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NY Times, Nov. 18 2015
Hans Mommsen, Who Studied Volkswagen’s Role in Nazi Era, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX
Hans Mommsen, considered the leading German historian of the Third
Reich, whose work encompassed the origins of the Holocaust as well as a
widely publicized report documenting Volkswagen’s wartime use of slave
labor, died in Tutzing, near Munich, on Nov. 5, his 85th birthday.
His wife, Margareta Mommsen, confirmed his death.
The Volkswagen study, published in 1996, was the product of some $2
million in financing by Volkswagen and eight years’ research by
Professor Mommsen and his co-author, Manfred Grieger. Carl Hahn, the
Volkswagen chairman who commissioned it, did so expressly to examine the
wartime role of the company, one of a number of German concerns to use
slave labor in those years.
The finished report, “Das Volkswagenwerk und Seine Arbeiter im Dritten
Reich” (“Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich”), drew on
rarely seen company archives. Spanning more than a thousand pages, it
chronicled Volkswagen’s use of slaves — among them Soviet prisoners of
war and Jews from Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen — to build
automobiles and armaments during the Nazi era.
The son of a distinguished multigenerational family of historians,
Professor Mommsen was known internationally for his writings on the Nazi
regime and on the Weimar Republic it had supplanted. Writing in The New
York Times in 1997, the Israeli writer and historian Amos Elon called
him “the dean of German Holocaust studies.”
Historians have often characterized the Third Reich as a streamlined,
top-down operation that crisply carried out Hitler’s orders. Professor
Mommsen, in contrast, challenged the idea that Nazi ideology — and the
workings of the Nazi machine — stemmed solely from Hitler and his
high-ranking associates.
He described the Reich as a more chaotic entity than was generally
supposed, a tangled, inefficient web of factions competing for the
Führer’s favor. While in no way absolving Hitler of responsibility for
the Holocaust, Professor Mommsen characterized him as a sometimes weak
leader who could be goaded by underlings into setting murderous policies
in motion.
“You are confronted with never-ending rivalries between the Nazi
chieftains, while the system is held together by the Führer cult,”
Professor Mommsen said in a 1997 interview with Yad Vashem, the
Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem. “The political
decision-making process remained completely informal, and there was no
institutional facility in which to discuss critical issues between
divergent power holders. As a consequence, the alleged unity of the will
did not really exist.”
Professor Mommsen did not, however, endorse the position of the American
political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose best-selling 1996
book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” argued that the Holocaust had
sprung in no small measure from the mass anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans.
“He does not have any understanding of the diversities within German
anti-Semitism, and he does not know very much about the internal
structure of the Third Reich, either,” Professor Mommsen, who often
opposed Mr. Goldhagen in public debates, said of him in the Yad Vashem
interview.
Hans Mommsen was born on Nov. 5, 1930, in Marburg, Germany. His
great-grandfather Theodor Mommsen received the 1902 Nobel Prize in
Literature for his historical writings, notably a study of ancient Rome.
Hans’s father, Wilhelm, was a historian who lost his academic post in
1945 after he was accused of being insufficiently de-Nazified.
Hans’s identical twin brother, Wolfgang, who died in 2004, was also a
noted historian, as was an older brother, Karl.
Hans Mommsen studied at the universities of Marburg, Tübingen and
Heidelberg. He taught at Heidelberg before joining the faculty of Ruhr
University Bochum, in west-central Germany. At his death he was an
emeritus professor of modern history there.
Professor Mommsen’s Volkswagen report was notably critical of Ferdinand
Porsche, a Nazi Party member who had founded Volkswagen in the 1930s.
(After the war, Porsche introduced the sports car that bears his name.)
Volkswagen had the enthusiastic support of Hitler, who wanted to produce
an affordable “people’s car” — the Beetle, introduced in the late ’30s.
During the war years, Professor Mommsen’s report asserted, Porsche had
regarded the company’s use of slave labor, and the many deaths that
resulted, with casual indifference.
Porsche, the authors wrote, “walked through these crimes like a
sleepwalker.”
By the time their report appeared, Mr. Hahn had been replaced as
Volkswagen’s chairman by Ferdinand Piëch, a grandson of Ferdinand
Porsche. Mr. Piëch said publicly that the report, which remains
untranslated into English, constituted a deliberate attack on his family.
In interviews at the time, Professor Mommsen described Mr. Piëch’s
assertion as “a huge misunderstanding.”
(Mr. Piëch was ousted from Volkswagen this April, at 78, in a highly
public power struggle. In September, the victor, Martin Winterkorn,
resigned as Volkswagen’s chief executive after the company admitted it
had equipped some 11 million of its diesel cars with “defeat devices”
designed to circumvent emissions tests.)
Professor Mommsen’s wife, the former Margareta Reindl, a political
scientist whom he married in 1966, is his only immediate survivor.
His books available in English translation include “From Weimar to
Auschwitz” (1991), “The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy” (1996),
“Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich” (2003)
and “Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under
the Third Reich” (2009).
Throughout his career, Professor Mommsen stressed that the malign
inefficiency he ascribed to the Third Reich was scarcely confined to
that time and place.
“This phenomenon was not unique and certainly not restricted to the Nazi
system,” he said in the Yad Vashem interview. “The case of the Vietnam
War shows similarities, because the atrocities committed by American
troops happened without any clear responsibility.”
He added: “The effects of informal politics, therefore, cannot be
overestimated.”
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