Editing Primo Levi (section)

== Views ==

=== Nazi death camps versus Soviet gulags ===
Levi vigorously repudiated [[historical revisionist]] attitudes in German historiography that emerged in the ''[[Historikerstreit]]'', led by the works of people like [[Andreas Hillgruber]] and [[Ernst Nolte]], who drew parallels between Nazism and Stalinism.<ref>Ernesto Ferrero, 'Cronologia,' in Primo Levi, ''Opere,'' [[Einaudi]] vol. 1, 1987 p. lxi.</ref> Levi rejected the idea that the labor camp system depicted in [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]'s ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' and that of the Nazi {{lang|it|Lager}} ({{langx|de|link=no|Konzentrationslager}}; see [[Nazi concentration camps]]) were comparable. The death rate in Stalin's gulags was 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the extermination camps, he estimated it to be 90–98%.<ref>Appendix to an Italian schools edition of {{lang|it|Se questo è un uomo}}, reprinted in  ''Opere'' Einaudi, 1987 vol. 1, pp. 185–212 [199].</ref><ref>Thomson, ''Primo Levi,'' 2019 p. 523.</ref><ref>Primo Levi, ''Il buco nero di Auschwitz,'' [[La Stampa]] 22 January 1987.</ref>

His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews were a horror unique in history because the goal was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior. He noted that it was highly organized and mechanized, and entailed the degradation of Jews to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.<ref>''The Drowned and the Saved'' (1986) Abacus ed. (1988) p.  100.</ref>

The purpose of the Nazi [[extermination camp]]s was not the same as the purpose of Stalin's ''[[gulag]]s'', Levi wrote in an appendix to ''If This Is a Man'', though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell."<ref>(Abacus 2001 ed., p. 391)</ref> The goal of the {{lang|de|Lager}} was the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe, and no one could renounce Judaism, because the Nazis considered Jews a [[Racial antisemitism|racial group]] rather than a [[religious antisemitism|religious group]]. Levi, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before [[World War II]], but the [[Italian racial laws]] and the Nazi camps impressed his [[Jewish identity|identity as a Jew]] upon him. Of the many children who were deported to the camps, almost all of them were murdered.<ref>Appendix to an Italian schools edition of {{lang|it|Se questo è un uomo}}, section 6, reprinted in: {{lang|it|Se questo è un uomo}} – {{lang|it|La tregua}} Einaudi, Torino (1989) p. 339 {{lang|it|"... nei Lager tedeschi la strage era pressoché totale: non si fermava neppure davanti ai bambini, che furono uccisi nelle camere a gas a centinaia di migliaia, cosa unica fra tutte le atrocità della storia umana." "... in the German camps the massacre was almost total: it did not even stop in front of children, who were killed in the gas chambers by the hundreds of thousands, something unique among all of the [[Genocides in history|atrocities of human history]]."}}</ref>

=== German people ===
According to biographer Ian Thomson, Levi intentionally excluded from ''If This Is a Man'' any experiences with Germans who helped him and included "collective condemnations, coloured by the author's rage, of the German people". However, Levi's opinion of Germans improved through his friendship with a German woman named Hety Schmitt-Maas. Her father had lost his job and she had been expelled from school due to their anti-Nazi beliefs. For 17 years, Levi and Schmitt-Maas discussed "their shared hatred of Nazism" together in their letters to each other until Schmitt-Maas died in 1983.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Thomson |first=Ian |date=2007-04-07 |title=The good German |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/07/history.primolevi |access-date=2024-06-21 |work=The Guardian |language=en-GB |issn=0261-3077}}</ref>

Almost forty years after ''If This Is A Man'' was published, Levi stated that he did not hate German people because hating a whole ethnic group would be too much like Nazism. However, he also stated that he did not forgive "the culprits". According to Levi, the German people largely knew about the concentration camps but did not know the extent of the atrocities occurring there. However, "most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know".<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Levi |first1=Primo |title=Primo Levi's Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About 'Survival in Auschwitz' |magazine=The New Republic |date=17 February 1986 |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz |access-date=17 January 2019}}</ref>