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Louis had sent this over a year ago, and IMO it's taken on new relevance, particularly the part about factional fighting within the Reich leadership and the resulting uncoordinated sources of many Nazi crimes. (Not that Trump is yet Hitler, but the "team" he's assembling has IMO a similar fragmentation and lunatic ad hoc collection of dangerous numbskulls.) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Louis Proyect via Marxism <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 11:03 AM Subject: [Marxism] Hans Mommsen, Who Studied Volkswagen’s Role in Nazi Era, Dies at 85 To: [email protected] ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. ***************************************************************** 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.” _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt ions/marxism/acpollack2%40gmail.com _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
