"Despite the importance and centrality of antisemitism, it cannot serve as the exclusive explanation of murder and murderers": David Bankier's (1947-2010) path in Holocaust research

Dan Michman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

Abstract

Summarizes the scholarly work of David Bankier, a leading Israeli historian of the Holocaust. His main spheres of interest were the Nazi Final Solution and the attitude of German society, during the Nazi era and after, toward the Holocaust. Bankier dismissed the idea that the Nazi regime succeeded in recruiting the masses to support its anti-Jewish policy through indoctrination. He criticized sharply both the "rational" theory of the Final Solution, proposed by Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, and Goldhagen's thesis of eliminationist antisemitism. Bankier showed that it was Hitler who engineered the Nazi anti-Jewish policy; he intervened in all of its stages. He also argued that the Germans, the populations of the occupied countries, and the free world possessed a measure of knowledge on the Nazi genocide due to the system in which the Nazis released information that he called "imposed guesswork". In recent years Bankier was greatly preoccupied in his research with the question of the self-examination of Germans and other peoples in Europe in light of the scope of the crime against the Jews.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)15-45
Number of pages31
JournalYad Vashem Studies
Volume38
Issue number1
StatePublished - 2010

Bibliographical note

English and Hebrew.

RAMBI Publications

  • RAMBI Publications
  • Bankier, David
  • Antisemitism -- Historiography
  • Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Historiography
  • Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Germany
  • Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
  • National socialism

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