Erstarrte Geschichte : Faschismus und Holocaust im Spiegel der Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtspropaganda der DDR

In the first postwar years, survivors, politicians, and scholars in the Soviet Zone of occupation could deal freely with the Holocaust. A period of silence followed during the years of "anti-Zionist" persecution. From 1953 onwards historians could again deal with the subject, but only in accordance with the directives of the SED (the Communist Party) and for its purposes. The basis from which it was forbidden to deviate was the "Dimitroff formula" of the Comintern of 1935, which posited the primacy of economics in monopoly capital's instrumentalization of the Nazi dictatorship against communism. The persecution of the Jews was incidental: Aryanization and slave labor were economically profitable, and antisemitism distracted the masses from the class struggle. Secondly, historians were to show that the mass of Germans had been anti-fascist; the DDR was now their state, whereas West Germany remained a haven for Nazi criminals and for the old monopolies. Antisemitic incidents in West Germany received wide publicity. The regime obstructed the work of historians (like Helmut Eschwege) who went their own way. In the late 1980s, when the DDR was wooing the Jews (having overestimated their political influence in the West), it encouraged research on the Holocaust as part of its elaborate "Kristallnacht" commemorations; historians were given more leeway, but the "Dimitroff formula" was still paramount. Comments that early phases of the Nazi persecution of Jews might have had partly economic motives, but it is hard to see the economic rationale in the extermination of an entire people. Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-315) and index. 320 pages ; 25 cm.