hermod wrote:Sannhet wrote:Goering didn't dispute the use of the term Endlösung in general. He disputed the use of it in that specific document, which he authored.
Goering was a NSDAP party official from 1923 (age 30) to 1945 (age 52), a very long period of time. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in the regime used the term
Endlösung before 1942, when it first appears in the regime's internal writing, in a memorandum (Wannsee) (Goering was not present at Wannsee).
When I see and read Goering's dispute of the term in the March 1946 Nuremberg session, although he does not deny that it "ever appeared," although it is true that he is talking about one 1939 document as you say, the nature or what he said and how he said it suggests, to me, that Goering himself seems to have:
(1) not been very aware of the term, if he remembered it at all having perhaps seen it briefly (22 years as a party official, imagine how many memoranda he saw, read/skimmed, and signed!)
(2) believed that the term had no special, secret/sinister significance;
(3) believed that the term was obscure enough that his dispute of the term would be "decisive" (Goering, prefacing his dispute of Final Solution as it appeared in the English translation, said, "Und jetzt kommt das entscheidende Wort, das falsch übersetzt wurde" [Now comes the decisive word which has been mistranslated]). Listening to Goering's voice during his dispute of the term, he seems very confident that this dispute is a winning strategy. If he had believed that
Endlösung could easily be shown by the prosecutor to have been widespread, he would have spoken differently and with more reservation, not believed the dispute "decisive." If the term was as central to NS Regime ideology as current historiography insists, disputing one instance of the term would seem trivial, would not strike the defendant as decisive.
(4) Recalled with confidence his use of
Gesamtlösung in previous years.
Goering never tries to make a defense of the term
Endlösung itself, which, together with how he breezily disputes the term in translation that day, as we have been discussing, implies that he did not believe the term to have been widespread or important. He may have been unaware of the (so-called) Wannsee 'Conference' itself or not recalled it well, as it was a minor administrative meeting anyway. In summary, sitting there that day in March 1946, had Goering believed the term
Endlösung to have been so important, he presumably would have spoken very differently.
So I do think there is reason to believe that this "Final Solution Endlösung' / Gesmatlosung" affair is a small example, a typical case actually, of top NS Regime officials at Nuremberg
unaware of central aspects to the Holocaust story. It is even more convincing to me because it is not that Goering said "I didn't know," it's that he
shows us that he doesn't know, by his very choice of self-defense strategy! If he "knew" and was lying, he would have chosen a different defense strategy. He could not have known, of course, how hugely inflated that obscure term would become, that everyone in the West knows it 75 years later.
