INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 1996

Mr. Goldhagen's thesis is hardly original. It is just a more virulent version of the old collective guilt idea — a historically and morally detestable category.

As a Fulbright graduate fellow in Germany in 1971-72, I interviewed hundreds of Wehrmacht rank and file and thousands of average Germans on the question of who knew what when about the Holocaust. I thoroughly disagree with Mr. Goldhagen.

There is a long way between knowing that the German state was anti-Semitic and knowing about the Final Solution, which after all was a state secret. The transcripts of the Nuremberg trials reveal that the prosecutors found it altogether plausible that the bulk of the German people knew little or nothing about Auschwitz and the death squads.

Moreover, the use of special language — "evacuation" rather than "elimination" — and the location of all extermination camps outside the Reich were logical measures to limit knowledge about the murders. Of course, some Germans heard rumors and others saw trains transporting Jews to the East. But who in 1943 or 1944 could have guessed that the Jews were going to their deaths instead of being sent to labor camps to support the German war effort?

The California citizen who saw his Japanese-American neighbors shipped off to internment camps in 1942 did not assume that they would be killed and, of course, they were not.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust today, but let us not be anachronistic and assume, without solid evidence, that the German people knew about or approved of this monstrous and insane extermination policy.

Such an assumption is tantamount to the defamation of a people as a race of murderers and comes close to what the Germans call Volksverhetzung — inciting the people to racial hatred.

ALFRED DE ZAYAS.

Geneva.