Everyone is responsible for his actions. That sounds banal and is actually also a matter of course. But it is precisely in relation to the crimes of the Third Reich it was decades frowned upon in Germany, to say this simple truth or to write.
The responsibility of German society to have moved into the public consciousness, perhaps is the most important merit of the historian Hans Mommsen. How was now known, he died after a long illness on Thursday, his 85th birthday, in Tutzing at Lake Starnberg.
had since the 1960s Mommsen stated repeatedly in essays and books that not only Hitler and a few thousand SS thugs World War and Genocide translated into work. Rather, there were millions of German, the more or less strongly contributed to the Holocaust, which benefited or at least looked the other way.
Simple answers led not
But as much as Mommsen the idea of all-controlling” strong dictator “Hitler refused, so he fought the other extreme, the one as a word” can denote collective guilt “. Derlei simple answers to the question of how it was possible, did not lead on, was his firm conviction. Instead, he offered complex explanations, even if they were long uncomfortable and sometimes difficult to explain.
About his thesis of the “cumulative radicalization” that ultimately the led millions of industrial mass murder of Europe’s Jews. In his classic, widely reprinted essay entitled “The realization of utopia”, he pointed out that it took in the Third Reich none at Hitler’s command to put the Holocaust into work.
In fact, the release of enough” leader “, as radical as ever only conceivable with all Jews deal, which one was getting hold to allow men to take initiatives independently of mass destruction from the apparatus. This model explains more than any other, such as the murder of the Jews could become a reality.
Mommsen suffered from a lack of understanding for his work
But his researches were innovative not only in terms of the Holocaust. Already in the first half of the 1990s, he developed an important study on forced labor in the VW Group – years before the issue was politically sensitive by lawsuits from survivors in America
Mommsen suffered when his often complex, were not just not understood in concise formulas for reducing explanations to the general public. 1996 claimed the American political scientist Daniel Goldhagen simply, “the Germans” during the period of the Third Reich had almost all been driven by a murderous anti-Semitism.
Mommsen attacked him sharply and held Goldhagen before that so nothing was explained. Nevertheless, the Americans flew the hearts of the German public to – to be sustainable but whose claim has not been proven, was contrary to Mommsen’s thesis, the first time in 1983 published and since confirmed by all the acts finds in newly opened archives
A brilliant stylist Mommsen was not, although the talent lay in his family since his great-grandfather was the historian and Nobel Theodor Mommsen. On November 5, 1930 Born along with his twin brother Wolfgang J., his youth was marked by the confrontation with National Socialism. Because his father William, also a historian, had been relieved and retired early in the course of denazification his professorship.
The sharpened his sense of the mechanisms of a society shifted the responsibility was indeed deported. As assistant of the exiled by the Nazis, but returned historian Hans Rothfels Mommsen grew up in the newly established German contemporary history into it.
In his habilitation on “officialdom in the Third Empire “(1966), he developed the first time the basic idea of a social history of the Third Reich.
p16″ class = “Until the last months of life Mommsen
Since 1968, professor in Bochum, Mommsen has taken on numerous research professorships at the most prestigious universities in the world. Until his last months of life in it-reviewed, perceptive and sometimes scathing, but always with a clear view of real progress and for mere aberrations.
one of his life topics the Reichstag fire of February 1933. As early as 1964 he end had clearly explained why the fully confessed Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe was the sole arsonist. Until the current Wikipedia contribution but Mommsen was personally attacked for its scientifically convincing case, partly reviled. Injured he reacted sometimes sharper than was sensible.
Since his retirement in 1996 Mommsen lived on Lake Starnberg near Munich, where his wife Margarete taught Political Science. His large library, compiled over decades, he founded successively especially the German Historical Institute in Moscow.
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