Submitted by: David Hackett
              dhackett@utep.edu


As editor and translator of the _The Buchenwald Report_,
reviewed on this list on October 13 by Harold Marcuse, I was
pleased to see that despite lengthy criticisms and objections
the reviewer ultimately welcomed the publication of this source
and praised it as an "excellent teaching tool." However, I
thought some of the criticisms he raised were both unwarranted
and potentially misleading, and that in the spirit of scholarly
dialogue that this list encourages, a detailed response ought to
be offered.

The general thrust of Marcuse's remarks is that the book should
have been more scholarly, with a longer introduction, more
footnotes, and a more complete index. Let me say that early in
the publication process a decision was made to pitch this book
to a general audience, including students in history classes.
Size and length (180,000 words and 400 pages) became important
issues, both from the point of view of reading length and the
price charged at the bookstore. I was quite willing to make the
necessary compromises to achieve these goals, because like the
reviewer I too believed it would make an excellent teaching
tool. Another important decision was not to omit any portions of
the text, except for several lists of names, and in only a few
places in Chapter 9 was the text slightly abridged (288f).
Otherwise, the report is complete as originally submitted in
1945 by PWD-SHAEF, and does not, as the reviewer complains,
contain only 70% of the reports. (The later figure refers to the
degree of overlap with two similar collections held at the
Buchenwald Archives.) With these goals in mind, it was necessary
to exercise some restraint in the number of footnotes, as well
as the length of the introduction, bibliography and index. In
the index, it was decided not to list those whose names appeared
only once or those for whom the accuracy of the name and its
spelling could not be verified. Thus it is true that some of the
authors of individual testimonies do not appear in the index.

A second theme of the review is that Harold Marcuse repeatedly
questions the scholarship involved in the text, without always
having correct information himself. For example, in paragraph 7
he states his annoyance that Hackett "gives the wrong liberation
dates for Mauthausen and Theresienstadt, even though he cites
literature with the correct information." Well, I decided to
check this information more closely. In the case of Mauthausen,
I gave the date of May 8, taken exactly from Bridgman as cited,
while Abzug gives May 5, but in fact the correct date is May 6.
In the case of Theresienstadt I stated May 8, where Bridgman
gives May 7, but in fact May 8, attested by numerous sources, is
correct. (The most authoritative source on chronology now is the
new publication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: _1945: The
Year of Liberation_.) Similarly, he takes me to task for not
discussing the fate of Otto Foerschner, later commandant at
Dora, while repeatedly spelling the name Foerscher himself. He
also asserts that the PWD report was not the first report on
Buchenwald, that the first was an American report made on April
24, 1945. But I quoted that report in the Introduction (5),
giving it a full citation (381fn6) and referring to it several
other times, even though it is already well-known to readers of
Robert Abzug's 1985 book. "The list goes on," as the reviewer
says.

Third, the reviewer accuses me of being unaware of the work by
Lutz Niethammer et. al., _Der 'gesaeuberte' Antifaschismus: Die
SED und die roten Kapos von Buchenwald_ (1994). Indeed, this was
true; I did not see the book until after mine appeared. The
final draft of  _The Buchenwald Report_ was submitted in
November 1993 and by the time Niethammer's book appeared, my
book was already at the page proof stage. Indeed, as Niethammer
points out in the Introduction, work on the book by a team of
archivists and himself did not even begin until Easter 1994
(12-13) and the book was rushed into print within a matter of
months by Akademie Verlag of Berlin. It is an extremely valuable
piece of scholarship and reveals much about the Communist inmate
leadership that I wish  had been available at the time I was
working on my book. To me, the most intriguing part of it is the
discovery that the document they uncovered from the SED party
archives, judging from the excerpt printed on 198-206,  is
indeed the same text as the Main Report in my edition of  _The
Buchenwald Report_.

However, I might point out in the spirit of nit-picking, that
the Niethammer volume is full of errors, perhaps due to the
extreme haste with which it was prepared. For example, an easily
verifiable piece of information-- the date of the turnover of
Thuringia to the Soviets by the US-- July 4, 1945-- is
incorrectly given as July 14 (335fn16); in other places simple
proofreading errors are indicated by dates such as 19546 (340).
That error occurs in a footnote where an American military
government officer-- Richard Gutman is incorrectly identified as
Harry Guthman (340fn27). Such things obviously do make one
wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the information
provided. As for the climate of controversy in Germany out of
which the Niethammer volume appears, I am aware of the
continuing controversies over the future role of the Buchenwald
camp and museum and which aspects of its history are to be
presented there. In 1993 I  wrote a conference paper about the
political (mis)uses of the Buchenwald monument by the GDR
regime: "Buchenwald: Symbol and Metaphor for the Changing
Political Culture of  East Germany," to be published in _Studies
in GDR Culture and Society_, 15/16 (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, forthcoming).

Finally, Marcuse's other main point is that I failed to discuss
the role of the Communist leadership in the administration of
the camp. Indeed, I did not devote a section of the Introduction
to that topic, as I felt I had more important (and previously
undocumented) matters about the origins of the report to cover.
I also did not think that the fate of the Communists should take
preeminence over the fates of the 54,000 prisoners of all
categories-- Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals,
Dutch, French, Poles, and Russians (among others)-- who died at
the Nazi camp. The role of the Communists in the camp is
discussed in all the previous literature that has appeared on
the camp since 1945, and by Kogon himself in his book. To this,
I had little to add that was new. I certainly provided numerous
hints in the Introduction that the role of the Communists was a
significant issue-- which the reviewer himself did not miss--
and left it to the intelligent reader to make his or her own
judgment about the ethical issues involved. Certainly, those
ethical ambiguities emerge rather clearly from the passages
dealing with the selection of prisoners for transfer or
transport by the Labor Records Office. Indeed, the main reason
these prisoners were used as sources for the report was that by
guaranteeing their own longevity they were (in many cases) the
witnesses with the most seniority, who could therefore
reconstruct the history of the camp from its beginnings. Neither
Kogon nor Baumeister, who played the key roles in writing the
Main Report, were Communists, nor were many of the prisoners who
provided Individual Reports, especially the Jewish prisoners who
provide evidence of the Holocaust in Chapter 12. (Curiously, the
reviewer has nothing to say about these latter reports in his
lengthy review.)

Obviously, as can be seen from what has been said above, the
controversies will continue in the future over the role of
Buchenwald concentration camp in history. There is an
urgent need for accurate historical scholarship on its history,
which I feel is only just beginning to emerge at the present
time. If Harold Marcuse is working on a book in this area, I
look forward to seeing it appear in the near future. In the
meantime, I am working on a book myself that seeks to answer at
least some of the unanswered questions posed in his review.

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