forms of hyperexploitation that occurred within the context of universal economic mobilization and of many forms of deportation and resettlement. (p. 349). Concentration and extermination camps both grew in capacity after 1941. For instance, "ordinary" concentration camps held about 100,000 registered inmates in late 1942. (p. 336). By January 1945, the number of inmates had grown to about 713,000 (p. 424), and this doesn't count the 700,000-800,000 who had already died or been killed in such "ordinary" camps. (p. 336). It has been argued that the gas chambers had been used specifically on Jews. This is untrue. Mass gassings of the infirm and mentally ill of Germany (p. 383) and of German-occupied Poland (p. 385) had been performed long before the Jews met the same fate. Mayer uses the term Judeophobia for anti-Jewish attitudes and reserves the term anti-Semitism to anti-Jewish acts. There is nowadays a tendency to treat non-Jews as spectators of the Jewish tragedy, and to blame Poles and other Slavs for "being mostly indifferent" to Jewish deaths. The likes of Jan Blonski, Michael Steinlauf, and Jan T. Gross have even portrayed the Nazi destruction of the Jews as some kind of epiphany experienced by non-Jewish Poles. All of the foregoing fatuous notions are di

Beyond Horror

Between the invasion of Russia in June of 1941 and the withdrawal of German troops from near Moscow in the winter of 1941-42 the SS killed about a half a million civilians behind German lines, 9/10ths of whom were Jewish. Most were killed as the invasion began to falter. Despite this fact, the author claims that these killings were not part of a preplanned final solution, but a result of a series of factors including Nazi identification of Jews with communism, the hardened anti-Semitism of the SS, the role of emancipated Jews in the Soviet Union as workers and party members, the SS picking up on pogroms of the anticommunist nationals in such places as Latvia, and Bessarabia, and Jewish residence in hard-fought-for conquered cities. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union to eliminate Jewish Communism from the world. Slavo-Jewish-communists were untermenschen and the war in the East was a total war of annihilation and subjugation. The Germany army participated in this. Stalin's licensing of guerilla warfare behind German lines provided a convenient excuse for military brutality and acceptance of SS atrocities behind the lines. In casual comments Hitler and other Nazis suggested that death of civilians and captured soldiers made the job of clearing the East for settlement easier. Of the three million Soviet war prisoners very few survived. They died of cold, hunger and overwork. When asked in 1941 by the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte how they were feeding all their Soviet war prisoners, a German general replied nonchalantly, "By now they are eating each other." Though thousands were shot, they were not lined up in front of trenches and exterminated as were the Jews of Kiev at Babi Yar. Why did Mayer write another history of the "Final Solution?" He seems to be addressing the accepted rendition of history that the Holocaust is a unique event for mankind, the planned result of Nazi anti-Semitism. The book reads like an argument with a non-present co-conversant. Mayer seems to be trying to refute claims that a systematic planned murder of the Jews was part of Nazi thinking years before its actual execution. Mayer's aim is to place the Holocaust in an historical context of the Nazis identifying Jews with communists and frustration due to the failure of the drive to the East. The explanations he comes up with are apparently objectionable to people who regard the Holocaust as the most egregious event in human history, more horrible than anything that happened to any other peoples, a policy embedded in early Nazi thinking and carried out by modern bureaucratic and technological means. These people often argue that its special nature is reason for special compensation to Jews. Having taught at Brandeis University for thirty years, I would come into contact with such opinions. Because this sentiment was overwhelmingly present on campus (and maybe official dogma of the institution), I tended to avoid the subject, engaging in other pre

the previous review is better than mine

Mayer's book is essential reading for most who have a stereotyped view of WWII. Note particularly his use of the word Judeocide instead of Holocaust (a term coined I think by Lucy Davidowitz in anger over Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem--I may be mistaken) "Holocaust" was a word never used to describe the destruction of European Jewry until the sixties-to that I can testify. Personally I believe Hitler's primary aim was the destuction of the Soviet Union and the Jews "were in the way" the second largest cohort of people murdered by the Nazis were Soviet Prisoners of war 3.6 million. I think Mayer could have been even bolder but that is my prejudice. A great book and a fine review by the previous reviewer.

The anti-thesis of Goldhagen

I suggest you read A. Mayer's book chapter for chapter with Goldhagen's. Mayer's book takes on the question of the final solution from the point of view that the two fronts, and therefore the two regions of European Jewry were dealt with in different ways. German anti-semitism as well as the worlds anti-semitism weighed out a heavier toll on those Jews in the East than those in the West. Nations allowed Western Jews into their countries, but closed their boarders to the Eastern Jews. And as the Nazis war machine progressed it installed death camps in Poland, the East. But, no Death Camps are built in France,Belgium, or Austria. The East was reserved for the final solution. Mayer, does not believe Hitler had planned the final solution but developed it as he went along. Case in point, Hitler at first expelled Jews to the four corners of the World, trying to get them out of Germany. If the Final solution was Hitler's end all allong why scatter the population you plan to exterminate? Mayer delves into these questions. He does not let Germans off the hook, nor the rest of the world. Goldhagen's work is the exact opposite of Mayer's book. Goldhagen believes in the final solution from Hitler's inception onward in Germany. He puts the blame intirely on the Germans of that period and no one else. He does not distuinguish from the different fronts. And, he unties the history of the Nazis from the Germans of today. His most defining chapter is that of the einzatzgruppe. It is the horror of these special battalions that decimated the Eastern Jewish population and caused a need for the Nazis to create camps to put those they had not been able to kill in the first onslaught. The basis of this comes from another book by Browning that is from the police reports interviewing the Germans that were in these special forces. In Brownings book he looks at the evil doers themselves and how they justified, broke down, and how the majority of them became murders. These three books I highly recommend.