Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

Abstract

NORMAN SOLKOFF: Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect. Lanham, NY: Oxford University Press of America, 2001, 357 pp., ISBN 0-7618-2028-0. This compelling book was inspired by a collaborative teaching effort between a historian and a psychologist. The historian, William Sheridan Allen writes in the foreword: I feel that the book should be an excellent resource for both college students and educated lay persons grappling with the major issues of the He is correct. His colleague, the psychologist Norman Solkoff, has written a masterful text filled with useful information concisely presented and eminently readable. Professor Solkoff offers commentary and insights from a psychological perspective that inform that complicated Jewish tragedy known as the Holocaust. The twelve chapters that comprise this book are cohesive and their organization is explained by the author (pp. 9-10). The chapter Authoritarianism and Conformity is an excellent review of studies relevant to human behavior, generally, but made explicit in the context of the history of Nazi Germany. The focus on the Holocaust enables Solkoff to illustrate how behavioral theories and dynamics manifested themselves in the behavior of Nazis, specifically, the German people, generally, and in the deep-- rooted anti-Semitism of most European countries. The first four chapters which include Anti-Semitism and Aggression and Violence provide the necessary background for a fascinating treatment of the succeeding discussion of Genocide: Euthanasia in Nazi Germany, Hitler, and Leading Nazis. The chapter on anti-Semitism was particularly unsettling. Solkoff describes how anti-Semitism fulfills psychological needs of anti-Semites. His considered overview, including how the defense mechanisms of externalization, projection, and displacement are utilized to identify and denigrate a particular victim group, shows a frighteningly close relationship to modern-day antiSemitism now spreading through the Islamic world. The similarities to pre-World War II European anti-Semitism are inescapable. It is interesting that Solkoff appears comfortable with psychodynamic terminology in explaining anti-Semitism, yet frequently dismisses psychoanalytic theory. However, he does so correctly because psychoanalysis failed to adapt its potentially useful constructs to the requirements of describing survivor trauma and to the psychotherapeutic treatment of Holocaust survivors. It is, therefore, no surprise that Bruno Bettelheim attracts Solkoff's attention in Surviving the Ghetto and Camps. Bettelheim's analytic observations as described in a 1943 article about his prewar incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, smeared every fellow prisoner with his biased interpretations, particularly that inmates regressed to an earlier and childlike state (p. 199). He asserted that it was every man for himself and ignored evidence that some inmates made heroic efforts to support one another. Bettelheim continued to pontificate on the coping behavior of camp inmates well into the 1970s, gradually obscuring the fact that he was not in death camps and contrary to eyewitness testimony from death-camp survivors like the authors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and psychiatrists Viktor Frankl and Leo Eitinger. Regretfully, Solkoff is forced to return to Bettelheim again in his chapter on Complicity and Resistance because Bettelheim also spent his postwar years expounding on what Jews should have done to resist. Mostly, resistance proved the quickest path to a gruesome death and, of course, Bettelheim himself did not resist. As he wrote: [S]urvival was largely a matter of luck, of managing not to be killed (p. 201). And that was in a camp not yet committed to the murder of every inmate. Bettelheim's postwar Holocaust-related writings are of little value and have been discredited by a large number of far more credible survivors and authors, (Richard Pollak, Leo Eitinger, Ernst Federn to name but a few). …