“Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’
Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, by Norman G. Finkelstein
was published in the New Left Review (London), nr 224, July 1997, p. 39-88.
“Historiographical Review:
Revising the Holocaust”, by Ruth Bettina BIRN, is from The Historical Journal
(Cambridge University Press), 40, 1 (1997), p.193-215.
Goldhagen has threatened the
Ruth Birn with a suit.
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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’
Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners
Norman G. Finkelstein
In the opinion, not of bad men, but of the best men,
no belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful...
John Stuart Mill
Rarely has a book with scholarly pretensions evoked
as much popular interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (1). Every important journal of opinion printed
one or more reviews within weeks of its release. The New York Times, for
instance, featured multiple notices acclaiming Goldhagen’s book as ‘one of
those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark’, ‘historic’, and
bringing to bear ‘corrosive literary passion’. Although initial reviews were
not uniformly positive, once the Goldhagen juggernaut proved unstoppable, even
the dissenting voices joined in the chorus of praise. An immediate national
best-seller, Hitler’s Willing
Executioners was balled in Time magazine’s year-end issue as the ‘most
talked about’ and second best non-fiction book of 1996.(2) Before long,
Goldhagen was also an international phenomenon, creating an extraordinary stir
in Germany.
What makes the Goldhagen phenomenon so remarkable is
that Hitler’s Willing Executioners is
not at all a learned inquiry. Replete with gross misrepresentations of the
secondary literature and internal contradictions, Goldhagen’s book [39] is
worthless as scholarship. The bulk of what follows documents this claim. In the
conclusion I speculate on the broader meaning of the Goldhagen phenomenon. 4
I. Before the Genocide
Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German
society. It was immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the
structure of cognition.
Hitler’s Willing
Executioners, p. 449
1. A Nation Crazy with
Hatred?
In a seminal study published thirty-five years ago, The Destruction of the European Jews,
Raul Hilberg observed that the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were ‘not
different in their moral makeup from the rest of the population... the
machinery of destruction was a remarkable cross section of the German
population.’ These representative Germans, Hilberg went on to say, performed
their appointed tasks with astonishing efficiency: ‘No obstruction stopped the
German machine of destruction. No moral problem proved insurmountable. When all
participating personnel were put to the test, there were very few lingerers and
almost no deserters.’ Indeed, an ‘uncomfortably large number of soldiers...
delighted in death as spectators or as perpetrators.’ (3)
Long before Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study, it was
thus already known that ‘ordinary’ Germans were Hitler’s ‘willing’ and not
infrequently cruel ‘executioners’. (4) The main distinction of Goldhagen’s
study is the [40] explanation it purports to supply for what Hilberg called
this ‘phenomenon of the greatest magnitude.’ (5) It is Goldhagen’s thesis that
the ‘central causal agent of the Holocaust’ was the German people’s enduring
pathological hatred of the Jews. (Hitler’s
Willing Executioners [hereafter HWE] p. 9)
To cite one typical passage:
[A] demonological anti-Semitism, of the virulent
racial variety, was the common structure of the perpetrators’ cognition and of
German society in general. The German perpetrators ... were assenting mass
executioners, men and women who, true to their own eliminationist anti-Semitic
beliefs, faithful to their cultural anti-Semitic credo, considered the
slaughter to be just. (HWE, pp. 392-3)
There are no prima facie grounds for dismissing
Goldhagen’s thesis. It is not intrinsically racist or otherwise illegitimate.
There is no obvious reason why a culture cannot be fanatically consumed by
hatred. One may further recall that, Goldhagen’s claims to novelty
notwithstanding, his argument is not altogether new. In the immediate aftermath
of World War II, the genesis of the Final Solution was located in a twisted ‘German
mind’ or ‘German character’. (6) The departure point of much ‘Holocaust
scholarship’ is that Germans, nurtured on anti-Semitism, were thirsting for a ‘war
against the Jews’. On the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power, wrote Lucy
Dawidowicz, Germany was ‘a world intoxicated with hate, driven by paranoia,
enemies everywhere, the Jew lurking behind each one.’ (7) This is also the
dominant image of the Nazi extermination among Jews and in popular culture
generally.
Bolstered as it is by a bulging scholarly apparatus,
the audacious sweep, of Goldhagen’s thesis nonetheless merits emphasis. He
argues that, for centuries, nearly every German was possessed of a homicidal
animus toward Jews. Thus, he suggests that more than 80-90 per cent of the
German people would have relished the occasion to torture and murder Jews. (8)
Goldhagen takes to task the ‘conventional explanations’ which supposedly ignore
the ‘identity of the victims’: ‘That the victims were Jewish – according to the
logic of these explanations – is irrelevant.’ Indeed, he declaims that we must ‘abandon
the assumption that, by and large,
Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth century were not anti-Semitic.’ (HWE,
pp. 13, 30-1, original emphasis) In a rejoinder to critics, Goldhagen credits
his own book as being the first to correct this misconception: ‘Most seem now
to agree that anti-Semitism was a necessary cause of the Holocaust...’ (9) Yet,
one is hard-pressed to name a single account of the Nazi genocide that doesn’t crucially situate it within the
context of German anti-Semitism. Goldhagen’s true distinction is to [41] argue
that German anti-Semitism was not only a significant but rather that it was the
sufficient condition for perpetrating the extermination of the Jews: ‘With
regard to the motivational cause of
the Holocaust, for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation
does suffice.’ (10)
The Hitlerite regime accordingly plays a subordinate
role in Goldhagen’s comprehension of the Final Solution. Inasmuch as the
inclination for ‘killing’ Jews ‘predated Nazi political power’, the Nazis were ‘easily
able to harness the perpetrators’ preexisting anti-Semitism once Hitler gave
the order to undertake the extermination.’ (HWE, PP. 399, 463; see also pp.
418-19) All Hitler did was ‘unleash the pent-up anti-Semitic passion’, ‘unshackle
and thereby activate Germans’ preexisting, pent-up anti-Semitism’, and so on.
(HWE, pp. 95, 442,443)
Why
was the Holocaust Unique to Germany?
Leaving to one side the question of its veracity,
this last formulation of Goldhagen’s is still problematic. Consider that he
repeatedly contradicts it. Had it not been for ‘Hitler’s moral authority’,
Goldhagen observes, the ‘vast majority of Germans never would have contemplated’
the genocide against the Jews. (11) It was the Nazis’ unprecedentedly ‘extreme
and thoroughgoing ... cognitive-moral revolution’ that, Goldhagen suggests,
produced Germany’s ‘lethal political culture’. (HWE, p. 456; see also Reply, p.
42) Unaware that ‘these Germans were like no Germans they had ever known’,
Goldhagen explains, Soviet Jerry ‘initially greeted’ the Nazi soldiers ‘obligingly
and without hostility.’ (HWE, p. 587 n. 87) But if Goldhagen’s thesis is
correct, these Germans were like all
other Germans.
On a related issue, to explain why the genocide unfolded
in Germany and not elsewhere, Goldhagen points up the centrality of Hitler’s
regime: ‘Whatever the anti-Semitic traditions were in other European countries,
it was only in Germany that an openly and rabidly anti-Semitic movement came to
power... that was bent upon turning anti-Semitic fantasy into state organized
genocidal slaughter.’ (HWE, p. 419; see also Reply, p. 43.) Yet Goldhagen’s
explanation evades an embarrassingly obvious question: if other Europeans were
as anti-Semitic as Germans which is what this argument assumes why didn’t a ‘rabidly
anti-Semitic movement’ come to power elsewhere? True, Goldhagen argues that ‘Had
there not been an economic depression in Germany, then the Nazis, in all
likelihood, would never have come to power.’ (Reply, p. 42; see also HWE, p.
87) But that simply evades another obvious question: if Germans were so
possessed by a fanatical anti-Semitism – more on which directly – why did a ‘rabidly
anti-Semitic movement’ have to await an economic depression to attain power?
Indeed, Hitler’s
Willing Executioners is a monument to question-begging. Eschewing the claim
that it is ‘inexplicable’, Goldhagen sets as his [42] objective to ‘explain why
the Holocaust occurred, to explain how it could occur.’ He concludes that it ‘is
explicable historically’. (HWE, pp. 5, 455 [incomplete reference]) Goldhagen’s
thesis, however, neither renders the Nazi holocaust intelligible nor is it
historical. For argument’s sake, let us assume that Goldhagen is correct.
Consumed by a ferocious loathing of the Jews, the German people jumped at
Hitter’s invitation to exterminate them. Yet the question still remains, whence
the hatred of Jews? A nation of genocidal racists is, after all, not exactly a
commonplace.
On this crucial issue, Goldhagen sheds no light.
Anti-Semitism, he suggests, was symptomatic of a much deeper German malaise. It
served the Germans as a ‘moral rationale’ for releasing ‘destructive and
ferocious passions that are usually tamed and curbed by civilization.’ (HWE, p.
397) Yet he neither explains why these normally quiescent passions burst forth
in Germany nor why they were directed against the Jews. Goldhagen depicts
anti-Semitism as the manifestation of a deranged state. The Germans were ‘pathologically
ill ... struck with the illness of sadism ... diseased ... tyrannical, sadistic’,
‘psychopathic’ (HWE, pp. 397, 450, quoting a ‘keen diarist of the Warsaw Ghetto’),
in thrall of ‘absolutely fantastical ... beliefs that ordinarily only madmen
have of others ... prone to wild, “magical thinking”’ (HWE, p. 412), and so on.
(12) Goldhagen never explains, however, why the Germans succumbed and why the
Jews fell victim to this derangement.
In what is surely the book’s most evocative analogy,
Goldhagen compares the Germans to ‘crazy’ Captain Ahab. Recalling Melville’s
memorable description of Ahab’s insanely hateful state as he harpoons the
whale, Goldhagen writes: ‘Germans’ violent anger at the Jews is akin to the
passion that drove Ahab to hunt Moby Dick.’ (HWE, pp. 398-9) Yet even if the
Germans were ‘crazy’ like Ahab, it still remains to explain what drove them to
such a frenzied state. In Ahab’s case, the motive is clear: Moby Dick had
earlier mangled him. To quote Melville from the passage Goldhagen excerpts: ‘It
was revenge.’ But Goldhagen plainly does not believe the Jews inflicted violent
injury on Germans. Indeed, he emphatically denies that Jews bear any
responsibility for anti-Semitism: ‘the existence of anti-Semitism and the
content of anti-Semitic charges... are fundamentally not a response to any
objective evaluation of Jewish actions... anti-Semitism draws on cultural
sources that are independent of the Jews’ nature and actions.’ (HWE, p. 39,
original emphasis) In an almost comically circular argument, Goldhagen
concludes that the Germans’ Ahab-like loathing of the Jews originated in their
loathing of the Jews: ‘Germans’ anti-Semitism was the basis of their profound
hatred of the Jews and the psychological impulse to make them suffer.’ (HWE, p.
584 n. 62; see also p. 399). (13) This argument recalls one of Goldhagen’s key
theoretical insights: ‘The motivational dimension is the most crucial for
explaining the perpetrators’ willingness to act.’ (HWE, p. 20) [43] Goldhagen
approvingly cites the Sonderweg
argument that ‘Germany developed along a singular path, setting it apart from
other western countries.’ (HWE, p. 419) But Goldhagen’s thesis has precious
little in common with this argument. Unlike the Sonderweg proponents, he never once anchors the deformations of the
German character in temporal developments. Rather, the perverted German
consciousness of Goldhagen’s making floats above and persists in spite of
history. Just how little Goldhagen’s argument has in common with any school of history is pointed up by
his conclusion that the Germans’ ‘absurd beliefs... rapidly dissipated’ after
the Second World War. (HWE, pp. 593-4 n. 53; see also p. 582 n. 38) Indeed,
Germans today are ‘democrats, committed democrats.’ (14) Emerging from oblivion
and enduring for centuries, the psychopathic German mind vanished again into
oblivion in the space of a few decades. Thus Goldhagen renders the Nazi
holocaust ‘explicable historically’.
The merit of his thesis, Goldhagen contends, is that
it recognizes that ‘each individual made choices about how to treat Jews.’
Thus, it ‘restores the notion of individual responsibility’. (Reply, p. 38) Yet
if Goldhagen’s thesis is correct, the exact opposite is true. Germans bear no
individual or, for that matter, collective guilt. After all, German culture was
‘radically different’ from ours. It shared none of our basic values. Killing
Jews could accordingly be done in ‘good conscience.’ (HWE, p. 15) Germans
perceived Jews the way we perceive roaches. They did not know better. They
could not know better. It was a homogeneously sick society. Moral culpability,
however, presumes moral awareness. Touted as a searing indictment of Germans,
Goldhagen’s thesis is, in fact, their perfect alibi. Who can condemn a ‘crazy’
people?
2. Explaining Everything
Goldhagen deploys two analytically distinct
strategies to prove his thesis. The first derives from his own primary research
on the German perpetrators of the genocide. Goldhagen maintains that certain of
his findings ‘defy all of the conventional explanations.’ (HWE, p. 391) In
particular, he argues that only a murderously anti-Semitic culture can account
for the wanton cruelty of the Germans. (Reply, pp. 38-9) Yet, it is not at all
obvious why Goldhagen’s thesis is more compelling than one that, say, includes
the legacy of German anti-Semitism exacerbated by the incessant, inflammatory
Jew-baiting of Nazi propaganda, and further exacerbated by the brutalizing
effects of a singularly barbarous war. It is perhaps true, as Goldhagen
suggests, that such a ‘patchwork explanation’ does not yet fully plumb the
depths of German bestiality. (HWE, p. 391) But Goldhagen himself acknowledges
that neither does his theory. Ultimately, he concedes, the immensity of German
cruelty ‘remains hard to fathom’ and ‘the extent and nature of German
anti-Semitism’ cannot explain it. (HWE, pp. 584 n. 62, 584 n. 65; see also p.
399)
The second thrust of Goldhagen’s argument is to
demonstrate historically that German society was seething with virulent
anti-Semitism on the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power. The undertaking is a
daunting [44] one. Goldhagen relies almost entirely on the recent secondary
literature on German anti-Semitism. He acknowledges that the evidence does not
in a ‘definitive’ manner prove his conclusions. (HWE, p. 47) The problem,
however, is rather larger. Profuse as it is, not a jot of this scholarship
sustains Goldhagen’s thesis. No serious German historian discounts the legacy
of German anti-Semitism; none, however, maintains that German anti-Semitism was
in itself sufficiently virulent to account for the Nazi genocide. (15) Indeed,
this is one reason why versions of Goldhagen’s thesis have been discarded in
serious scholarly inquiry. The task Goldhagen sets himself is to force the new
evidence into the Procrustean bed of an obsolete theory. To meet this
challenge, Goldhagen fashions a new model of anti-Semitism. Thomas Kuhn
suggested that a new paradigm comes into existence when anomalies crop up that
the old one can no longer accommodate. The purpose of Goldhagen’s new paradigm,
however, is to make the anomalies fit the old one.
The essence of Goldhagen’s new paradigm is what he
calls ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. Goldhagen situates German anti-Semitism
along a continuous spectrum. At one extreme was the German perception that Jews
were vaguely different. At the other extreme was the perception that Jews were
distinctly evil. Between these poles was the perception that Jews were more or
less flawed. Moving from one end of the spectrum to the other, the complementary
German desire to eliminate an unappealing feature of the Jews rapidly yielded
to the desire to eliminate Jews altogether. ‘The eliminationist mind-set’, Goldhagen proclaims, ‘tended towards an exterminationist one.’
(HWE, p. 71, emphasis in original; see also pp. 23, 77, 444) Thus, any German
who questioned the group loyalty or objected to the business practices of Jews
was effectively a Nazi brute. Wedded as it was to an assimilationist version of
the ‘eliminationist mind-set’, even German liberalism inexorably led to
Auschwitz.
Rescuing an otherwise improbable thesis, ‘eliminationist
anti-Semitism’ serves as Goldhagen’s deus ex machina. Indeed, using this
device, it is not at all difficult to prove that nearly every German was a
latent Hitler. It would also not be at all difficult to prove that nearly every
white American is a latent Grand Wizard. How many white Americans do not
harbour any negative stereotypes about black people? If Goldhagen is correct,
we are all closet racial psychopaths. Why then did the ‘Holocaust’ happen in
Germany? If we all suffer from an ‘eliminationist mind-set’ then that alone
cannot account for what Goldhagen calls a ‘sui generis event’. (HWE, p. 419)
Casting as a theoretical novelty the distinction
between ‘type[s] of anti-Semitism’, Goldhagen dismisses previous scholars who ‘typically...
treated’ anti-Semitism ‘in an undifferentiated manner’. Before he came along, ‘a
person [was] either an anti-Semite or not.’ (HWE, pp. 34-5; see also Reply, p.
41) Leaving aside the fact that the contrast he proposes [45] between, say,
religious and racial or latent and manifest anti-Semitism is standard in the
Nazi holocaust literatures, (16) it is Goldhagen himself who radically
undercuts all distinctions: on the ‘eliminationist’ spectrum, every
manifestation of anti-Semitism and even philosemitism ‘tend[s] strongly towards
a genocidal “solution”.’ (17)
In this connection, Goldhagen’s resolution of a key
controversy in the Nazi holocaust literature is noteworthy. Historians have
long disputed whether Hitler sought from the outset (the intentionalist school)
or was pressed by circumstances (the functionalist school) to exterminate the Jews.
To prove the intentionalist thesis, Goldhagen simply lumps Hitler’s various
initiatives together: they were all effectively genocidal. Thus, Hitler’s
pre-invasion orders that limited the extermination of Soviet Jews to adult
males was ‘still genocidal’. His ghettoization and deportation schemes were ‘bloodlessly
genocidal’, ‘proto-genocidal’, ‘psychologically and ideologically the
functional, if not the eventual, actual equivalent of genocide’, ‘quasi-genocidal’,
‘bloodless equivalents of genocide’, and so on. Even the destruction of Jewish
synagogues during Kristallnacht was a ‘proto-genocidal assault... the psychic
equivalent of genocide.’ (18) The very basis of the
intentionalist-functionalist controversy, however, is that the distinction
between riot, expulsion, and mass murder, on the one hand, and genocide, on the
other, does count. Why else focus on Hitler’s decision to initiate the
judeocide? Goldhagen’s ‘proof annuls the debate’s central premise. It also
annuls the central premise of his own book. If all these policies evidence
genocidal intent, then genocidal intent is very far from uncommon in human
history. Yet, Goldhagen maintains that ‘the Holocaust is ... utterly new’, and
it is ‘crucially’ the genocidal intent that makes it so. (HWE, p. 5; Reply, p.
45)
Once Goldhagen attends to the matter of distinctions,
the bankruptcy of his explanatory model stands exposed. Thus, he also enters
the strong caveat that German ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ was equally
compatible with a broad range of social outcomes. It was ‘multipotential.’
Indeed, ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ could ‘obvious[ly]’ culminate in
everything from ‘total assimilation’ to ‘total annihilation’, with ‘verbal
assault’, ‘legal [46] restraints’, ‘physical assault’, ‘physical separation in
ghettos’, ‘forcible and violent expulsion’, all being intermediate
possibilities. (HWE, pp. 69, 70, 132-6, 444, 494 n. 92) These multiple options,
Goldhagen further elucidates, ‘were rough functional equivalents from the
vantage point of the perpetrators.’ (HWE, p. 135; see also p. 70) Yet, if all
these policy options were ‘rough functional equivalents’ for the ‘eliminationist
mind-set’, then that mind-set plainly cannot account for the genocidal variant.
So capacious is his conceptual device, Goldhagen suggests, that it can explain
in a ‘logical’ manner the full gamut of unfolding German anti-Jewish policies.
(HWE, p. 444) True it explains all of them; it also explains none.
Goldhagen’s survey of German anti-Semitism roughly
divides at the Nazis’ ascension to power. In the next two sections, I shall
consider his analysis of Germany before and after the Nazis took over.
3. Pre-Nazi Germany
In his introductory chapter, Goldhagen emphasizes an
analytical distinction: ‘Some anti-Semitisms become woven into the moral order
of society; others do not.’ Theorizing that the former are potentially more
explosive, Goldhagen puts ‘the conception of Jews in medieval Christendom’ in
this category: ‘its uncompromising non-pluralistic and intolerant view of the
moral basis of society... held the Jews to violate the moral order of the world
... Jews came to represent ... much of the evil in the world; they not only
represented it but also came to be seen by Christians as being synonymous with
it, indeed as being self-willed agents of evil.’ (HWE, pp. 37-8; see also p.
51) Alas, Goldhagen also argues that anti-Semitism was not at the core of
premodern Christianity: ‘In medieval times ... Jews were seen to be responsible
for many ills, but they remained always somewhat peripheral, on the fringes,
spatially and theologically, of the Christian world, not central to its
understanding of the world’s troubles ... even if the Jews were to disappear,
the Devil, the ultimate source of evil, would remain.’ (HWE, p. 67; see also p.
77) Apart from his theoretical insight – or perhaps insights – Goldhagen skips
quickly over the pre-modern era.
Except perhaps for an obscure, unpublished,
thirty-year-old doctoral dissertation, Goldhagen acknowledges, the extant
scholarly literature on modern German anti-Semitism does not reach his
conclusions. If, however, the same findings are ‘reconceptualize[d]’ in a ‘new
analytical and interpretative framework’, they do, he believes, sustain his
novel thesis. (HWE, pp. 488 n. 17, 76-7; see also Reply, p. 41) Summarizing his
conclusions for the nineteenth century through World War I, Goldhagen writes:
It is... incontestable that the fundamentals of Nazi
anti-Semitism... had deep roots in Germany, was part of the cultural cognitive
model of German society, and was integral to German political culture. It is
incontestable that racial anti-Semitism was the salient form of anti-Semitism
in Germany and that it was broadly part of the public conversation of German
society. It is incontestable that it had enormously wide and solid
institutional and political support in Germany at various times ... It is
incontestable that this racial anti-Semitism which held the Jews to pose a mortal
threat to Germany was pregnant with murder. (HWE, pp. 74-5; see also p. 77)
[47] No serious historian doubts that anti-Semitism
persisted in modern Germany. The question is, what was its scope and nature?
(19) Goldhagen argues that anti-Semitism was ubiquitous in Germany. Yet German
Social-Democracy forcefully denounced anti-Semitism and, as the single largest
political party (the SPD), commanded the allegiance of fully a third of the
electorate by the early twentieth century. Not the working-class base,
Goldhagen suggests, but only ‘the core of the socialist movement, its
intellectuals and leaders’ repudiated anti-Semitism. It was merely a ‘small
group’. (HWE, p. 74; see also p. 72) The only source he cites is Peter Pulzer’s
Jews and the German State, which
enters no such qualification. (20) Indeed, turning to Pulzer’s authoritative
companion study, The Rise of Political
Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria,
we learn that ‘anti-Semitism drew little strength from ... the working-class ...
The [German worker] knew that national and religious arguments were at best
irrelevant to a solution of his problems and at worst a deliberate attempt to
cloud his view of the “real issues”.’ (21) A compelling example of popular
German anti-Semitism cited by Goldhagen is the recurrence of ritual murder
accusations. ‘In Germany and the Austrian Empire’, he reports, twelve such
trials took lace between 1867 and 1914.’ (HWE, pp. 63-4) Goldhagen cites Pulzer’s
The Rise of political Anti-Semitism in
Germany and Austria. Turning to the cited page, we find that Goldhagen has
reversed the import of Pulzer’s finding. The remainder of the sentence reads: ‘eleven
of which collapsed although the trials were by jury’. (22)
To further document the extent of German
anti-Semitism, Goldhagen recalls a ‘spontaneous, extremely broad-based, and
genuine’ petition campaign in Bavaria opposing the full equality of Jews. Yet,
the corresponding note tucked in the book’s back pages reveals that actually
the campaign was carefully orchestrated by ‘priests and other anti-Jewish
agitators’ and that ‘many’ signatories were ‘indifferent’ to the Jews. Ian
Kershaw adds that ‘many petitioners... knew little of any Jewish Question.’
Unfazed, Goldhagen concludes his endnote: ‘because agitators could so easily
induce them to anti-Semitic expression’, the petition drive still proves ‘how
anti-Semitic Bavarians were’. (23)
[48] Even if Goldhagen were able to prove that German
culture was ‘axiomatically anti-Semitic’ (HWE, p. 59), that in itself would not
yet prove that the German people strained at the bit to murder Jews. Thus, as
seen above, Goldhagen also argues that German anti-Semitism was pervasively
homicidal. Consider some other representative passages:
By the end of the nineteenth century, the view that
Jews posed extreme danger to Germany and that the source of their
perniciousness was immutable, namely their race, and the consequential belief
that the Jews had to be eliminated
from Germany were extremely widespread in German society. The tendency to consider
and propose the most radical form of elimination – that is, extermination – was
already strong and had been given much voice. (HWE, p. 72, original emphasis)
... the cognitive model of Nazi anti-Semitism had
taken shape well before the Nazis came to power, and ... this model, throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was also extremely widespread in
all social classes and sectors of German society, for it was deeply embedded in
German cultural and political life and conversation, as well as integrated into
the moral structure of society. (HWE, p. 77)
Pulzer, however, maintains that only ‘a small, though
growing, and noisy minority’ even held that ‘Jews were a separate,
unassimilable race’. A second authority frequently cited by Goldhagen, Shulamit
Volkov, similarly concludes that nineteenthcentury German anti-Semitism did not
‘bring forth’ the Nazi genocide. Indeed, it was ‘closer to the French version
of that time than to later National Socialist positions.’ (24)
The
Jews as a Separate Race
To document his thesis, Goldhagen repeatedly points
to the proliferation of radically anti-Semitic literature in Germany. For
instance, he cites the ‘startling’ statistic that 19 of 51 ‘prominent
anti-Semitic writers’ advocated the ‘physical
extermination of the Jews.’ (HWE, p. 71, original emphasis; see also p. 64)
One would perhaps also want to note that an overwhelming majority did not. As
Goldhagen himself acknowledges two pages earlier: ‘a large percentage of the
anti-Semites proposed no action at all.’ Goldhagen deems this last fact ‘astonishing’
– but it would be astonishing only if his thesis were true. Goldhagen also
never asks who read this literature. Scoring Germany as the birthplace and
headquarters of ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism, Eva Reichmann nonetheless cautions
that ‘an anti-Semitic literature does not of necessity prove a wide
anti-Semitic response among the public.’ (25)
Ill suited to his thesis, the scholarly evidence is
recast by Goldhagen with [49] the aid of his novel methodology. (26) Thus,
Goldhagen suggests that any German who believed that Jews constituted a ‘religion,
nation, political group, or race’ and thus were an ‘alien body within Germany’,
or that Jews engaged in ‘underhanded’ or ‘parasitic’ business activities fell
on the eliminationist spectrum gliding to murder. (27) The identical image of
Jews as a ‘nation’ or ‘race’ that was ‘alien’ to and ‘parasitical’ on European
society was also, however, a staple of Zionist ideology. Indeed, as one Zionist
historian copiously documents, ‘the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among
the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the
plaints of the German anti-Semites.’ (28) Does that make all Zionists homicidal
anti-Semites as well? Pressed into Goldhagen’s conceptual meat grinder, even
German ‘liberals’, ‘philosemites’, and ‘Progressives’, with their ambivalent
prescriptions for Jewish emancipation, emerge as racial psychopaths. Thus,
Goldhagen reckons that Enlightenment Germans were ‘anti-Semites in sheep’s
clothing’, ‘philosemitic anti-Semites’, in thrall to the ‘assimilationist
version of the eliminationist mind-set’, and so forth. (HWE, pp. 56-9, 70, 74,
78) Small wonder that Goldhagen is able to prove that Germany was a nation of
murderous Jew-haters.
For all its social turbulence, modern Germany prior
to Hitler witnessed only episodic spasms of anti-Jewish violence. Indeed, there
was no equivalent of the riots that attended the Dreyfus Affair or the pogroms
in Russia. If Germany was brimming with pathological anti-Semites, why did Jews
so rarely suffer their wrath? Alas, Goldhagen only briefly touches on this –
for his thesis – plainly pivotal question. He writes, ‘As powerful and
potentially violent as the anti-Semitism was ... the state would not allow it
to become the basis of collective social action of this [50] sort. Wilhelmine
Germany would not tolerate the organized violence for which the anti-Semites
appeared to long.’ (HWE, p. 72) Yet, why was the State immune to the
pathological anti-Semitism infecting the German body-politic? Indeed, winning
the 1893 election, the Conservative Party, which according to Goldhagen was ‘thoroughly
anti-Semitic’, along with allied avowedly anti-Semitic parties, proved a force
to reckon with in the State. (HWE, pp. 56, 74-6) Why did these violent
anti-Semites ‘not tolerate’ anti-Semitic violence?
Disobeying orders that they opposed, the Germans did
not, according to Goldhagen, blindly defer to State authority. Indeed, if the
State violated a normative value, ‘ordinary citizens’ entered into ‘open
rebellion’ against, and ‘battled in the streets... in defiance of ... and in
order to overthrow it.’ (HWE, pp. 381-2) Goldhagen further maintains that all
the non-governmental centres of power in Germany – what he calls its ‘Tocquevillian
substructure’ – were packed with insane Jew-haters. (HWE, pp. 59-60, 72-4) If
they were thus driven by fanatical anti-Semitism that was the German ‘cultural
norm’ (HWE, p. 61), the German people should have risen up against the
Wilhelmine state that was shielding the Jews. Jewish blood should have been
flowing in German streets. Luckily for the Jews, but unluckily for Goldhagen’s
thesis, this never happened. Ironically, the only ‘continual legislative and
parliamentary battles’, ‘bitter political fights’, and so forth Goldhagen
chronicles were over Jewish emancipation. (HWE, p. 56) If, as Goldhagen writes
in the very same paragraphs, the ‘vast majority’ of Germans were ‘thoroughly
anti-Semitic’, why was there such intense political discord on the Jewish
Question?
Goldhagen acknowledges only parenthetically that, for
all the entrenched anti-Semitism, modern German Jews experienced a ‘meteoric
rise from pariah status.’ (HWE, p. 78) Indeed, German Jerry at the century’s
turn – recalls one historian – ‘thrived in this atmosphere of imperfect
toleration; their coreligionists throughout the world ... looked to them for
support and leadership.’ (29) Goldhagen wisely does not even try to reconcile
the ‘meteoric rise’ of German Jews with the thesis that Germany was seething
with psychopathic anti-Semitism.
Saturated with Jew-hatred, Weimar Germany was,
according to Goldhagen, all of a piece. Thus ‘virtually every major institution
and group ... was permeated by anti-Semitism’, ‘nearly every political group in
the country shunned the Jews’, ‘Jews, though ferociously attacked, found
virtually no defenders’, ‘the public conversation about Jews was almost wholly
negative’, and so on, and so on. (HWE, pp. 82-4)
It is true that anti-Semitism persisted in the Weimar
era. Goldhagen recalls the ‘Aryan paragraphs’ that restricted Jewish entry into
universities and student organizations. (HWE, p. 83) Yet Jews in England and
the US suffered similar exclusions. Popular anti-Semitic violence occasionally
flared up during the years 1917-23 when German society tottered on the brink of
total collapse. Once the new regime stabilized, however, almost all
vandalization of Jewish property was connected [51] with the Nazis. Unlike
Goldhagen, Pulzer reports that the Social-Democratic Party proved during Weimar
‘a committed opponent of organized anti-Semitism’, and Niewyck reports that ‘the
penetration of anti-Jewish opinions into the organized Socialist working class
was kept to an unmeasurable minimum’. To document that the ‘SPD did little to
attack the Nazis ‘anti-Semitism’, Goldhagen cites Donna Harsch’s study, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism. (HWE, p. 497 n. 16) Turning to
the cited page, we learn that, although the SPD did react defensively to slurs
that it was beholden to the Jewish community, ‘all Social Democrats’ proved ‘consistent’
in their ‘advocacy of the civil rights of German and East European Jews’. (30)
Goldhagen’s monochromatic thumbnail sketch also
completely omits the remarkable successes registered by German Jews. Occupying
a salient place in German life, Weimar Jewry assembled a record of achievements
in the arts, politics and the economy rivaled only by that of American Jewry
after World War II. ‘Had the German population been uniquely rabid in its
hatred’, Sarah Gordon reasonably concludes, ‘it is inconceivable that Jews
could have fared so well, especially compared to Jews in other nations.’ (31)
How
Public Were Hitler’s Intentions?
Shouting from the rooftops his maniacal hatred of the
Jews, Hitler fully and incessantly apprised the German people, according to
Goldhagen, of his genocidal plans: ‘In his writing, speeches, and conversation,
Hitler was direct and clear. Germany’s enemies at home and abroad were to be
destroyed or rendered inert. No one who heard or read Hitler could have missed
this clarion message.’ (HWE, p. 86) And again: ‘Rarely has a national leader so
openly, frequently, and emphatically announced an apocalyptic intention – in
this case, to destroy Jewish power and even the Jews themselves – and made good
on his promise.’ (HWE, p. 162; see also p. 424)
Yet, Goldhagen adduces only three pieces of evidence
for the period up to the eve of World War II to document this claim: the
notorious passage from Mein Kampf,
which perhaps few Germans read and even fewer took literally; a speech of 1920
when Hitler was ‘still politically obscure’; and Hitler’s conditional and
ambiguous January 1939 ‘prophecy’, which was largely ignored by a German public
preoccupied with the impending war. (32)
[52] Hitler’s public statements have been subject to
numerous analyses. None confirm Goldhagen’s depiction. Indeed, yet again
directly contradicting his own thesis, Goldhagen reports that Hitler ‘prudently
would not repeat in public’ his explicitly genocidal aims ‘after he had
achieved national prominence’. Goldhagen also validates Goebbels’s boast in
1944 that, before seizing power, the Nazis ‘had not made their ultimate intentions
known publicly’. (Goldhagen’s paraphrase; HWE, pp. 425, 589 n. 13) The actual
documentary record for the period through 1939 shows that: 1) Hitler’s earliest
speeches were pervasively anti-Semitic; 2) realizing, however, that anti-Marxism
had a wider appeal than anti-Semitism, Hitler muted his attacks on Jews once he
entered public life in 1923; 3) attacks on Jews figured only marginally in
Hitler’s speeches during the years immediately preceding his electoral triumph;
4) upon taking power and until the eve of World War II, Hitler publicly
announced as his ultimate goal not the annihilation but the forced emigration
of the Jews. (33)
‘Even during the War, when his machinery of
destruction was running at top capacity’, Max Domanis recalls, Hitler ‘confined
his remarks on a massacre of Jews to threats within the scope of his foreign
policy, knowing only too well that such an openly propagated program of
extermination was certain to meet with resistance from the majority of the
German people and the bulk of his parry followers.’ (34) Yet, Goldhagen writes:
‘Hitler announced many times, emphatically, that the war would end in the
extermination of the Jews. The killing met with general understanding, if not
approval.’ The endnote refers readers to Max Domarus. (HWE, pp. 8 [incomplete
reference], 477 n. 10)
The Nazi genocide, Goldhagen elucidates, was ‘given
shape and energized by a leader, Hitler, who was adored by the vast majority of
the [53] German people, a leader who was known to be committed wholeheartedly
to the unfolding, brutal eliminationist program.’ (HWE, p. 419) Pointing up ‘Hitler’s
enormous popularity and the legitimacy that it helped engender for the regime’,
Goldhagen elsewhere refers readers to Ian Kershaw’s important study, The ‘Hitler Myth’. (HWE, p. 512 n. 2)
Yet Goldhagen omits altogether Kershaw’s main finding – that anti-Semitism
never figured centrally in Hitler’s mass appeal. Thus Kershaw typically writes:
Anti-Semitism, despite its pivotal place in Hitler’s ‘world
view’, was of only secondary importance in cementing the bonds between Fuhrer
and people which provided the Third Reich with its popular legitimation and
basis of plebiscitary acclamation. At the same time, the principle of excluding
the Jews from German society was itself widely and increasingly popular, and
Hitler’s hatred of the Jews – baleful in its threats but linked to the
condoning of lawful, ‘rational’ action, not the unpopular crude violence and
brutality of the Party’s ‘gutter’ elements – was certainly an acceptable
component of his popular image, even if it was an element ‘taken on board’
rather than forming a centrally motivating factor for most Germans.
Indeed, ‘during the 1930s ... when his popularity was
soaring to dizzy heights’, Kershaw underlines, Hitler ‘was extremely careful to
avoid public association with the generally unpopular pogrom-type anti-Semitic
outrages.’ (35)
Was
Anti-Semitism Appealing?
Like Hitler’s public persona, the electoral cycle
culminating in the Nazi victory has been closely scrutinized by historians.
These contests were a uniquely sensitive barometer of the fluctuations in
German popular opinion. The consensus of the scholarly literature is that
anti-Semitism did not figure centrally in the Nazis’ ultimate success at the
polls. (36) Before the massive economic depression sent German society reeling,
neither the Nazis nor any of the other radical anti-Semitic parties were able
to garner more than a minuscule percentage of the votes. Even as late as 1928,
only 2.8 per cent of the German electorate cast ballots for the Nazi Party. The
subsequent spectacular upswing in the Nazis’ electoral fortunes was due [54]
overwhelmingly to the solutions they proposed for Germany’s economic crisis.
Not the Jews but Marxism and Social Democracy served as the prime scapegoats of
Nazi propaganda. Anti-Semitism was not altogether jettisoned by the Nazis; it
did not, however, account for the core of their support. In perhaps the single
most illuminating interpretive study of the Nazi phenomenon, Eva Reichmann
subtly elucidates this relationship:
In an excessively complicated situation Nazism
offered to a society in full disintegration a political diet whose disastrous
effects this society was no longer able to realize. People felt that it
contained tidbits for every palate. The tidbits were, so to speak, coated with
anti-Semitism.... But it was not the covering for the sake of which they were
greedily swallowed.... The wrapping in which the new security, the new self-assurance,
the exculpation, the permission to hate was served might equally well have had
another colour and another spice.
The ‘conclusiveness of this analogy’, Reichmann
significantly adds, is ‘confirmed’ by the absence of popular anti-Semitic
malice prior to the Nazi victory:
If those people who, under the influence of
anti-Semitic propaganda, had been moved by outright hatred of the Jews, their
practical aggression against them would have been excessive after the Jews had
been openly abandoned to the people’s fury. Violence would not then have been
limited to the organized activities of Nazi gangs, but would have become
endemic in the whole people and seriously endangered the life of every Jew in
Germany. This, however, did not happen. Even during the years in which the
party increased by leaps and bounds, spontaneous terrorist assaults on Jews
were extremely rare ... In spite of the ardent efforts of the [Nazi Party], the
boycott against Jewish shopkeepers and professional men before the seizure of
power was negligible, although this would have been an inconspicuous and safe
way of demonstrating one’s anti-Jewish feeling. From all this all but complete
lack of practical anti-Semitic reactions at a time when the behaviour of the
public was still a correct index to its sentiments, it can only be inferred
that the overwhelming majority of the people did not feel their relations to
the Jewish minority as unbearable. (37)
Goldhagen dispatches the crucial cycle of elections
culminating in the Nazi victory in one page. He highlights that, in the July
1932 election – the Nazis’ best showing in an open contest – ‘almost fourteen million Germans, 37.4 per cent
of the voters, cast their lots for Hitler.’ (HWE, p. 87, original emphasis) He
might also have highlighted that more than twenty
three million Germans, 62.6 per cent of the voters, did not cast their lot
for Hitler. ‘There is no doubt’, Goldhagen concludes, ‘that Hitler’s virulent,
lethalsounding anti-Semitism did not at the very least deter Germans by the
millions from throwing their support to him.’ (HWE, p. 497 n. 22) This finding,
however, feebly sustains Goldhagen’s thesis. If, [55] as Goldhagen claims, the
Germans were straining at the bit to murder the Jews, and if, as he claims,
Hitler promised to ‘unleash’ them if elected, then Germans should have voted
for Hitler not despite but because of his anti-Semitism. Not even Goldhagen
pretends this was the case. Indeed, he acknowledges that ‘many people ...
welcomed Nazism while disliking certain of its aspects as transient
excrescences upon the body of the Party which Hitler ... would slough off as so
many alien accretions.’ (HWE, p. 435) This was precisely the case with Nazi
anti-Semitism. (38) Finally, to demonstrate Hitler’s greater popularity right
after the seizure of power, Goldhagen recalls that the throttling of all
dissent ‘did not deter voters, but increased the Nazi vote to over seventeen
million people’ in March 1933. (HWE, p. 87) One may have supposed that this
increment in Nazi votes was perhaps because all dissent was throttled. Imagine
if, to demonstrate the Communist regime’s growing popular appeal, a Soviet
historian argued that massive repression ‘did not deter, but increased the vote
for Stalin to over...’ It is doubtful that even Pravda would have noticed such
a book.
4. The Nazi Years,
1933-1939
In her study of Nazism, Eva Reichmann observes that
the ‘spontaneous’ German attitude toward Jews can no longer be gauged after
Hitler’s ascension to power. Totalitarian rule corrupted Germans. (39)
Goldhagen disagrees. Consistent with his ‘monocausal explanation’, Goldhagen
maintains that the Nazi regime’s propaganda and repressive apparatuses did not
do special injury to German-Jewish relations. ‘It must be emphasized’,
Goldhagen writes, ‘that in no sense did the Nazis “brainwash” the German
people.’ Rather, the Germans were already in thrall to a ‘hallucinatory,
demonized image of Jews’ long before Hitler came on the scene. (40) Why then
did the Nazi regime invest so much of its resources in fomenting Jew-hatred?
Goldhagen recalls, for instance, that ‘the most consistent, frequently acted
upon and pervasive German governmental policy’ was ‘constant, ubiquitous,
anti-Semitic vituperation issued from ... public organs, ranging from Hitler’s
own speeches, to never-ending installments in Germany’s radio, newspapers,
magazines, and journals, to films, to public signage and verbal fusillades, to
schoolbooks.’ Indeed, Goldhagen himself stresses that this ‘incessant
anti-Semitic barrage’ took an ‘enormous toll’ not only on Jews but ‘also on
Germans’, and was aimed at ‘Preparing Germans for still more drastic
eliminationist measures.’ (HWE, pp. 136, 124, 137)
Hitler’s
Willing Executioners is in fact replete with illustrations, cited
approvingly by Goldhagen, that Nazi Jew-baiting did poison German
sensibilities. Germans embraced anti-Semitism, an Einsatzkommando confesses,
because ‘it was hammered into us, during the years of propaganda, again and
again, that the Jews were the ruin of every Volk in the midst of which they
appear and that peace would reign in Europe only... when the Jewish race is
exterminated.’ (HWE, p. 442). Popular anti-Semitism ‘was, after all, no
surprise’, a German Jew explained in [56] 1942. ‘Because for nearly ten years
the inferiority and harmfulness of the Jews has been emphasized in every
newspaper, morning and evening, in every radio broadcast and on many posters,
etc., without a voice in favour of the Jews being permitted to be raised.’
(HWE, p. 449) ‘I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and
subhumans’, a former murderous police battalion member discloses, ‘and that
they were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War.’ (HWE, p.
179) ‘Nazi schooling produced a generation of human beings in Nazi Germany so
different from normal American youth’, an American educator recalls, ‘that mere
academic comparison seems inane. ‘(HWE, p. 27)
Indeed, Goldhagen’s crowning piece of evidence
confutes the book’s central thesis. ‘In what may be the most significant and
illuminating testimony given after the war’, Goldhagen reports, an ‘expert
legal brief’ submitted at Nuremberg argued that the Einsatzgruppen ‘really
believed’ that Germany was locked in mortal combat with the Jewish agents of a
Bolshevik conspiracy. Quoting from this ‘all but neglected’ document, Goldhagen
locates the ‘source’ of these psychotic beliefs not in a murderously
anti-Semitic German culture but in Nazi propaganda: ‘it cannot be doubted that
National Socialism had succeeded to the fullest extent in convincing public
opinion and furthermore the overwhelming
majority of the German people of the identity of Bolshevism and Jewry.’
(HWE, p. 393, original emphasis) Goldhagen seems totally unaware that he has
just highlighted his ‘monocausal explanation’ of the Nazi genocide into
oblivion. (41)
Citing the findings of Robert Gellately, ‘the
foremost expert on the Gestapo’, Goldhagen reports that only a tiny handful of
Germans were prosecuted for verbally dissenting from Nazi anti-Semitism.
According to Goldhagen, this German silence cannot, however, be credited to
repression. Contrary to widespread belief, Goldhagen maintains, the Hitlerian
state was benign. The Nazis ruled ‘without massive coercion and violence’. The
regime ‘was, on the whole, consensual’. Germans generally ‘accepted the system
and Hitler’s authority as desirable and legitimate’. (HWE, pp. 132, 429-30,
456)
Yet Gellately situates his findings in a radically
different context from Goldhagen’s. He proceeds ‘from the assumption that fear
was indeed prevalent among the German people.’ To pretend otherwise, he
asserts, is ‘foolish’. Denunciation to settle private scores was rampant.
Especially vulnerable were Germans critical of Nazi anti-Semitism. With the
promulgation of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, ‘anyone friendly to Jews could be
denounced on suspicion of having illicit relationships.’ Thus [57] ‘numerous’
Germans ‘in the employ of Jews or in some kind of business contact with them
had brushes with the Gestapo when they persisted in these relations or
expressed the mildest kinds of solidarity with the persecuted.’ Indeed, more
often than not, transgressions were summarily dealt with: ‘When it came to
enforcing racial policies destined to isolate Jews, there can be no doubt that
the wrath of the Gestapo knew no bounds, often dispensing with even the
semblance of legal procedures. It is important to be reminded of the “legal”
and “extra-legal” terror brought down on the heads of those who would not
otherwise comply.’ ‘Sometimes... they were driven to suicide.’ Given the scope
of the repression, Gellately suggests, care must be exercised not to infer too
much from the Gestapo files. They ‘may well underestimate the degree of rejection
of Nazi anti-Semitism’. Germans ‘would be foolhardy to speak openly about
reservations they might have on that score when brought in for interrogation.’
Moreover, ‘if they were never caught, hence never turned over to the Gestapo,
there would be no official record of their activities. In addition, most of the
files of those who were caught were destroyed.’
Germans generally ‘accommodated themselves to the
official line’, Gellately nonetheless suggests, ‘and to all intents and
purposes, did not stand in the way of the persecution of the Jews.’ It was,
however, an acquiescence borne not of fanatical hatred but significantly of
fear: ‘Being turned into the authorities for the smallest sign of
non-compliance was too common not to have struck anxiety in the hearts of
anyone who might under other circumstances have found no fault with the Jews.’
(42)
Dissenting, Goldhagen maintains that behind the
German silence was not at all fear but ‘ideological congruity’ with the
murderous Nazi project. (HWE, p. 591 n. 27) Accordingly, in his overview of the
Nazi era, Goldhagen writes: ‘Whatever else Germans thought about Hitler and the
Nazi movement, however much they might have detested aspects of Nazism, the
vast majority of them subscribed to the underlying Nazi model of Jews and in
this sense (as the Nazis themselves understood) were “Nazified” in their view
of Jews.’
None of the copious relevant scholarship, Goldhagen
acknowledges in the corresponding endnote, reaches his conclusions. Rather,
Goldhagen leans on a ‘theoretical [and] analytical account of anti-Semitism’
and an understanding of ‘the nature of cognitions, beliefs, and ideologies and
their relation to action.’ (HWE, pp. 87, 497-8 n. 24) Without his novel
methodology, Goldhagen is indeed no more able to prove his thesis for the
period after Hitler’s ascension to power than he was for the period before it.
German
Attitudes to Anti-Jewish Laws
Goldhagen recalls the degrading and onerous
proscriptions on Jewish life in Nazi Germany. He cites, for example, the
barring of Jews from public facilities (for example, swimming pools and public
baths), the exclusion of Jews from prestigious professional associations and
institutions (for example, medicine, law and higher education) and later much
[58] of the economy, the posting of signs that pointed up the Jews’ pariah
status (for example, ‘Jews Not Wanted Here’, ‘Entry Forbidden to Jews’), and so
on and so on. (HWE, pp. 91-3, 96-7, 124-5, 137-8)
Implemented ‘with the approval of the vast majority
of people’, these measures evinced, according to Goldhagen, the ‘Germans’
eliminationist intent.’ (HWE, pp. 422, 93) The actual record, however, is
rather more complex. (43) Acting narrowly on their economic self-interest,
Germans generally supported Nazi anti-Jewish initiatives from which they stood
to gain materially, and opposed Nazi anti-Jewish initiatives from which they
stood to lose materially. Socially restrictive Nazi initiatives initially got a
lukewarm reception. Goldhagen suggests otherwise. Citing Gellately, he reports
that ‘Germans posted signs’ with anti-Jewish prohibitions. (HWE, pp. 91-2)
Turning to the cited page, we learn that the campaign was orchestrated ‘by
local hotheads in the Nazi movement , with opportunist Germans occasionally
joining in. Succumbing, however, to the combined pressures of propaganda and
repression, most Germans, already more or less disposed to anti-Semitic
appeals, did come to endorse, with relative ease if not conviction, the social
segregation of the Jews. Yet in this respect, the Germans’ ‘radical treatment’
– as Goldhagen puts it (HWE, p. 422) – of the Jews barely differed from the Jim
Crow system in the American South. (44)
Consider the Nuremberg Laws. Repeatedly pointing to
these enactments as the crystallization of the murderous Nazi mind-set,
Goldhagen, for instance, writes:
The eliminationist program had received at once its
most coherent statement and its most powerful push forward. The Nuremberg Laws
promised to accomplish what had heretofore for decades been but discussed and
urged on ad nauseam. With this codifying moment of the Nazi German ‘religion’,
the regime held up the eliminationist [59] writing on the Nazi tablets for
every German to read. (HWE, pp. 97-8; see also p. 138)
The Nuremberg legislation stripped Jews of the
franchise (‘Reich Citizenship Law’) and prohibited sexual relations between
Jews and Germans (‘The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’). Yet
black people in the American South suffered from identical restrictions.
Indeed, they did not effectively secure the vote, and the Supreme Court did not
outlaw the anti-miscegenation statutes, until the mid 1960s. These
proscriptions enjoyed overwhelming support among Southern whites. Does that
mean nearly all Southern whites were genocidal racists waiting for a Hitler to ‘unleash’
them? (45)
The German disposition to anti-Semitic violence is
plainly the crucial test of Goldhagen’s thesis. Seizing power, Hitler
effectively opened the sluice gates. Moral and legal restraints were lifted.
The opposition was crushed. Virulent anti-Semitic incitement was literally in
the air. ‘The state’, as Goldhagen puts it, ‘had implicitly declared the Jews
to be “fair game” – beings who were to be eliminated from German society, by
whatever means necessary, including violence.’ (46) What did the German people
do? Did they spontaneously indulge in anti-Semitic pogroms? Did they join in
the Nazi pogroms? Did they approve the Nazi pogroms? Did they, at bare minimum,
condone the Nazi pogroms? The voluminous scholarly evidence points to a
uniform, unequivocal answer to all these questions: No. There were few, if any,
popular German assaults on the Jews. Indeed, Germans overwhelmingly condemned
the Nazi anti-Semitic atrocities.
For ‘far greater empirical support for my positions
than space permits me to offer here’, Goldhagen advises, readers should consult
David Bankier’s study, The Germans and
the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism. (HWE, pp. 497-8 n. 24)
Consider then Bankier’s conclusions. During the first years of Nazi anti-Semitic
incitement, most Germans (‘large sectors’, ‘the bulk’, ‘sizable parts’) found ‘the
form of persecution abhorrent’, expressed ‘misgivings about the brutal methods
employed’, ‘remained on the sidelines’, ‘severely condemned the persecution’,
and so on. With the revival of Nazi anti-Semitic terror in 1935, ‘large
sections of the population were repelled by the Sturmer methods and refused to comply with demands to take action
against the Jews.’ Indeed, the ‘vast majority of the population approved the
Nuremberg Laws’ not only because they ‘identified with the racialist policy’
but ‘especially’ because ‘a permanent framework of discrimination had been
created that would [60] end the reign of terror and set precise limits to
anti-Semitic activities.’ ‘Sturmer
methods and the violence’ in the years 1936-37 ‘met with the same disapproval
as in the past.’ ‘The overwhelming majority approved social segregation and
economic destruction of the Jews’ on the eve of Kristallnacht in 1938 ‘but not
outbursts of brute force... it was not Jew hatred in the Nazi sense.’ ‘All
sections of the population’, Bankier reports, ‘reacted with shock’ to
Kristallnacht. ‘There were few occasions, if any, in the Third Reich’, Kershaw
similarly recalls, ‘which produced such a widespread wave of revulsion’,
reaching ‘deep into the ranks’ of the Nazi Party itself. The motives behind
these outpourings of popular disgust, to be sure, were not unalloyed. Some
Germans evinced genuine moral outrage. Some recoiled from the sheer brutality
of the violence which also defaced Germany’s image. Some opposed the
destruction only because it squandered material resources. Yet, whatever the
motive, Goldhagen’s thesis is unsustainable. (47)
For argument’s sake, let us assume the worst-case
scenario: Germans repudiated Nazi anti-Semitic violence not on strictly
humanitarian grounds but, rather, because it was gratuitously cruel and
economically wasteful. According to Goldhagen, however, these were precisely
the differentiae of the Nazi genocide. The ‘limitless cruelty’ of the German
perpetrators, Goldhagen emphasizes, was ‘a constituent feature of the
Holocaust, as central to it as the killing itself.’ (Reply, p. 38; I will
return to this crucial distinction in part II) Goldhagen also devotes a significant
part of his study (pp. 281-323) to demonstrating that, in the hierarchy of ‘guiding
values’ in the German ‘work’ camps, persecution of the Jews always took
precedence over ‘economic rationality’. (HWE, p. 322) Regardless of the reason,
then, the German people’s overwhelming condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitic
violence is conclusive evidence that Goldhagen’s ‘monocausal explanation’ is
false. Note further that, according to Goldhagen, a crucial facet of the Nazi
genocide was the voluntarism of the perpetrators. Always taking the initiative,
ordinary Germans – to quote a typical passage – ‘easily and with alacrity
became executioners of Jews’. (HWE, p. 395; I will also return to this point in
part II) Yet, as we have seen, spontaneous German anti-Semitic attacks rarely
occurred. On the eve of the Nazi holocaust, the German people were, on
Goldhagen’s own terms, very far from ‘Nazified.’ Indeed, there was much less
popular participation in and [61] support for violent racist incitement in Nazi
Germany than in the American South.(48)
Apparently aware that the crushing weight of
scholarly evidence obliterates his thesis, Goldhagen improvises a three-pronged
damage control strategy: tacit admission, minimization, and misrepresentation.
I shall only sample his procedures here (see Table).
Table
TACIT ADMISSION
Goldhagen acknowledges the evidence but not its
devastating implications for his thesis. For example:
‘The law excluding Jews from the civil service, being
unaccompanied by public displays of brutality, was, not surprisingly, widely
unpopular in Germany.’ (HWE, p. 91)
Recalling the ‘uncoordinated and often wild attacks
upon Jews’ during the first years of Nazi rule, Goldhagen observes that ‘many
Germans’ felt ‘unsettled.’ (HWE, p. 97)
‘The reaction of the populace at large’ to Nazi
initiatives ‘was one of general approval... , though it was accompanied by
significant disapproval of the licentious brutality.’ (HWE, p. 99)
To document that ‘workers ... were, on the issue of
the Jews, in general accord with the Nazis’, Goldhagen cites an SPD report
stating that ‘The general anti-Semitic psychosis affects ... our comrades’ but ‘All
are decided opponents of violence.’ (HWE, pp. 106-7)
MINIMIZATION
Goldhagen acknowledges the evidence but denies that
it undermines his thesis. For example:
‘The criticism of Kristallnacht’s
licentious violence and wasteful destruction that could be heard around Germany
should be understood as the limited criticism of an eliminationist path that
the overwhelming majority of Germans considered to be fundamentally sound, but
which, in this case, had taken a momentary wrong turn.’ (HWE, p. 102; See also
pp. 101, 103, 120-1, 123) (Weren’t ‘licentious violence’ and ‘wasteful
destruction’ the hallmarks of the Nazi genocide?)
‘Episodic distemper with aspects of the regime’s
assault on the Jews should not be understood as being indicative of a
widespread, general rejection of the eliminationist ideal and program... the
character and overwhelming plenitude of the counter-evidence... is vastly
greater than Germans’ numerically paltry expressions of disapproval of what...
can be seen to have been generally only specific aspects of the larger
eliminationist program and not its governing principles.’ (HWE, p. 120; see
also p. 91)
Conceding that ‘Ordinary Germans did not leap to mass
extermination on their own, or generally even urge it’, Goldhagen explains that
‘Hitler was already working towards this goal with heart and soul, so many
Germans sat by, satisfied that their government was doing the best that any
government conceivably could.’ (HWE, p. 445-6) (Weren’t Germans anxiously
awaiting Hitler to ‘unleash’ and ‘unshackle’ their ‘pent up anti-Semitic
passion’? Seizing every opportunity, didn’t Germans leap ‘with alacrity’ to
kill Jews during the Nazi genocide?)
‘No evidence suggests that any but an insignificant
scattering of Germans harboured opposition to the eliminationist program save
for its most brutally wanton aspects.’ (HWE, pp. 438-9; see also pp. 509-10 n.
165)
MISREPRESENTATION
Goldhagen mangles the evidence. For example:
spontaneous ones from ordinary Germans and ones
orchestrated by government and party institutions’, Goldhagen adds: ‘the vast
majority of the German people... were aware of what their government and their countrymen
were doing to the Jews, assented to the measures, and, when the opportunity
presented itself, lent their active support to them.’ (HWE, pp. 89-90) (Didn’t
Goldhagen’s main empirical source state that Germans overwhelmingly opposed
Nazi violence?)
‘The attacks upon Jews during the first years of Nazi
governance of Germany were so widespread and broad-based that it would be
grievously wrong to attribute them solely to the coughs of the SA, as if the
wider German public had no influence over, Recalling inter alia the ‘Physical
and increased verbal attacks upon Jews, both or part in, the violence.’ (HWE,
p. 95)
‘In light of the widespread persecution and violence
that occurred throughout ... Germany, Kristallnacht
was, in one sense, but the crowning moment in the wild domestic terror that
Germans perpetrated upon Jews.’ (HWE, p. 99; see also pp. 100-1)
‘The perpetrators [of the Nazi genocide], from Hitler
to the lowliest officials, were openly proud of their actions, of their
achievements; during the 1930s, they proclaimed and carried them out in full
view and with the general approval of the Volk.’
(HWE, p.429; see also p. 430)
Left without a shred of scholarly evidence that
Germans overwhelmingly savoured the prospect of massacring Jewry, Goldhagen
devises more ingenious methods of proof. Thus, to document the ‘whiff of
genocide’ in the ‘anti-Semitic German atmosphere’, Goldhagen quotes an American
journalist’s murderous conversations with ‘Nazi circles’, and ‘at a luncheon or
dinner with Nazis.’ (HWE, p. 595 n. 68) ‘It is oxymoronic’, according to
Goldhagen, ‘to suggest that those who stood with curiosity gazing upon the
annihilative inferno of Kristallnacht’
did not relish the violence and destruction. Apparently never having witnessed
a crowd mill about a burning edifice, Goldhagen writes: ‘People generally flee
scenes and events that they consider to be horrific, criminal, or dangerous.’(HWE,
p. 440)
Although there was no palpable evidence in the 1930s
of Americans’ intent to kill Japanese, Goldhagen finally analogizes, they did
so ‘willingly... and fully believing in the justice of their cause’ during
World War II. (HWE, p. 446) The comparison is instructive. The merciless war in
the Pacific, John Dower has argued, was the culmination of a plurality of
factors: pervasive anti-Asian prejudice, furore over the Pearl Harbor attack,
inflammatory war propaganda, brutalizing combat, and so on . (49) To reckon by
Goldhagen’s analogy, however, the explanation is rather more simple: Americans
were homicidal racists.
Opposition
and Indifference
Even during the early war years, most Germans
repudiated Nazi anti-Semitism. In September 1941 the Nazis issued a decree
forcing Jews to wear the yellow star. ‘A negative reaction to the labelling’,
Bankier reports, was the ‘more typical public response.’ Indeed ‘people were
often demonstratively kind’, according to reliable accounts. ‘Many displayed
forms of disobedience, offering Jews cigars and cigarettes, giving children
sweets, or standing up for Jews on trams and underground trains.’ ‘Germans
clearly could not tolerate’, Bankier infers, ‘actions which outraged their
sense of decency, even towards stigmatized Jews.’ Shocked and appalled by such
dissent, the Nazis intensified anti-Jewish [63] propaganda and even enacted a
new law sanctioning philosemitic displays with three months’ internment in a
concentration camp. (50) Although listing Bankier’s study as his main empirical
source, Goldhagen omits altogether these remarkable findings. Rather he
reports:
Wearing such a visible target among such a hostile
populace... caused Jews to feel acute insecurity, and, because any German
passer-by could now identify them easily, Jews, especially Jewish children,
suffered increased verbal and physical assaults ... The introduction of the
yellow star also meant that all Germans could now better recognize, monitor,
and shun those bearing the mark of the social dead. (HWE, pp. 138-9)
With the passage of time and especially as the war
took a more disastrous turn, Germans grew increasingly insensitive to Jewish
suffering. Propaganda played a part, as did the escalating repression and
physical isolation of the Jews. Then the callousness toward human life
typically attending war exacerbated by the terror bombing and worsening
deprivations on the home front-set in. Turning ever more inward, Germans
focused on the exigencies of survival. Hardened and bitter, in search of a
scapegoat, they occasionally lashed out at the weak. (51) To illustrate this
gradual coarsening of heart, Bankier first recalls ‘not unusual’ episodes in
1941 when, breaking the law and outraging Nazi authorities, Germans surrendered
their tramcar seats to aged Jews, eliciting ‘the general approval of the other
passengers.’ Yet by 1942, according to Bankier, Germans displaying sympathy for
Jews were hooted in public. He recounts a particularly brutal incident also on
a tramcar. Citing only this last episode in his book, Goldhagen goes on to
criticize Bankier’s balanced conclusion based on all the evidence:
It is difficult to understand why Bankier ...
concludes that ‘incidents of this sort substantiate the contention that
day-to-day contact with a virulent, anti-Semitic atmosphere progressively
dulled people’s sensitivity to the plight of their Jewish neighbours’... That
any but a small number of Germans ever possessed ‘sensitivity to the plight of
their Jewish neighbours’ during the Nazi period is an assumption which cannot
be substantiated, and which... is undermined by the empirical evidence which
Bankier presents throughout his book. (HWE, pp. 105, 502 n. 90)
Truly, the Germans’ progressively dulled
sensitivities are ‘an assumption which cannot be substantiated’ – if all the
empirical substantiation is subject to excision.
Although unaware of the full scope of the judeocide,
most Germans did know, or could have known if they chose to, that massive
atrocities were being committed in the East. There is no evidence, however,
that most Germans approved of these murderous acts. Indeed, precisely because
[64] Hitler knew he could not count on enthusiastic popular support, the Final
Solution was shrouded in secrecy and all public discussion of Jewry’s fate was
banned. (52) The near-consensus in the scholarly literature is that most
Germans looked on with malignant indifference. Ian Kershaw, who has written
most authoritatively on this topic, summarizes:
Apathy and ‘moral indifference’ to the treatment and
fate of the Jews was the most widespread attitude of all. This was not a
neutral stance. It was a deliberate turning away from any personal
responsibility, acceptance of the state’s right to decide on an issue of little
personal concern to most Germans ... the shying away from anything which might
produce trouble or danger. This apathy was compatible with a number of
internalized attitudes towards Jews, not least with passive or latent
anti-Semitism – the feeling that there was a ‘Jewish Question’ and that something
needed to be done about it.
It bears emphasizing that Germany’s anti-Semitic
legacy did constitute a vital precondition for the genocide. Had Jews not been
placed outside the community of moral concern, Kershaw stresses, the Nazis
could not have committed their monstrous deeds: ‘The lack of interest in or
exclusion of concern for the fate of racial, ethnic, or religious minority
groups marks ... at the societal level a significant prerequisite for the
genocidal process, allowing the momentum created by the fanatical hatred of a
section of the population to gather force, especially, of course, when
supported by the power of the state.’ This is a far cry, however, from
asserting that ordinary German anti-Semitism – let alone ordinary German
anti-Semitism before Hitler’s reign – in itself accounts for the Nazi genocide.
Indeed, Kershaw suggests that little in the German
response was ‘peculiarly German or specific only to the “Jewish Question”‘,
and, conversely, that most peoples similarly situated would probably not have
responded in a more ‘honourable’ fashion than the Germans. (53) Vehemently
dissenting, Goldhagen maintains that such alleged indifference in the face of
mass slaughter is a ‘virtual psychological impossibility’. (HWE, pp. 439-41)
Yet how differently did ordinary Americans react to the slaughter of four
million Indochinese, ordinary French to the slaughter of one million Algerians,
or, for that matter, ordinary non-Germans to the slaughter of the Jews?
II. Perpetrating the
Genocide
When the correlations are made of the Germans’
anti-Jewish measures with their deduced or imputed intentions, Hitler’s [65]
hypothesized psychological states and moods, and the Germans’ military fortune,
the correlation that stands out, that jumps out, as having been more
significant than any other (than all
of the others) is that Hitler opted for genocide at the first moment that the
policy became practical. (HWE, p. 161)
With the onset of the Nazi holocaust, the validity of
Goldhagen’s thesis ceases to be at issue. On the one hand, all the evidence
points to the conclusion that, on the eve of the genocide, the vast majority of
Germans were not in thrall to a
homicidal malice toward Jerry. On the other hand, it is simply not possible,
after 1941, to isolate, among the sundry factors potentially spurring German
behaviour – an anti-Semitic legacy, virulent Nazi propaganda, brutalization
caused by the war, and so on – a ‘monocausal explanation’ of the judeocide.
(54) Thus, even if everything Goldhagen maintains about the Nazi holocaust is
accurate, his thesis remains false or at best moot. Goldhagen’s rendering,
however, is not accurate. Indeed, in
a veritable negative tour de force, Goldhagen manages to get nearly everything
about the Nazi holocaust wrong. The wrong questions are posed. The wrong
answers are given. The wrong lessons are learned.
5. How Many Willing
Executioners?
Crediting himself as being the first to reckon the
magnitude of German complicity in the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen boasts:
Until now no one else has discussed seriously the
number of people who perpetrated the genocide ....The critics do not bother to
inform their readers that I am the first to discuss the numbers (and the
problems of providing an estimate), let alone to convey to readers the
significance of the findings or of the fact that we have had to wait until 1996
to learn one of the most elementary facts about the Holocaust. (Reply, p. 42)
Yet consider Goldhagen’s calculations. (HWE, pp.
166-7) He first estimates that, if all German perpetrators, direct and
indirect, of the [66] genocide are included, the number ‘ran into the millions’.
He next estimates that the ‘the number of people who were actual perpetrators
was also enormous’ and ‘might run into the millions.’ He then, however, makes
the qualification that ‘the number who became perpetrators of the Holocaust (in
the sense that it is meant here) was certainly over one hundred thousand’ and
perhaps as many as ‘five hundred thousand or more’. But what is ‘the sense that
it is meant here’, if not direct and indirect perpetrators combined or direct
perpetrators alone? Compounding the confusion, Goldhagen earlier explicitly
defines a perpetrator, for the purposes of his study, as any direct or indirect
participant in the genocide. (55) This presumably being ‘the sense that it is
meant here’, the total number of direct and indirect German perpetrators thus
runs not into the millions but at most the hundreds of thousands. What is more,
Goldhagen acknowledges in an endnote that all his calculations are pure
guesswork: ‘Early in my research, I decided that deriving a good estimate of
the number of people who were perpetrators would consume more time than I could
profitably devote to it, given my other research objectives. Still, I am
confident in asserting that the number was huge.’ (HWE, p. 525 n. 13) Indeed,
even this last asseveration is plainly untrue. The estimate for perpetrators
Goldhagen most often cites is 100,000. Even assuming for argument’s sake that
it includes only direct participants, this figure is still not at all ‘huge’.
Goldhagen seems unaware that his research is significant only if – as Hilberg
suggests – the perpetrators of the genocide were qualitatively representative of German society generally. Goldhagen’s
quantitative finding is comparatively
trivial.
Based mainly on the archives of postwar
investigations and trials, the core of Goldhagen’s study is an analysis of the
German police battalions. (56) Following Christopher Browning, Goldhagen
maintains that these ‘agents of genocide’ were more or less typical Germans.
Also like Browning, Goldhagen reports that the police battalions were often not
obliged to kill Jews. Explicitly given the option of not participating, the
overwhelming majority chose not to exercise it. Indeed, those who opted out
suffered no real penalties. (57)
[67] In their testimony, the police battalions did
not at all acknowledge anti-Semitism as a motivating factor. Making a
persuasive case that the near-total silence on Jews was partly disingenuous,
Browning nonetheless flatly denies that virulent, Nazi-like anti-Semitism was
the prime impetus behind the police battalions’ implementation of the Final
Solution. (58) To sustain his contrary thesis, Goldhagen focuses on the
gratuitous cruelty attending the genocide. The argument he makes comprises two
interrelated but also distinct propositions: 1) gratuitous cruelty is the
hallmark of virulent, Nazi-like anti-Semitism, and 2) the police battalions
implemented the Final Solution with gratuitous cruelty. I will address these
propositions in turn.
Psychopaths
or Bureaucrats?
‘Not only the killing but also how the Germans killed must be explained’, claims Goldhagen. ‘The “how”
frequently provides great insight into the “why”.’ It is Goldhagen’s main
theoretical contention that the propensity for ‘gratuitous cruelty, such as
beating, mocking, torturing Jews’ – a cruelty ‘which had no instrumental,
pragmatic purpose save the satisfaction and pleasure of the perpetrators’ – was
the hallmark of the ‘Nazified German mind’ in thrall to ‘demonological
anti-Semitism’. Contrariwise, had they not been Nazi-like anti-Semites, the
German perpetrators would have been ‘cold, mechanical executioners’, ‘emotionless
or reluctant functionaries’. (59)
The remarkable thing about Goldhagen’s argument is
that the exact opposite is true. What distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism was the reluctant and mechanical, as
against the gratuitously cruel implementation, of the Final Solution. ‘The
killing of the Jews’, reports Raul Hilberg, ‘was regarded as historical
necessity.’
The soldier had to ‘understand’ this. If for any
reason he was instructed to help the SS and Police in their task, he was
expected to obey orders. However, if he killed a Jew spontaneously,
voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he wanted to kill, then he
committed an abnormal act, worthy perhaps of an ‘Eastern European’.... Herein
lay the crucial difference between the man who ‘overcame’ himself to kill and
one who wantonly committed atrocities. The former was regarded as a good
soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person without self-control ...
[68] Addressing the Nazi fighting elite, SS leader
Heinrich Himmler accordingly avowed that the Final Solution had become ‘the
most painful question of my life’; that he ‘hated this bloody business’ that
had disturbed him to the ‘depth’ of his ‘soul’, but everyone must do his duty, ‘however
hard it might be’; that ‘we have completed this painful task out of love for
our people’; that it was ‘the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses’;
that ‘we have been called upon to fulfill a repulsive duty’, and he ‘would not
like it if Germans did such a thing gladly’; that ‘an execution is a grim duty
for our men’ and ‘if we had not felt it to be hideous and frightful, we should
not have been Germans’, but nevertheless ‘we must grit our teeth and do our
duty’, and so on.
In his perversely sanctimonious postwar memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz (generally
accepted by scholars as representing honest, if barbaric, sentiments), the
exemplary ultra-Nazi Rudolf Hoess similarly recalled being ‘deeply marked’ and ‘tormented’
by the ‘mass extermination, with all the attendant circumstances’ of this ‘monstrous
“work”.’ Regarding the ‘Extermination Order’ for the Gypsies – ‘my bestloved
prisoners, if I may put it that way’ – Hoess reflects, ‘Nothing surely is
harder than to grit one’s teeth and go through with such a thing, coldly,
pitilessly and without mercy.’ To implement the Final Solution, ‘I had to
exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost doubts and
feelings of oppression from becoming apparent .... My pity was so great that I
longed to vanish from the scene...
Loathsome undertaking that it was, the judeocide was
supposed to be executed with stoicism. ‘Sadism’, reports Heinz Hohne, ‘was only
one facet of mass extermination and one disapproved of by SS Headquarters.’
Repudiating ‘crude’ anti-Semitism, the Nazi elite sought to ‘solve the
so-called Jewish problem in a cold, rational manner.’ ‘The new type of man of
violence’, Joachim Fest likewise observes, ‘was concerned with the
dispassionate extermination of real or possible opponents, not with the
primitive release of sadistic impulses.’ This ideal Nazi rejection of
compulsive in favour of calculated violence, Hans Mommsen emphasizes, was ‘fundamental
to the entire system’. It did not at all, to be sure, spring from humanitarian
impulses. Rather, gratuitous cruelty was seen as beneath the moral dignity and
undermining the combat discipline of the German executioners.
Cruelty
in the Camps
Rejecting ‘from inner conviction’ the ‘Bolshevist
method of physical extermination of a people as un-Germanic’, SS leader
Heinrich Himmler resolved to implement the Final Solution ‘coolly and clearly;
even while obeying the official order to commit murder, the SS man must remain “decent”.’
(Hohne) ‘We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that
is clear’, Himmler admonished. ‘Be hard but do not become hardened’ and ‘intervene
at once’ should ‘a Commander exceed his duty or show signs that his sense of
restraint is becoming blurred.’ Regarding unauthorized assaults on Jews,
Himmler’s legal staff accordingly instructed that, if the motive was ‘purely
political, there should be no punishment unless such is necessary for the
maintenance of discipline... If the motive is selfish, sadistic or sexual,
judicial punishment [69] should be imposed for murder or manslaughter as the
case may be.’ Thus, in one notorious SS and Police Supreme Court verdict, an SS
officer was convicted not for the actual murder of Jews but inter alia for the ‘vicious
excesses’, ‘Bolshevik methods’, ‘vicious brutality’, ‘cruel actions’, and so
forth that attended the murders. (Goldhagen refers to this proceeding but not
the conviction for gratuitous cruelty. HWE, p. 585 n. 73) ‘Himmler, in short,
was not a simple, bloodthirsty, sadistic monster’, concludes biographer Richard
Breitman. ‘If a sadist is one who delights in personally inflicting pain or
death on others, or in witnessing others inflict them, then Himmler was not a
sadist... Himmler was the ultimate bureaucrat.’
The ‘horrors of the concentration camps’, Hoess
avows, did not receive his sanction. Evidently the Auschwitz commandant
intends, not the systematic mass extermination overseen by him, but rather the
sadistic outbursts he purports to have ‘used every means at my disposal to
stop.’ ‘I myself never maltreated a prisoner, far less killed one. Nor have I
ever tolerated maltreatment by my subordinates.’ ‘I was never cruel.’
Repeatedly professing profound disgust at the ‘malignancy, wickedness and
brutality’ of SS guards who did gratuitously torture camp inmates, Hoess muses,
‘They did not regard prisoners as human beings at all ... They regarded the
sight of corporal punishment being inflicted as an excellent spectacle, a kind
of peasant merrymaking. I was certainly not one of these.’ The Kapos –
prisoner-functionaries in charge of the work detachments – indulging in orgies
of violence aroused Hoess’s deepest contempt: ‘They were soulless and had no
feelings whatsoever. I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn
into such beasts ... It was simply gruesome.” (60) Indeed, former inmates of
the Nazi concentration camps typically testify that the Kapos were, in the words
of Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, ‘harder on the prisoners than were
the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did. (61) To reckon by
Goldhagen’s standard, not Hoess or Himmler but the Kapo underling was the
quintessential ‘Nazified German mind’ in thrall to ‘demonological anti-Semitism.’
On the other hand, Goldhagen does, for example,
mention that a senior SS official ‘who was no friend of the Jews’, Das Schwarze Korps, ‘the official organ
of the SS, the most ideologically radical of all Nazi papers and naturally also
a virulently anti-Semitic one’, and ‘even the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf
Hoess, who presided over the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews’,
repudiated, indeed were ‘repelled’ by, the ‘unnecessary brutality’, ‘frenzied
sadists’, ‘senseless acts of terror’, and so forth. He does not, however,
register the potentially fatal implications of [70] these acknowledgements for
his thesis. (HWE, pp. 105, 121, 394, 509-10 n. 165) Compounding error with
contradiction, Goldhagen instead avers that the ‘Nazified German mind’ was
equally compatible with a broad spectrum of types – ranging from the ‘revelling,
sadistic slayers’ and the ‘zealous but faint-of-heart killers’ to the ‘dedicated
but non celebratory executioners’ and the ‘approving but uneasy and conflicted
killers’ – and that ‘it is hard to know what the distribution of the various
types was.’ (HWE, pp. 259-61; see also pp. 509-10 n. 165) That being the case,
gratuitous cruelty plainly did not distinguish the ‘Nazified German mind’.
Goldhagen’s fixation on the gratuitous cruelty of Germans is thus, even on his
own terms, wrong headed: the ‘sadistic slayer’ is, for Goldhagen, no more proof
of a ‘Nazified German mind’ than the ‘uneasy and conflicted killer.’
Consider now Goldhagen’s complementary empirical
claim. The gratuitous cruelty of the police battalions was pervasive. Goldhagen’s
study is mostly given over to chronicling German atrocities attendant on the
Final Solution. Undaunted by the ‘horror, brutality, and frequent gruesomeness
of the killing operations’, the police battalions, according to Goldhagen, ‘easily
became genocidal killers’ of Jews. Indeed, Goldhagen maintains that the police
battalions tortured and murdered Jews with ‘relish and excess’, ‘cruel abandon’,
‘unmistakable alacrity’, ‘evident gusto’, ‘dedication and zeal’, as a ‘pleasurable
pursuit’, ‘in the most gratuitous, willful manner’. (HWE, pp. 19, 185, 191,
237, 238, 255, 256, 259, 378, 387, 447) Goldhagen underlines that the police
battalions committed their monstrous deeds openly – for example, with ‘loved
ones’ in attendance – and even ‘memorialized’ them in photographs: ‘It is as if
they were saying, “Here is a great event. Anyone who wants to preserve for
himself images of the heroic accomplishments can order copies”.’ (HWE, pp.
241-7)
First, a brief word about this latter argument. To
prove that ordinary Germans were in thrall to homicidal anti-Semitism before
Hitler’s rise to power, Goldhagen points to the public aspect of the
atrocities. Yet compare the war in the Pacific. Recalling that the Allied
combatants’ practice of collecting Japanese ears ‘was no secret’, John Dower
reports:
‘The other night’, read an account in the Marine
monthly Leatherneck in mid-1943, ‘Stanley
emptied his pocket of “souvenirs” – eleven ears from dead Japs. It was not
disgusting, as it would be from the civilian point of view. None of us could
get emotional over it.’ Even as battle-hardened veterans were assuming that
civilians would be shocked by such acts, however, the press in the United Sates
contained evidence to the contrary. In April 1943, the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a local mother who had petitioned
authorities to permit her son to mail her an ear he had cut off a Japanese
soldier in the South Pacific. She wished to nail it to her front door for all
to see. On the very same day, the Detroit
Free Press deemed newsworthy the story of an underage youth who had
enlisted and ‘bribed’ his chaplain not to disclose his age by promising him the
third pair of ears he collected.
Scalps, bones, and skulls were somewhat rarer
trophies, but the latter two achieved special notoriety ... when an American
serviceman [71] sent President Roosevelt a letter opener made from the bone of
a dead Japanese (the President refused it), and Life published a full page
photograph of an attractive blond posing with a Japanese skull she had been
sent by her fiancé in the Pacific. Life
treated this as a human-interest story ... Another wellknown Life photograph revealed the practice of
using Japanese skulls as ornaments on US military vehicles. 62
Yet as shown above, Dower’s account of the Pacific
war does not at all rely on the kind of ‘monocausal explanation’ that Goldhagen
purports is the only plausible one. Note incidentally that, unlike the
Americans, the Germans firmly forbade such publicity. ‘To every normal person’,
a German chief of staff lectured, ‘it is a matter of course that he does not
take photographs of such disgusting excesses or report about them when he
writes home. The distribution of photographs and the spreading of reports about
such events will be regarded as a subversion of decency and discipline in the
army and will be punished strictly.’
Indeed as Goldhagen suggests, those violating the
Nazi taboo suffered harsh penalties. (63)
Returning to the main argument, nearly all the
ordinary Germans assembled in the police battalions, according to Goldhagen,
brutalized Jews with ‘gusto’, ‘relish’ and ‘zeal’. Compare first the extreme
case of ‘those soulless automata’ (Hohne) staffing the concentration camps. ‘Among
the guards there were some sadists, sadists in the pure clinical sense’, Victor
Frankl recalled. Yet the ‘majority of the guards’, although morally ‘dulled’ by
the relentless brutality of camp life, ‘refused to take active part in sadistic
measures’. The ‘sadists, brutal criminals ... who enjoyed torturing human
beings, and did it with passionate conviction’, Auschwitz survivor Dr. Ella
Lingens-Reiner similarly suggested in her memoir, were only a minority among
several SS types in the camp. ‘Compared with our general living conditions’,
gratuitous cruelty ‘played an insignificant role. The deaths and cases of
grave, permanent physical injury caused by those acts of brutality were,
comparatively speaking, not so very numerous.’ ‘There were few sadists’,
Lingens-Reiner later testified at the Auschwitz trial. ‘Not more than five or
ten per cent.’ ‘Nothing would be more mistaken than to see the SS as a sadistic
horde driven to abuse and torture thousands of human beings by instinct,
passion, or some thirst for pleasure’, concurred Auschwitz survivor Benedict
Kautsky. ‘Those who acted in this way were a small minority.’ Thus ordinary
Germans were, if Goldhagen’s thesis is correct, much more pathologically cruel
than the concentration camp personnel. Seen from Goldhagen’s theoretical side,
that would also make ordinary Germans much more in thrall to Nazi-like
anti-Semitism than the camp guards. (64)
[72]
Interpreting the Evidence
Amid the manifold repetitions of his sweeping
generalization, Goldhagen suddenly reveals that its empirical basis is but fragmentary,
indeed paper-thin.
Few survivors have emerged, and so it is often up to
the Germans to report their own brutality – however much there was – and
thereby to incriminate themselves, which they are naturally reluctant to do.
Moreover, the Federal Republic of Germany’s investigating authorities were
generally not interested in learning about instances of cruelty, since by the
time of these investigations, all crimes, except murder, had passed the time
limit for prosecution that is specified in the statute of limitations. No
matter how much a German in a police battalion had beaten, tortured, or maimed
a Jew, if he did not kill the victim, he could not be prosecuted for his
actions. (HWE, p. 255; see also p. 261)
And again in an endnote:
... the interrogations focus on establishing what
crimes were committed and who committed them. The only crime with which all but
the earliest investigations (and they were few and unrevealing) were concerned
was murder, because the statute of limitations had expired for all other
crimes. So the investigators were generally interested in acts of cruelty only
insofar as they were perpetrated by the tiny percentage of perpetrators whom
they indicted or believed they might indict, because such acts of cruelty would
help to establish a perpetrator’s motive; investigators, therefore, did not ask
about or delve into the cruelties that the vast majority of perpetrators
committed. (HWE, p. 600 n. 5)
The actual documentation, according to Goldhagen, at
best ‘suggests’ that gratuitous cruelty figured as a ‘part’ of the police battalions’
repertoire. (HWE, p. 255) The wonder would be were it otherwise. Who ever
doubted that there were sadistically cruel Germans? To sustain his thesis,
however, Goldhagen must prove considerably more. What marks off its novelty,
after all, is the audacious indictment of nearly all battalion members – hence
ordinary Germans – as sadistic anti-Semites.
[73] The evidentiary basis of Goldhagen’s thesis is
not only exiguous. It is also highly selective. He categorically discounts all ‘self-exculpating
claims of the battalion men to opposition, reluctance, and refusal’. Explaining
his methodology, Goldhagen recalls that criminals do not typically confess to
more than can be proven against them. What can be denied is denied. Hence
Goldhagen infers that the police battalions, although acknowledging the
genocide, concealed their sadism: ‘Even when they could not completely hide
that they had given their bodies to the slaughter, they in all likelihood
denied that they had given to it their souls, their inner will and moral
assent.’ (HWE, pp. 467-8, 534 n. 1) Leaving to one side the purely speculative
nature of this claim, the fact is that the police battalions did openly confess
to more – much more – than could have been proven against them. (65) Consider
just a tiny sample of the incriminating admissions that Goldhagen reports or
cites:
One killer even tells of a time he was sent alone
with a Jew to the woods. He was under absolutely no supervision, so it was a
perfect opportunity to let a victim flee, had he opposed the existing war of
racist purgation. But he shot him. (HWE, p. 193)
‘I would like to mention now that only women and
children were there. They were largely women and children around twelve years
old ... I had to shoot an old woman, who was over sixty years old. I can still
remember, that the old woman said to me, will you make it short or about the
same.’ (HWE, p. 219)
‘I would like also to mention that before the
beginning of the execution, Sergeant Steinmetz said to the members of the
platoon that those who did not feel up to the upcoming task could come forward.
No one, to be sure, exempted himself.’ (HWE, p. 220)
‘I must admit that we felt a certain joy when we
would seize a Jew whom one could kill. I cannot remember an instance when a
policeman had to be ordered to an execution. The shootings were, to my
knowledge, always carried out on a voluntary basis; one could have gained the
impression that various policemen got a big kick out of it.’ (HWE, p. 452) (66)
Indeed, Goldhagen’s evidence of gratuitous brutality
is culled almost entirely from the gratuitously self-incriminating testimony of
the police battalions. Plainly this was not, by his own reasoning, typical
criminal testimony. The police battalion members did not seek at every opportunity
to minimize their responsibility. Yet Goldhagen indiscriminately excludes all ‘self-exculpating’
testimony on the assumption that they did.
It bears emphasis that the issue is not whether the
testimony of the police battalions was riddled with lies, distortions and
omissions. Of course it [74] must have been. The point rather is Goldhagen’s blanket dismissal of all testimony
impeaching his thesis. Thus he reports a police battalion member’s gratuitous
admission about killing Jewish patients in a hospital, while maintaining that
the member’s explanation that a superior officer threatened him ‘must be
discounted’ on principle. (HWE, pp. 200-1, 533 n. 74) Indeed, Goldhagen
highlights the absence of testimony that the police battalions dissented from
this or that criminal act. (HWE, p. 201) Yet all claims of dissent are anyhow
automatically disregarded by him.
Acknowledging that the police battalions did
initially recoil from their murderous assignment, Goldhagen nonetheless denies
that this demurral at all registered moral qualms. Emphatically and repeatedly,
he instead diagnoses the ‘unhappy, disturbed, perhaps even incensed’ state of
the police battalions as merely a ‘visceral reaction’ to the ‘physically
gruesome’, ‘aesthetically unpleasant’ task at hand: ‘The men were sickened by
the exploded skulls, the flying blood and bone, the sight of so many freshly
killed corpses of their own making.’ Contradicting himself, Goldhagen also
states in the very same breath that the police battalions were ‘given pause, even
shaken by having plunged into mass slaughter and committing deeds that would
change and forever define them socially and morally.’ (HWE, pp. 192, 220-2,
250, 252, 378, 400-1, 538 n. 39, 543 n. 98)
‘Had this reaction been the consequence of principled
opposition and not mere disgust’, Goldhagen critically argues, ‘the
psychological strain would, with subsequent killings, have likely increased and
not subsided completely... But like medical students who might initially be
shaken by their exposure to blood and guts yet who view their work as ethically
laudable, these men easily adjusted to the unpleasant aspect of their calling.’
(HWE, p. 261)
The
Killers’ Mental Anguish
Thus the police battalions’ effortless psychological
accommodation to the genocide demonstrates their Nazi-like anti-Semitism. Yet
consider Goldhagen’s treatment of the Nazi ‘ideological exponents’ recruited
from bodies such as the SS, SD and the Gestapo to form the Einsatzgruppen. (67)
As the genocide unfolded, the Einsatzgruppen did suffer, according to
Goldhagen, escalating psychological distress. Goldhagen recalls the Nuremberg
testimony of Einsatzgruppe commander, Otto Ohlendorf: ‘I had sufficient
occasion to see how many men of my Gruppe did not agree to this [genocidal]
order in their inner opinion. Thus, I forbade the participation in these
executions on the part of some of these men and I sent some back to Germany.’
On account of the severe emotional strain, Goldhagen further reports, ‘transfers
occurred frequently’ in the Einsatzgruppen and Himmler even issued explicit
orders allowing for Einsatzgruppen members to excuse themselves. To explain why
‘the SS and security units were so lenient’, Goldhagen also cites Himmler’s
assessment that the judeocide ‘could only be carried out by... the staunchest
individuals ... [by] fanatical, deeply committed National Socialists.’
Goldhagen further highlights SS leader Reinhard Heydrich’s orders that [75] the
Einsatzgruppen recruit local collaborators for the killings in order to
preserve the psychological equilibrium of our people.’ (HWE, pp. 149, 380-1,
578-9 n. 13) Indeed precisely on this account, Goldhagen emphasizes, the Nazi
leadership eventually switched to gas chambers:
Himmler, ever solicitous of the welfare of those who
were turning his and Hitler’s apocalyptic visions into deed, began to search
about for a means of killing that would be less burdensome to the executioners ...
The move to gassing... – contrary to widely accepted belief – was prompted not
by considerations of efficiency, but by the search for a method that would ease
the psychological burden of killing for the Germans. (HWE, pp. 156-7; see also
p. 521 n. 81)
The severe disorientation of Einsatzgruppen members –
culminating in the breakdown of some and the barbarization of others – and its
repercussions for Nazi policy – the use, for example, of local collaborators,
gas chambers, and military style executions to assuage the sense of individual
guilt – are in fact amply attested to in the documentary record. ‘Even Himmler’s
most aggressive Eastern minion’, Hohne recalls
became a victim of the nightmare [some text may be
missing] von dem Bach-Zelewski was taken to the SS hospital ... suffering from
a nervous breakdown and congestion of the liver. Haunted by his guilt, he would
pass his nights screaming, a prey to hallucinations... The Head SS doctor
reported to Himmler: ‘He is suffering particularly from hallucinations
connected with the shootings of Jews in the East.’ (68)
Goldhagen also suggests that the specific genocidal task
allotted the Einsatzgruppen was less stringent than that of the police
battalions: ‘The men in some of the police battalions had a more demanding,
more psychologically difficult road to travel. Unlike the Einsatzkommandos,
they were not eased into the genocidal killing, and integral to their
operations was the emptying of ghettos of all life, with all the brutalities
that it entailed.’ (HWE, p. 277)
Distilling the essence of Goldhagen’s argument, we
reach yet another truly novel conclusion: ordinary Germans in the police
battalions ‘easily adjusted’ to the genocide; the specialized units in the
Einsatzgruppen, although less morally taxed, experienced acute psychological
strain; ordinary Germans were much more Nazified than the Nazi ideological
warriors in the Einsatzgruppen. QED.
The
Death Marches
With the Red Army rapidly advancing on the Eastern
front in the war’s last stages, Himmler ordered the evacuation of the
concentration camps. Goldhagen analyzes one of these ‘death marches’ leaving
off [76] from the Helmbrechts camp. Even at the war’s end and effectively left
to their own devices, Goldhagen argues, ordinary Germans brutalized Jews. The
general significance of Goldhagen’s case study is not at all clear. He first
claims that there were ‘certain patterns and recurrent features of death
marches.’ But then he immediately qualifies that the death marches were a ‘chaotic
phenomenon, with sometimes significant variations in their character;’ that ‘the
disparities among the death marches were such that it would be hard to
construct a persuasive model of them;’ and that the death march was an ‘incoherent
phenomenon’ emerging out of the ‘chaos of the last months of the war.’ (HWE,
pp. 364, 369)
The guards leading the death marches were drawn from
concentration camp personnel. One ‘typical’ male guard, Goldhagen reports, was
a Romanian of German ancestry who was ten years old when Hitler came to power.
It is not immediately obvious what his sensibility might reveal about
anti-Semitism in Germany before the Nazi era. (HWE, pp. 336-7) Goldhagen also
reports that all the female guards belonged to the SS, at least half of them
volunteers. Because they did not enter the elite Nazi order until late 1944, he
maintains, these female SS guards were nonetheless typical Germans. Yet so late
in the war when defeat was in sight, arguably only fanatics would embrace the
Nazi cause. (69) To clinch his argument, Goldhagen recalls that ‘the head woman
guard referred to them in her testimony as “SS” guards with ironical quotation
marks around “SS”.’ Wasn’t Goldhagen’s ‘methodological position’, however, to ‘discount
all self-exculpating testimony’?
(HWE, pp. 337-8, 467, original emphasis)
Trying to cut a last-minute deal with the Americans,
Himmler issued explicit orders not to kill the Jews. Yet ‘the Germans’,
Goldhagen observes, indulged in ‘multifarious cruel and lethal actions’ against
them. Indeed, ‘the purpose of the march in the minds of the guards, no matter
what the higher authorities conceived it to have been, was to degrade, injure,
immiserate, and kill Jews.’ Thus, the comparatively youthful female guards ‘were
without exception brutal to the Jews’. On the other hand, a survivor credited
by Goldhagen recalls that ‘the older men of the guard unit were for the most
part good-natured and did not beat or otherwise torment us. The younger SS men
were far more brutal.’ But then ‘the Germans’ were not a homogeneous lot.
Indeed recall Goldhagen’s claim that avowed Nazis were not more anti-Semitic
than ordinary Germans and that the Hitler regime did not exacerbate
anti-Semitism. But in a striking refutation of his thesis, the overall evidence
cited by Goldhagen suggests that younger SS guards were much crueler than
unaffiliated, older guards ‘bred not only on Nazi German culture.’ (HWE, pp.
276, 337, 339, 346, 356-7, 360-1)
Goldhagen also adduces the guards’ zigzag line of
retreat as prima facie evidence of their sadistic anti-Semitism. The manifest
intent was to further torture the Jews: ‘the aimlessness of the routes that
they followed ... suggest that the marches, with their daily, hourly yield of
debilitation and death, were their own reason for being’, ‘viewing the maps ...
should be sufficient to convince anyone that the meanderings could have had no
end [77] other than to keep the prisoners marching. And the effects were
calculable – and calculated’. (HWE, pp. 365-6) Yet ten pages earlier Goldhagen
reported that the guards ‘had no prescribed route, so they had to feel their
way towards some undetermined destination. They did not even possess a map ...
As one guard states: “Throughout the march, the guards were unaware of where we
were supposed to march to.” The guards had to improvise constantly with the
changing conditions.’ (HWE, p. 356) It would seem that sadistic anti-Semitism
is not the only plausible explanation for the ‘aimlessness’ and ‘meanderings’
of the death marches.
Even if Goldhagen’s malignant spin on the evidence is
credited, however, his thesis is scarcely proven. Just yesterday a heady dream,
the Third Reich was for many Germans now a ghastly nightmare. The world had
come crashing in. Abject surrender was only a matter of time. The
arch-criminal, arch-enemy Judeo-Bolsheviks of incessant Nazi propaganda were
fast closing in. Judgment Day was at hand. Yet Himmler had ordered that the
remnant Jews – these ambulatory skeletons of an evil past, these terrifying
tokens of the vengeance to come – be kept alive. Some guards deserted. (HWE, p.
360) Hating them and fearing them, wishing they would just die, the hardened
and cowardly core tormented the Jews. The death march is, for Goldhagen,
irrefutable proof that ‘situation factors were not what caused the Germans to
act as they did.’(HWE, p. 363) Yet is wanton brutality, under these
circumstances, really so surprising?
Goldhagen also indicts the cruelty of German
bystanders. He points up, for instance, the ‘frequent unwillingness of local
German citizens’ along the death march route to ‘spare food for Jewish “subhumans”.’
(HWE, pp. 365, 348) Yet in the directly ensuing narrative, Goldhagen recounts
that despite the ‘chaos and general food shortage of the time’ on the ‘first
day of the march ... German civilians responded to the supplications of the
Jews for food and water, only to meet the interdiction of the guards’; on the ‘seventh
day, a town’s Mayor proposed to accommodate the Jewish women in the hall that
had been prepared with bedding for a large group of women auxiliaries of the
German army who had been expected’; on the ‘eighth day... a few women from
Sangerberg tried to pass to the prisoners some bread. A male guard threatened
one of the women who wanted to distribute food that he would shoot her if she
should try again to pass food to the prisoners’; on the ‘sixteenth day... [the
guards] allowed the Jews to have some soup that the people of Althutten had
prepared, but forbade them from receiving any other food’; and on the ‘twenty-first
day... the guards still refused to allow townspeople... to feed the Jews.’
Indeed, civilians ‘freely offered’ food to Jews ‘throughout the march.’(HWE,
pp. 348-9; see also p. 365) To judge by Goldhagen’s account, the truly
noteworthy fact would seem to be not the infrequent but the frequent willingness
of ordinary Germans even after twelve years of Nazi rule to reach out to Jews
(70) [78] ‘German children’, recalls a survivor of the Helmbrechts death march,
‘began to throw stones at us.’ Clinching his thesis, Goldhagen concludes: ‘The
German children, knowing nothing of Jews but what they learned from their
society, understood how they were to act.’ (HWE, p. 365) Thus, to dispel any
lingering doubt that pre-Nazi homicidal German anti-Semitism explains the Final
Solution, Goldhagen points to German children stoning Jews in 1945.
6. An Ordinary Slaughter?
Imbued as his study is with the ideological
imperatives of ‘Holocaust studies’ (on which more presently), Goldhagen
unsurprisingly harps on the categorical uniqueness of the Nazi genocide. Thus ‘there
is no comparable event in the twentieth century, indeed in modern European
history... the theoretical difficulty is shown by its utterly new nature’, ‘the
Holocaust was a radical break with everything known in human history ...
Completely at odds with the intellectual foundations of modern western
civilization ... as well as the ... ethical and behavioural norms that had
governed modern western societies’. The perpetration of the genocide by the
Germans accordingly ‘marked their departure from the community of “civilized
peoples”.’ (HWE, pp. 4, 5, 28, 386, 419) No doubt facets of the Nazi holocaust
– for example, the annihilation centres such as those at Treblinka and Sobibor
– were unique. The case Goldhagen mounts, however, sheds less light on the
historical singularities of the judeocide than it does on his own singularly
ahistorical sense. It bears emphasis that the matter at
issue is not whether the crimes of
the Nazi era were monumental. Rather it is whether these monumental crimes are
without any historical precedent or
parallel.
What distinguished Hitler’s rule above all, according
to Goldhagen, was the concentration camp. It was the ‘emblematic’, ‘novel’, ‘distinctively
new’, ‘revolutionary’, institution of Nazi Germany, one that ‘most prominently
set Germany apart from other European countries, and that to a large extent
gave it its distinctive murderous character’. (HWE, pp. 170, 456-60) Yet, as
Hitler more or less accurately charged, ‘the idea of concentration camps was born
in British brains’ during the Boer War. Some 150,000 women and children were
corralled in what pro-Boer British MPs dubbed at the time ‘concentration camps’.
In a litany that would soon become numbingly familiar, a contemporary witness
to the Boer repression reported ‘the wholesale burning of farms ... the
deportations ... a burnt out population brought by hundreds of convoys ...
deprived of clothes ... the semi-starvation in the camps... the fever-stricken
children lying ...upon the bare earth... the appalling mortality.’ Fully a
quarter of the internees eventually succumbed to measles, typhoid and other
pestilence. (71)
[79] Recalling Aktion
Reinhard, Goldhagen observes that ‘in the value-inverted world of Germany
during the Nazi period, naming a genocidal undertaking after someone – in this
case, the assassinated, Reinhard Heydrich – was to honour him.’ (HWE, p. 532 n.
55) In an insane society like Nazi Germany, a campaign of mass murder was named
after a mass murderer. In a sane society like ours, the first atomic bomb,
which killed 200,000 Japanese, was christened ‘Little Boy’, and a programme of
mass assassination that left 20,000 Vietnamese dead was named after the
phoenix, the legendary symbol of rebirth and regeneration. In the ‘bizarre
world’ of Nazi Germany, Goldhagen highlights, more ‘solicitude’ was shown for
dogs than Jews: ‘The dog’s fate... was greatly preferable to that of Jews. In
every respect, Germans would have agreed, it was better to be a dog.’ Goldhagen
goes on to observe that ‘any but those beholden to the Nazi creed’ would have
found such a state of affairs ‘deeply ironic and disturbing’, ‘psychologically
gripping, even devastating’. The ‘sensibilities’ of these Nazified Germans,
however, did not ‘remotely approximate our own.’ They were ‘too far gone’,
their ‘cognitive framework’ was such that this ‘telling juxtaposition could not
register.’ (HWE, pp. 268-70) Yet foreigners visiting the United States are
almost immediately struck that more solicitude is shown for pets than the homeless.
Indeed the ‘cognitive framework’ of many an American is such that the ‘telling
juxtaposition’ of supermarket aisles lined with pet food while children in the
US go to bed hungry does not ‘register’. (I leave to one side the ‘telling
juxtaposition’ of pampering animals while world-wide 35,000 fellow human beings
perish each day from starvation.)
The ‘perversity of the Nazified German mind was such’,
according to Goldhagen, that the deaths of German children during the Allied
terror-bombing’ did not ... arouse sympathy ‘for Jewish children: ‘Instead,
thinking of their children spurred the Germans to kill Jewish children.’ (HWE,
p. 213) Recall that the attack on Pearl Harbor aroused no pangs of sympathy for
the Japanese. ‘Japan’s surprise attack’, John Dower reports, ‘provoked a rage
bordering on genocidal among Americans.’ The firebombing of Tokyo in 1945,
which left some 100,000 civilians dead – ‘scorched and boiled and baked to
death’, in the words of the mastermind of the new strategy, Major-General
Curtis LeMay – not only evoked ‘no sustained protest’ but was ‘widely accepted
as just retribution’. The President’s son and confidant, Elliott Roosevelt,
supported bombing Japan ‘until we have destroyed about half the civilian
population’, while a key presidential advisor favoured the ‘extermination of
the Japanese in toto.’ Nearly one-quarter of the respondents in a December 1945
Fortune magazine poll wished that the United States had had the opportunity to
use ‘many more’ atomic bombs before Japan surrendered. (72)
Pervasive
Racism
An egregious feature of Nazism, Goldhagen emphasizes,
was its racist underpinnings. In fact, so aberrant were the racist ravings of
Nazi Germany, according to Goldhagen, that ‘we ‘can barely grasp them:
[80] Germany during the Nazi period ... operat[ed]
according to a different ontology and cosmology, inhabited by people whose
general understanding of important realms of social existence was not ‘ordinary’
by our standards. The notion, for example, that an individual’s defining
characteristics were derived from his race and that the world was divided into
distinct races ... was an extremely widespread belief. That the world ought to
be organized or reorganized according to this conception of an immutable hierarchy
of races was an accepted norm. The possibility of peaceful coexistence among
the races was not a central part of the cognitive landscape of the society.
Instead, races were believed to be inexorably competing and warring until one
or another triumphed or was vanquished. (HWE, P. 460; see also p. 458)
For argument’s sake, let us leave to one side
Goldhagen’s bizarre claim that judging an individual by his race and dividing
the world into distinct races is ‘not “ordinary” by our standards’, indeed, is
alien to our ‘ontology and cosmology.’ Yet even racist Social Darwinism was
very far from peculiar to Nazi Germany. Consider the views – altogether
unexceptional until quite recently – of Theodore Roosevelt. ‘It is for the good
of the world’, opined one of the most revered twentieth-century US presidents, ‘that
the English-speaking race in all its branches should hold as much of the world’s
surface as possible.’ Elaborating on this theme in his classic Winning of the
West, Roosevelt reflected:
The settler and pioneer have at bottom justice on
their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game
preserve for squalid savages ... It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly
morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole
continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men
of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea
that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage
tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and
ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they hold joint ownership...
Or, as Roosevelt succinctly
put it in his private correspondence, ‘if we fail to act on the “superior
people” theory .... barbarism and savagery and squalid obstruction will prevail
over most of the globe.’ (73)
[81] The intent on killing, Goldhagen concludes, was the defining feature of the Nazi
genocide: ‘It was the will and the motivation to exterminate European Jewry...
the will ... that is the crucial issue.’ And again: ‘This issue – the issue of
will – is the crucial issue.’ Goldhagen goes on to maintain that ‘in this
sense the German perpetrators were
like the perpetrators of other mass slaughters’. Thus as in ‘any other mass
slaughter or genocide’, Germans killed because they ‘believed that they were
right to kill’. In fact it is a ‘grave error’, Goldhagen warns, to assume that
people cannot ‘slaughter whole populations – specially populations that are by
any objective evaluation not threatening – out of conviction. The historical
record, from the ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with
which people can extinguish the lives of others, and even take joy in their
deaths.’ (Reply, pp. 44-5, HWE, p. 14, original emphasis)
Yet Goldhagen also maintains that the Nazi genocide
was singular precisely because
Germans killed from ‘conviction’ and a sense of ‘right’:
One of the remarkable features of the genocide ... is
how readily and naturally Germans... understood
why they were supposed to kill Jews ... Anti-Semitism in Germany was such that
when Germans ... learned that the Jews were to be killed, they evinced not
surprise, not incredulity, but comprehension. Whatever their moral or
utilitarian stances towards the killing were, the annihilation of the Jews made sense to them. (HWE, p. 403,
original emphasis)
Leaving to one side this gross contradiction, yet
another leaps off the page. If the Nazi genocide was, on the ‘crucial issue’,
like ‘any other mass slaughter’, it could not have marked ‘a radical break with
everything known in human history’. Indeed to judge by this account, it was a
commonplace.
The circle is complete. From the mystifying premise
that it was utterly new, through a welter of nonsensical assertions,
misrepresentations, contradictions and non-sequiturs, to the trivializing
conclusion that it was utterly old: thus Daniel Jonah Goldhagen makes ‘sense’
of the Nazi genocide.
7. The Holocaust Studies
Industry
Hitler’s
Willing Executioners adds nothing to our current understanding of the Nazi
holocaust. Indeed, recycling the long discarded thesis of a sadistic ‘German
mind’, it subtracts from our
understanding. The fact is that Goldhagen’s book is not scholarship at all.
Between the gross misrepresentations of secondary literature and the glaring
internal contradictions, it does not deserve consideration as an academic
inquiry. Yet the book did indisputably elicit an avalanche of praise. How does
one account for this paradox and what is its significance? I want to address
these questions in two areas: scholarship and politics. It bears emphasis that,
however informed, the remarks that follow are speculation. They clearly belong
in a separate category from the preceding analysis of the text itself.
[82] The Nazi extermination of the Jews spawned two
parallel, indeed contradictory, bodies of literature. Historians working with
the German materials have gradually reached consensus that most ordinary
Germans did not share Hitler’s obsession with the Jews. A broad range of solid
scholarly research has concluded that popular German anti-Semitism neither accounted
for Hitler’s triumph nor was it the impetus behind the Final Solution. Focusing
on the Jewish victims, a second corpus held as its major premise that popular
German anti-Semitism was the
mainspring of Hitler’s success and the Jewish catastrophe that ensued.
Ideological and politically driven, this field, currently known as ‘Holocaust
studies’, is largely devoid of scholarly interest. (74) Indeed virtually every
substantive work touching on relevant themes – for example, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews,
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? has
landed on the ‘Holocaust studies’ index. (75) The division of labour between
those working with the German and Jewish materials on the Nazi genocide was,
until the publication of Hitler’s Willing
Executioners, mutually respected. For
reasons not difficult to discern, neither side ventured too far afield:
scholars in the German field steered clear of the political hornet’s nest of
Holocaust studies; mainly a propaganda enterprise, Holocaust studies ignored
German scholarship. (76)
Firmly anchored in the Holocaust paradigm, yet
scrutinizing not the Jewish victims but the German perpetrators, Goldhagen’s
book marks the first foray of a holocaust ideologue across the divide. The
venture comes at a time when Holocaust studies is trying to entrench itself as
a reputable field of scholarly inquiry. (77) Indeed, Goldhagen himself is a
candidate for the first endowed chair in ‘Holocaust and Cognate Studies’ [83]
at Harvard University. Although it obscures the meaning of the Nazi holocaust,
Goldhagen’s foray does cast a harsh if unwitting light on Holocaust studies.
Seeking to reconcile an ideologically loaded thesis with radically incompatible
empirical findings, Goldhagen mangles the scholarly record and gets mired in a
morass of internal contradictions. What Hitler’s
Willing Executioners conclusively demonstrates is the intellectual
barrenness of Goldhagen’s field: ignoring as they do the findings of German
scholarship, the claims of Holocaust ideologues prove unsustainable when put to
an empirical test. (78)
Holocaust studies first flourished in the wake of the
June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This is the crucial political context for
comprehending the Goldhagen phenomenon. It is a fact seldom noticed that, until
the war, Israel and Zionism occupied barely a marginal place in American Jewish
intellectual life. In the wake of Israel’s victory and its realignment with US
power, Jewish intellectuals suddenly discovered the Jewish state, now
celebrated as a bastion of Western Civilization doing battle on the front lines
with and, against all odds, smashing the Arab hordes. They also suddenly
discovered the Nazi genocide. (79) A tiny cottage industry before 1967,
Holocaust studies began to boom. This was not a coincidence. Basking as they
were in Israel’s reflected glory, American Jews had also to contend with
increasing censure of its repressive policies. In these circumstances, the Nazi
extermination proved politically useful but only
as it was represented in a specific ideological account. Anti-Semitism,
according to Zionist ideology, expresses the Gentile’s natural and
irreconcilable animus for Jews. The Nazi genocide marked in this reading the
ineluctable culmination of Gentile anti-Semitic hatred. Thus interpreted, the
Nazi extermination both justified the necessity of Israel and accounted for all
hostility directed at it: the Jewish state was the only safeguard against the
next outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism and, conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism
was behind every attack on, or even defensive manoeuvre against, the Jewish
state. ‘The Holocaust’ is in effect the Zionist account of the Nazi holocaust.
It was seized upon and methodically marketed [84] because it was politically
expedient. Politically inexpedient was the scholarly consensus showing that
most ordinary Germans did not elect or later support Hitler because of his
anti-Semitism; indeed, that they opposed Nazi violence and did not approve the
genocide.
In this light, key elements of Goldhagen’s study take
on new resonance. ‘Without a doubt... the all-time leading form of prejudice
and hatred within Christian countries’, anti-Semitism, according to Goldhagen, ‘has
been a more or less permanent feature
of the western world.’ Effectively derogating all other forms of bigotry,
Goldhagen thus endows anti-Semitism with a unique ontology, one that virtually
defies historical analysis. We have already seen that, for Goldhagen, where
anti-Semitism is not manifest it may yet be latent, and that anti-Semitism and
even philosemitism ‘tend strongly toward a genocidal “solution”.’ (80) Thus all
Gentiles are potential if not actual homicidal anti-Semites. Going well beyond Zionist,
let alone standard scholarly, analyses, Goldhagen purports that anti-Semitism ‘is
always abstract in its
conceptualization and its source.’ Goldhagen conceives anti-Jewish animus as ‘divorced
from actual Jews’, ‘fundamentally not
a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action’, ‘independent of the
Jews’ nature and actions’, and so on. Indeed according to Goldhagen,
anti-Semitism is strictly a Gentile mental pathology: its ‘host domain’ is ‘the
mind.’ (HWE, pp. 34-5, 39, 42, original emphases)
A
Manichean View
Seen through Goldhagen’s effectively ultra-Zionist
lens, in the dialectic of anti-Semitism, not only can Gentiles do no good but
Jews can do no evil. Ever-guilty Gentiles and ever-guiltless Jews: these are
the reciprocal faces of the supra-historical, Manichean paradigm in which
Goldhagen situates the judeocide. It is worth emphasizing that the issue is not
the Nazi genocide per se but rather Goldhagen’s ideological framework. Indeed
what makes Goldhagen’s ideological framework seem so plausible is that in the
Nazi holocaust the reality was, if
not absolute Gentile guilt, at any rate absolute Jewish innocence. Yet his
approach implies that Gentiles always harbour homicidal anti-Jewish animus and
Jews never bear responsibility for
Gentile animus. By this logic, Jews a priori always enjoy total moral impunity.
The Jewish state is accordingly immunized from legitimate censure of its
policies: all criticism is and must be motivated by fanatical anti-Semitism. If
Gentiles are always intent on murdering Jews, then Jews have every right to
protect themselves however they see fit; whatever expedient Jews might resort
to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defence. Is it any
wonder that many Jews in particular, apologists for Israel warmed to Goldhagen’s
thesis? (81)
[85] In this connection, one cannot but be struck by
the parallels between the Goldhagen phenomenon and an earlier ideologically
serviceable best-seller, Joan Peters’s From
Time Immemorial, which maintained
that Palestine was literally empty on the eve of Zionist colonization. In both
cases, 1) a relative unknown claimed to scoop a stodgy, benighted academic
establishment. Peters was an occasional journalist, Goldhagen a recent Harvard
Ph.D. 2) the scholarly breakthrough was actually a caricatured version of a
stale, Zionist thesis long repudiated in the academic literature. 3) purporting
as it did to be an academic study, the book had to cite the documentary record
and extant scholarship, both of which pointed to the opposite conclusion. Thus
the evidence adduced in support of the novel thesis was either grossly
misrepresented or else actually gainsaid the thesis. 4) prominent scholars with
no specialized knowledge of the field helped to launch the ideological enterprise.
Peters’s book jacket featured fulsome blurbs by Lucy Dawidowicz (‘the
historical truth’) and Barbara Tuchman (‘a historical event’); Goldhagen’s book
jacket has blurbs by Simon Schama (‘phenomenal scholarship and absolute
integrity’) and Stanley Hoffmann (‘truly revolutionary... impeccable
scholarship ... profound understanding). 5) once the ideological juggernaut
achieved sufficient momentum, what little mainstream criticism there was
subsided. (82)
Touted as the ultimate testament to the Nazi
Holocaust, Hitler’s Willing Executioners
in fact fundamentally diminishes its moral significance. For what is the
essence of Goldhagen’s thesis if not that only deranged perverts could
perpetrate a crime so heinous as the Final Solution? Lurid as Goldhagen’s
account is, the lesson it finally teaches is thus remarkably complacent: normal
people – and most people, after all, are
normal – would not do such things. Yet the overwhelming majority of SS guards,
Lingens-Reiner testified after the war, were ‘perfectly normal men who knew the
difference between right and wrong.’ ‘We must remember’, Auschwitz survivor
Primo Levi wrote, that ‘the diligent executors of inhuman orders were not born
torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men.’
Not deranged perverts but ‘perfectly normal men’, ‘ordinary men’: that is the
really sensational truth about the perpetrators of the Final Solution. ‘From
our findings’, observed the American psychiatrist responsible for the Nuremberg
defendants, we must conclude not only that such personalities are not unique or
insane, but also that they could be duplicated in any country of the world
today. We must also realize that such personalities exist in this country and
that there are undoubtedly certain individuals who would willingly climb over
the corpses of one half of the people of [86] the United States, if by so
doing, they could thereby be given control of the other half.
Indeed the men sitting in the dock at Nuremberg
constituted Germany’s, as it were, ‘best and brightest’. Of the twenty-one Nazi
leaders indicted at the Trial of German Major War Criminals, six scored ‘superior’
and twelve ‘very superior’ on the IQ test. Truly these were the ‘whiz kids’ of
Germany. Or consider the Nazi elite murderers sitting in the dock at the
Einsatzgruppen trial. ‘Each man at the bar’, recalled the Nuremberg Tribunal in
its final judgement, has had the benefit of considerable schooling. Eight are
lawyers, one a university professor, another a dental physician, still another
an expert on art. One, as an opera singer, gave concerts throughout Germany
before he began his tour of Russia with the Einsatzkommandos. This group of
educated and well-bred men does not even lack a former minister, self-frocked
though he was. Another of the defendants, bearing a name illustrious in the
world of music, testified that a branch of his family reached back to the
creator of the ‘Unfinished Symphony’... (83)
‘The most refined shedders of blood’, Dostoyevsky
long ago recognized, ‘have been almost always the most highly civilized
gentlemen’, to whom the official criminal misfits ‘could not have held a candle’.
No doubt the intellectual class singing Goldhagen’s praises much prefers his
conclusion that, unlike the crazed Nazis, truly ‘civilized gentlemen’ do not
commit mass murder.
ENDNOTES
1. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York 1996. The author
wishes to thank David Abraham, Roane Carey, Noam Chomsky, Samira Haj, Adele
Olfman, Shifra Stern, Jack Trumpbour, and Cyrus Veeser for comments on an
earlier draft. This essay is dedicated to the memory of my beloved parents,
both survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps: only a
rational apprehension of what happened can give point to their suffering.
2. New York
Times, 27 March, 2 April, 3 April 1996; Time,
23 December 1996. The New York Review of Books first gave Goldhagen’s
book a tepid notice but then ran a glowing piece in which it was acclaimed as ‘an
original, indeed, brilliant contribution to the mountain of literature on the
Holocaust.’ (18 April 1996, 28 November 1996) Initially running a hostile
review, The New Republic subsequently
featured Goldhagen’s nine-page, ‘reply to my critics’ (29 April 1996, 23
December 1996). Crucial as it is to fully apprehending the Goldhagen
phenomenon, the German reaction will not be considered in this monograph.
Deciphering its anomalies would require a much more intimate knowledge of the
German cultural landscape than this writer possesses.
3. Raul Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews, New York 1961. My page references will be
to the three-volume ‘revised and definitive edition’ published in 1985: vol. 3,
p. 1011, vol. 1, p. 327; see also vol. 3, p. 994-See also Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, New
York 1992, p. 28: ‘Whether they were in command or lowly placed, in an office
or outdoors, they all did their part, when the time came, with all the efficiency
they could muster.’ For the initial reaction to Hilberg’s damning portrait of
German culpability, see Raul Hilberg, The
Politics of Memory, Chicago 1996, pp. 124-6. Hilberg’s memoir also offers
instructive insight into the politics of the ‘Holocaust industry’.
4. Hilberg specifically pointed to the Order Police
the subject of Goldhagen’s study perpetrators whose ‘moral makeup’ typified ‘Germany
as a whole’. The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, p. 1011.
5. Ibid.
6. For background and critical commentary, see Eric
A. Zillmer et al., The Quest for the Nazi
Personality, Hillsdale, NJ 1995.
Sampling a wide array of clinical data, the authors dismiss the ‘simplistic’
notion of a ‘specific homicidal and clinically morbid’ German personality (P.
13).
7. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, New
York 1975, p. 47; see also pp. 163-6.
8. Goldhagen dissents from Christopher Browning’s
estimates that 10-20 per cent of the German police battalions refused to kill
Jews as ‘stretching the evidence’. (HWE, p. 541, n. 68; see also p. 551, n. 65)
It is one of Goldhagen’s central contentions that the police battalions were
prototypical of the murderous German mind-set (HWE, pp. 181-5, 463ff).
9. ‘A Reply to My Critics’, The New Republic, 23 December 1996 [hereafter Reply], p. 41.
10. HWE, p. 416, original emphasis, See also HWE, p.
582 n. 42.
11. Reply, p. 42; see also HWE, pp. 446-7. Not to be
deterred by the hobgoblin of consistency, Goldhagen writes a couple of pages
earlier: ‘By the time Hitler came to power, the model of Jews that was the
basis of his anti-Semitism was shared by the vast majority of Germans’ (Reply,
p. 40).
12. An unwitting ironist, Goldhagen elsewhere in the
book counsels, ‘Germans should not be caricatured’. (HWE, p. 382)
13. In the endnote, Goldhagen cautions that his
argument ‘obviously does not explain people’s capacity for cruelty in the first
place or the gratification many derive from it.’ Yet, what needs explaining is
not the mechanisms of these sadistic impulses but, as noted above, why the
Germans succumbed and why the Jews fell victim to them.
14. Jewish Book
News, 25 April 1996, P. 39. For equivalent formulations, see Reply, p. 43,
and Goldhagen’s numerous interviews.
15. In an astonishingly disingenuous endnote,
Goldhagen writes that ‘it is indeed striking how little or non-existent the evidence is that... Germans’ beliefs
about Jews differed from the incessantly trumpeted Nazi one.’ (HWE, p. 593 n.
49, original emphasis) For a sample of this ‘little or non-existent evidence’,
see section 4) below.
16. See Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, New
York 1964, pp. 30, 70, and Ian Kershaw, Popular
Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Oxford 1983, p. 231. Both
are basic texts. Consider Goldhagen’s other theoretical breakthroughs:
... each source of [anti-Semitism] is embedded in an
extended metaphorical structure that automatically extends the domain of
phenomena, situations, and linguistic usages relevant to the anti-Semitic compass
in a manner paralleling the metaphorical structure itself. (HWE, p. 35)
All anti-Semitisms can be divided according to one
essential dissimilitude which can be usefully thought of as being dichotomous
(even if, strictly speaking, this may not be the case). (HWE, p. 37)
Prejudice is a manifestation of people’s (individual
and collective) search for meaning.
(HWE, p. 39, emphasis in original)
Comment is superfluous.
17. HWE, p. 494 n. 92. The counterpoint to Goldhagen’s
homogenization of the German perpetrators is his heterogenization of the
Germans’ victims. Thus, Goldhagen’s discriminations to prove that Jewish
suffering was unique. (HWE, pp. 175, 294, 311ff, 340ff, 523 n. 1)
18. HWE, pp. 141, 146, 147, 153, 421. For a variation
on this argument which conflates verbal abuse with ‘deportation and physical
violence’, see HWE, p. 125.
19. In his rejoinder, Goldhagen downplays the import
of this question: ‘Even if some would conclude that I am not entirely correct
about the scope and character of German anti-Semitism, it does not follow that
this would invalidate my conclusion ... about the perpetration of the
Holocaust, [which] logically can stand on its own and must be confronted
directly.’ And again: ‘My assertions about the reach of anti-Semitism in
Germany before the Nazi period is [sic] supported by the works of some of the
most distinguished scholars of anti-Semitism ... Where I depart from some of
them is not over the extent of anti-Semitism in Germany, but over its content
and nature.’ (Reply, pp. 40, 41) Yet, the ‘scope and character’, ‘content and
nature’ of German anti-Semitism are not distinct from or subsidiary to but the
very essence of his thesis.
20. Pulzer, Jews
and the German State, Oxford 1992.
21. Pulzer, The
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, pp. 279-80.
22. Ibid., p. 71.
23. HWE, pp. 61, 491 n. 51. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent,
Oxford 1983, p. 229. Indeed, Goldhagen’s study is marred throughout by his
penchant for double bookkeeping. Thus, in the text’s body Goldhagen implies
that no police battalion member initially refrained from killing infants.
Turning to the back of the book, we learn that, according to one member, ‘almost
all the men’ refused, and according to another, ‘as if by tacit agreement, the
shooting of infants and small children was renounced by all the people.’ In the
endnote Goldhagen grudgingly concedes that ‘undoubtedly, some of the men did
shy away’. (HWE, pp. 216, 538 n. 37, n. 39).
24. Pulzer, Jews
and the German State, pp. 42, 14.
25. Eva G. Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization, London 1950, p. 154. See Sarah Gordon,
Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’,
Princeton 1984, p. 27.
26. I will not elucidate all Goldhagen’s
methodological points on contemporary anti-Semitism. These include:
While its cognitive content was adopting new forms in
the service of ‘modernizing’ anti-Semitism, of harmonizing it with the new
social and political landscape of Germany, the existing cultural cognitive
model about Jews provided a remarkable underlying constancy to the elaborated
cultural and ideological pronouncements. (HWE, pp. 53-4)
In ‘functional’ terms, the changing manifest content
of anti-Semitism could be understood, in one sense, to have been little more
than the handmaiden of the pervasive anti-Jewish animus that served to maintain
and give people a measure of coherence in the modern world... (HWE, p. 54)
Previously, a welter of anti-Semitic charges and
understandings of the source of the Jews’ perniciousness had characterized the
outpouring of anti-Jewish sentiment since the ‘Jewish Problem’ had become a
central political theme as a reaction to the movement for their emancipation.
(HWE, p. 66)
The cognitive model of ontology that underlay the
essential, racist Volkish worldview contradicted and did not admit the
Christian one that had held sway for centuries. (HWE, p. 68)
These are typical of the ‘insights and theories of
the social sciences’ that Goldhagen says ‘inform’ his enterprise, unlike the
criticism which ‘betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the social
scientific method.’ (Reply, pp. 38-9, 43).
27. HWE, pp. 55-7, 64-73. For Goldhagen’s recourse to
this genre of argument for the Nazi period, See HWE, pp. 106, 113-15, 126, 431.
28. Joachim Doron, ‘Classic Zionism and Modern
Anti-Semitism: Parallels and Influences (1883-1914)’, in Studies in Zionism, Autumn 1983, pp. 169-204 (quote at 171). See
Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality
of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London 1995, ch. 1.
29. Donald L. Niewyck, The Jews in Weimar Germany, Baton Rouge 1980, p. 9.
30. Michael H. Kater, ‘Everyday Anti-Semitism in
Prewar Nazi Germany: The Popular Bases’, in Yad
Vashem Studies, xvi, Jerusalem 1984, p. 133; Niewyck, The Jews in Weimar Germany, pp. 51, 69(working class quote), p. 70;
Putzer, The Rise of Political
Anti-Semitism, p. 325; Pulzer, Jews
and the German State, pp. 261 (SPD quote), 344-5; Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, Chapel Hill 1993, p. 70.
31. Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’, p. 48. For a balanced
presentation of German Jewry during the Weimar years, see especially Niewyck’s The Jews in Weimar Germany.
32. HWE, pp. 86, 142, 162, 424-5. William Brustein, The Logic of Power, p. 51, reports that ‘relatively
few people read Mein Kampf before 1933. Albert Speer claimed never to have read
it; his biographer is unsure. Albert Speer, Inside
the Third Reich, New York 1970, pp. 19, 122, 509; Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer, New York 1995, pp. 183,
302, 590-1. Although the notorious passage from Mein Kampf is not strictly genocidal-Hitler speculates that if
twelve or fifteen thousand... Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held
under poison gas’, Germany might have won World War I. Philippe Burrin
convincingly demonstrates that these musings do shed important light on Hitler’s
genocidal aims. See Hitler and the Jews,
London 1994. For the linguistic ambiguities of and indifferent public reception
to Hitler’s January 1939 ‘prophecy’, see Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the Jewish Question, p. 133; Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Oxford 1987, pp.
240-2; Hans Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, in Gerhard
Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide,
London 1986, pp. 134-5 n. 36.
33. Norman H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, New York
1969, p. 721; Brustein, The Logic of Evil,
p. 58; Max Domarus, ed., Hitler: Speeches
and Proclamations, 1932-1945,
Wauconda, IL 1990, pp. 37, 40; Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews,
New York 1997, pp. 72, 95-7, 101-4 (Friedlander puts more stress on Hitler’s
public anti-Semitism throughout the 1920s but concurs that in the early 1930s ‘the
Jewish theme indeed became less frequent in his rhetoric’); Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the Jewish Question, pp. 84, 129; Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, pp. 230-5; Niewyck, The Jews in Weimar Germany, p. 54. For the period January 1932 to March 1933, there is
no mention at all of Jews in any of Hitler’s speeches collected in Domarus’s
standard edition. The main negative theme is anti-Bolshevism and anti-Marxism.
In Baynes’s earlier collection of Hitler extracts that ‘practically exhausts the
material on the subject’ of the Jews, the only item before 1933 is an interview
with the London Times in which
Hitler, repudiating ‘violent anti-Semitism’, declares that he ‘would have
nothing to do with pogroms’ (p. 726). Although ‘unjust and harsh’, as Domarus
recalls, Hitler’s forced emigration scheme was hardly unprecedented even in the
modern world (p. 40).
34. Domarus, Hitler:
Speeches and Proclamations, p. 37; see Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, pp. 243-4; Lothar Kettehacker, ‘Hitler’s Final
Solution and its Rationalization’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide, London 1986,
p. 83; Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, pp. 108-11.
35. Kershaw, The
‘Hitler Myth’, pp. 46-7, 152, 154, 161, 230, 233, 235-8, 239 (second
quote), 250 (first quote), 252; see also Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, p. 273.
36. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, New York 1984, pp. 84, 218; Brustein,
The Logic of Power, pp. xii, 51, 57-8, 88, 180-1; Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter, Chapel Hill 1983, pp.
43, 262-8; Gordon, Hitler, Germans and
the Jewish Question, pp. 29ff, 45, 68-71, 82, 299; Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?, Princeton 1982,
pp. 363-9, 377-8, 418, 421-2, 607 n. 46; and Eva Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization, pp. 190,
229-36. It is not at all clear even that anti-Semitism figured prominently in
the motives for joining the Nazi party before, let alone after, Hitler’s
victory; see especially Peter H. Merki, Political
Violence under the Swastika, Princeton 1975, pp. 499-500. To illustrate
that the crudely anti-Semitic SA was ‘representative of a significant
percentage of the German people’ during the Nazi years, Goldhagen recalls that
its membership ‘was approximately 10 per cent of the German civilian male population
of the age cohorts on which the SA drew’ (HWE, p. 95). Leaving to one side that
a tip does not always prove an iceberg, Goldhagen observes elsewhere that ‘many
non-ideological reasons’ induced Germans to join Nazi organizations (HWE, p.
208).
37. Reichmann, Hostages
of Civilization, pp. 231-3. Long out of print, this luminous work should be
reissued.
38. Childers, The
Nazi Voter, P. 267.
39. Reichmann, Hostages
of Civilization, pp. 231, 261 n. 380.
40. HWE, p. 594 n. 56; for a similar argument for the
war years, see pp. 251-2.
41. Goldhagen’s citation of this document is doubly
ironic. Not only does it undercut his claim about the inefficacy of Nazi
propaganda but also his claim about restoring the dimension of individual
responsibility. Seeking to mitigate the culpability of the Einsatzgruppen
commanders, the brief lent support to a plea of temporary insanity: ‘The
defendants... were obsessed with a psychological delusion based on a fallacious
idea concerning the identity of the aims of Bolshevism and the political role
of Jewry in Eastern Europe.’ Although effectively endorsed by Goldhagen, this
last defense was fortunately for justice’s sake rejected by the Military
Tribunal. Trials of War Criminals Before
the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. 4, ‘The Einsatzgruppen Case’,
Washington, DC n.d., pp. 342, 344, 350, 354, 463-4.
42. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, Oxford 1990, pp. 111, 129, 135-6,
146-7, 160-1, 171, 172, 177, 179, 186-7, 205-7, 213, 256.
43. A brief word about sources. Research on popular
opinion in Nazi Germany relies mainly on reports secretly dispatched by the SPD
underground and on internal files of the Nazi police (Gestapo, SD). Goldhagen
cautions that SPD reports ‘should be read with circumspection’ because the ‘agents
were obviously eager and ideologically disposed to find among the German people...
evidence of dissent from the Nazi regime and its policies.’ (HWE, p. 509 n.
162; see p. 106) Oddly, he does not enter a comparable caveat in the reverse
sense for the Gestapo reports, which are repeatedly cited by him to document
popular German anti-Semitism (for example, HWE, pp. 98, 121). In any event, the
issue of reliability has already been thoroughly explored. The consensus is
that the SPD reports are generally trustworthy even the Gestapo attested to their
veracity and the Nazi police reports perhaps somewhat less so. See David
Bankier, The Germans and the Final
Solution, Oxford 1992, pp. 7-9, 100-1; Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question, pp. 166-7, 209; Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, p. 362; Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, pp. 6-8.
44. Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solutions, pp. 69-73, 81-4, 172 n. 68; Friedlander, Nazi Germany
and the Jews, pp. 22, 125-30, 232-6, 259, 323-4, Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 105 (quote), 106, 171;
Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish
Question, pp. 169, 171, 175, 206-8; Kater, ‘Everyday Anti-Semitism in
Prewar Nazi Germany’, pp. 147-8, 154-6; Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent, pp. 232, 233, 240, 243, 244,
256, 272-4; Kershaw, The Hitler Myth,
pp. 229-30; Otto Dov Kulka and Aron Rodrigue, ‘The German Population and the
Jews in the Third Reich’, in Yad Vashem
Studies, Jerusalem 1984, p. 426, Pulzer, Jews and the German State, p. 347; Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization, pp. 233-4, Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, Athens,
1977, pp. 37, 40. Benches in Nazi Germany carried ‘Aryan only’ signs but of
course such measures were commonplace in the South until the 1960s.
45. For the Nuremberg Laws, see Helmut Krausnick, ‘The
Persecution of the Jews’, in Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State, New York 1965, pp. 32-3; and Hans Mommsen,
‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, pp. 103-5. For popular German reaction to
the Nuremberg Laws, see especially Otto Dov Kulka, “‘Public Opinion” in Nazi
Germany and the “Jewish Question”’, The
Jerusalem Quarterly, Fall 1982, pp. 124-35. Kulka concludes that most
Germans supported the laws, although a ‘quite sizable portion of the population
was indifferent’ (p. 135). The US Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The
Supreme Court first declared a state miscegenation law unconstitutional in 1967
(Loving v. Virginia).
46. HWE, p. 95. Directly contradicting himself,
Goldhagen writes elsewhere that ‘Germans’ profound hatred of Jews... had in the
1930s by necessity lain relatively
dormant.’ (HWE, p. 449, my emphasis)
47. Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solution, ch. 4; Kershaw Popular Opinion and Political Dissent,
pp. 271, 265; see also pp. 172, 234-5, 239, 240, 243-4, 256, 260-74. For
further documentation of Bankier’s conclusions, see Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, pp. 125,
163-4, 294-5; Gordon, Hitler, Germany and
the Jewish Question’, pp. 159, 173, 175-80, 206-8, 265-7; Ian Kershaw, ‘German
Popular Opinion and the “Jewish Question”, 1939-1943: Some Further Reflections’,
in Arnold Paucker, ed., The Jews in Nazi
Germany, 1933-1943, Tubingen 1986, pp. 368-9; Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, pp. 229-30, 235-7; Kulka, “‘Public Opinion” in
Nazi Germany and the “Jewish Question”‘, pp. 138-44; Kulka and Rodrigue, ‘The
German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich’, p.432; Mommsen, ‘The
Realization of the Unthinkable’, p. 116; Franz Neumann, Behemoth, New York 1942, p. 121; Pulzer, Jews and the German State, p. 347; Pulzer, The Rise of Political
Anti-Semitism, p. 71; Reichmann, Hostages
of Civilization, pp. 201,233-4, 238; Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, pp. 37,40; Herbert A. Strauss, ‘Jewish
Emigration from Germany Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses’, in Leo Baeck
Institute, Year Book xxv, New York
1980, p. 331. Bankier discounts, while Kershaw credits, German moral outrage to
Kristallnacht. Kulka and Rodrigue reasonably conclude that ‘we shall probably
never know what the true proportions of both attitudes were.’
48. The scholarly consensus is that, ‘Although
without doubt some individual members of the white community condemned
lynching, it is equally clear that a majority supported outlaw mob violence’
Stewart E. Toinay and E.M. Beck, A
Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Chicago 1992, p. 28; see also Neil R.
McMillen, Dark Journey, Chicago 1989,
ch. 7, especially pp. 238ff; and Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, New York 1969, p. 47. One may add that,
for sheer brutality, Southern violence was in a class apart: the grisly
torture, dismemberment and even roasting of its victims, along with the
collection of bodily parts as souvenirs, were inconceivable in pre-war Nazi
Germany. For an example, see Toinay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, p. 23.
49. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy, New York 1986.
50. Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 124-30.
51. Kershaw, Popular
Opinion and Political Dissent, ch. 9; Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans,
pp. 136-45, 334-5.
52. Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solution, ch. 8; Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish
Question’, pp. 182-6; Hans Mommsen, ‘What Did the Germans Know About the
Genocide of the Jews?’ in Walter H. Pehle, ed., November 1938, New York
1991; Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, pp. 108, 128, 131 n. 12;
Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans, pp. 55, 140-5, 335. Probably
only a small minority of Germans had specific knowledge of the death camps or gassings.
53. Kershaw, ‘German Popular Opinion and the “Jewish
Question”‘, pp. 366-84 (quote at pp. 383-4, original emphasis); Ian Kershaw, ‘German
Public Opinion During the Final Solution: Information, Comprehension, Reactions’,
in Asher Cohen et al., Comprehending the
Holocaust, New York 1988, pp. 146-55 (quotes at pp. 146-7, 155).
54. For the corrosive effects of the brutalizing
combat and Nazi propaganda on ordinary German perpetrators, see especially Omer
Barcov’s companion studies, The Eastern
Front, 1941-45, New York 1986 and
Hitler’s Army, Oxford 1991. Goldhagen
denies that the war brutalized the Germans. (HWE, p. 275) Yet he also reports,
for example, that a police battalion lieutenant who originally ‘refused to
allow his men to participate in the killing of the Jews ... was later to become
a zealous killer, who performed with extreme ardor and brutality towards the
victims.’ (HWE, p. 535 n. 4) Goldhagen does not account for this metamorphosis.
Is ‘brutalization’ so implausible an explanation? Goldhagen also dismisses as ‘nonsense’
the postwar rationale of, for example, the police battalion members that their
participation in the genocide was partly in reaction to Allied atrocities: ‘Their
killing began when Germany reigned supreme and hardly a bomb was being dropped
on it.’ (HWE, 537 n. 23) Police Battalion 101 the focus of Goldhagen’s
study-embarked on outright genocide in July 1942. Yet Britain launched the
first bomber offensive deliberately aimed at civilian German targets in May
1940. By early 1942, it was engaged in massive terrorbombing of German cities.
The Allies, incidentally, inflicted far more civilian casualties on Germany
than they themselves suffered. Almost entirely restricted to Britain, German
bombing of civilians caused about 51,000 deaths. The Allied air assaults,
however, left about 600,000 German civilians dead. See Clive Ponting, Armageddon, New York 1995, pp. 239-40.
55. A perpetrator is anyone who knowingly contributed
in some intimate way to the mass slaughter of Jews, generally anyone who worked
in an institution of genocidal killing. This includes all people who themselves
took the lives of Jews, and all those who set the scene for the final lethal
act, whose help was instrumental in bringing about the deaths of Jews. So anyone
who shot Jews as part of a killing squad was a perpetrator. Those who rounded
up these same Jews, deported them (with knowledge of their fate) to a killing
location, or cordoned off the area where their compatriots shot them were also
perpetrators, even if they themselves did not do the actual killing.
Perpetrators include railroad engineers and administrators who knew that they
were transporting Jews to their deaths. They include any Church officials who
knew that their participation in the identification of Jews as non-Christians
would lead to the deaths of the Jews. They include the by now proverbial “desk
murderer”... who himself may not have seen the victims yet whose paperwork
lubricated the wheels of deportation and destruction.’ (HWE, p. 164; see also
pp. 165, 523 n. 3)
56. For Goldhagen’s misrepresentation of the German
archives, see Ruth Bettina Birn, ‘Revising the Holocaust’, The Historical Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 1997, pp. 195-215. After
submitting this manuscript for publication, I came across Birn’s important
review. Although our arguments occasionally overlap, her focus is Goldhagen’s
misuse of the archival sources, a topic I do not directly address.
57. HWE, pp. 181-5, 203-22. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, New York 1992, pp. 45-8,
61ff, 170-1. Even Nazi stalwarts organized in, for example, the Einsatzgruppen
could refuse participation in the judeocide without suffering substantive
penalties. Indeed, all German perpetrators could also exercise many options,
short of outright refusal, to evade murderous orders. See Hans Buchheim, ‘Command
and Compliance’, in Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf
Jacobsen, Anatomy of the SS State,
New York 1965, pp. 373-5, 387; Hilberg, Perpetrators,
Victims, Bystanders, p. 55; Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews,
vol. 3, pp. 1024-5; Heinz Hohne, The
Order of the Death’s Head, London 1969, p. 357; Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen,
Volker Riess, eds, ‘The Good Old Days’,
New York 1991, pp. xx, 62, 75-86.
58. Browning, Ordinary
Men, pp. 73, 150ff, 184.
59. HWE, pp. 17, 188, 228, 256, 259, 386, 388-9,
396-8, 400, 457, 480 n. 40, original emphasis. Faulting ‘conventional
explanations’ for ignoring the cruelty dimension, Goldhagen, in his inimitable
style, alleges: ‘They do not acknowledge the “inhumanity” of the deeds as being
anything other than epiphenomenal to the underlying phenomenon to be explained.’
(HWE, p. 392)
60. On these and related points, see Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45, p. 115;
Richard Breitman, The Architect of
Genocide, New York 1991, p. 250; Buchheim, ‘Command and Compliance’, pp.
338 (quote), 351, 361-2, 363 (quote), 372; Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, New York 1970, pp. 115 (quote), 118
(quote), 121 (quote); Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 1, pp. 326 (quote), 332-3 (quote),
vol. 3, pp. 904, 1009-10; Rudolf Hoess, Commandant
of Auschwitz, London 1974, pp. 70,142-3, 150, 171-3, 201-3; Hohne, The Order of the Death’s Head, pp. 307,
325 (quote), 328 (quote), 364-6, 382 (quote), 383, 386ff; Klee et al., ‘The Good Old Days’, pp. 195ff (quote);
Mommsen, ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable’, p. 99.
61. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, New York 1984, p. 18, see also p. 93;
Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror,
Princeton, 1997, pp. 137-49.
62. Dower, War
Without Mercy, p. 65.
63. HWE, pp. 268, 585 n. 73. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews,
vol. I, p. 325; Klee et al., ‘The Good
Old Days’, p. 195ff. For the German photographs, see also Bartov, Hitler’s Army, pp. 104-5.
64. Hohne, The
Order of the Death’s Head, p. 363; Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 92; Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear, London 1948, pp. 129,
41 (see also ch. 8); Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz,
New York 1966, p. 91; Tzvetan Todorov, Facing
the Extreme, New York, 1996, p. 122; Sofsky, The Order of Terror, ch. 20. Ironically, Goldhagen chastises other
historians for ignoring survivor testimony (see Goldhagen’s review of Browning
in The New Republic, 13-20 July 1992, yet on this the crucial point of his
thesis, Goldhagen himself ignores what the classic survivor accounts report.
For a clinical study that reaches the same conclusions as the survivors, see
Zillmer, The Quest for the Nazi
Personality, especially pp. 117, 119, 180-1. Regarding earlier versions of
the Goldhagen thesis, Lingens-Reiner cautioned:
When one report after the other focused the glare of
its searchlight on the final horrors and the most outrageous atrocities, I
began to feel ... that something was missing, something therefore was wrong.
Not that the most terrifying descriptions of inhuman cruelties and inhuman
misery were not true! Yet, when the spotlight picked them out, it seemed to me
that the background which made them possible, the day-to-day happenings and ‘normal’
aspects of concentration camp life, became almost invisible and unintelligible.
And if only the sensational horrors were registered, there was a danger that
the far deeper, but less blatant, horror of the whole system would not be fully
understood. (p. ix)
65. Note that, according to Browning, ‘there was a
pronounced reluctance of the witnesses to criticize their former comrades’ and
that ‘such denunciations by the policemen, even of unpopular superiors, much
less of their comrades, were extremely rare.’ Ordinary Men, pp. 108, 151-2.
66. For other examples, see HWE, pp. 198, 228, 252,
540 n. 58.
67. For the Einsatzgruppen, see especially Trials of War Criminals, vol. iv (cited
phrase on p. 490).
68. See Breitman, The
Architect of Genocide, pp. 196-7, 204; Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders,
pp. 21, 55, 95; Hilberg, The Destruction
of the European Jews, vol. I, pp. 327-8, 332-3, vol. 3, pp. 1008-10; Hohne,
The Order of the Death’s Head, pp.
357, 363 (quote), 366-7; Ernst Klee et al., ‘The
Good Old Days’, pp. 5, 60, 68, 81-3, 129; Trials of War Criminals, vol. iv, pp. 83, 206, 245, 311.
69. Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solution, p. 150.
70. Goldhagen’s treatment of German anti-Semitism at
the end of the war is typically disingenuous. From the multitude of immediate
postwar surveys with their wildly contradictory findings, he culls only the
most damning statistic. Thus he reports that ‘a survey done by American
occupation authorities at the end of 1946 revealed that fully 61 per cent of
Germans were willing to express views that classified them as racists or
anti-Semites.’ (HWE, p. 593 n. 53) But turning to the cited study, we also
learn that, according to a survey a year earlier, fully 61 percent agreed that ‘the
actions against the Jews were in no way justified.’ Frank Stern, The Whitewashing
of the Yellow Badge, Oxford 1992, pp. 117-18. For a sensitive appraisal of
the postwar surveys, see Gordon, Hitler,
Germans, and the Jewish Question, pp. 197-209. juxtaposing one finding that
nearly 80 per cent of Germans totally opposed Hitter’s anti-Semitism against
another – albeit in response to a ‘badly phrased question’ – that nearly 40 per
cent approved the extermination, Gordon concludes that no definitive conclusion
is possible from these surveys.
71. Adolf Hitler, My
New Order, New York 1941, p. 777; Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, New York 1979, pp. 522-4, 531-40, 548-9 (quote at
534). The phrase ‘concentration camps’ was borrowed from the notorious reconcentrado camps set up by the
Spanish to deal with the Cuban guerrillas.
72. Dower, War
Without Mercy, pp. 36,40-1, 53-55
73. Theodore Roosevelt, Winning of the West, New York
1889, vol. 1, p. 119, vol. 4, pp. 54-6; Elting E.
Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore
Roosevelt, Cambridge 1951, vol. 2, pp. 1176-77, vol. 8, p. 946.
Denouncing the Nazis’ racist Weltanschauung, the Nuremberg Tribunal repeatedly
cited these words from a Hitler speech:
But long ago man has proceeded in the same way with
his fellow man. The higher race – at first higher in the sense of possessing a
greater gift for organization – subjects to itself a lower race and thus
constitutes a relationship which now embraces races of unequal value. Thus
there results the subjection of a number of people under the will often of only
a few persons, a subjection based simply on the right of the stronger, a right
as we see it in nature can be regarded as the sole conceivable right because
founded on reason.
Although plainly racist, Hitler’s argument was but an
anemic version of Roosevelt’s. In the Tribunal’s final judgement, of the two
individuals specifically lauded for lightening humanity’s dark history, the
first was ‘President Theodore Roosevelt’. Trials
of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg
Military Tribunals, vol. IV, pp. 33, 279, 497.
74. Compare, for example, Raul Hilberg’s scathing
assessments of Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne of Holocaust studies in the US, and
Israel Gutman, director of the Research Centre of Yad Vashem in Israel. See
Hilberg, The Politics of Memory.
75. To be sure, the sins varied. Hilberg was
blackballed for allegedly minimizing Jewish resistance. Yet the ideological
phantom of Jewish resistance only obscures the non-instrumental character of
the Nazi genocide. Indeed, the claim of ‘Jewish partisan activity’ was the Einsatzgruppen’s
main pretext for the slaughter. For illuminating commentary on the ideological
recasting of the Holocaust to incorporate Jewish resistance, see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, New York 1993, pp.
109-10, 179-80, 183-4 and especially ch. 24. The banishment of Hannah Arendt
from the Holocaust fold for pointing up the crucial role of Jewish cooperation
in the Final Solution is well known. Recent revelations concerning Arendt’s
relationship with Martin Heidegger have fueled new speculation. Thus Richard
Wolin suggests that this affair was behind Arendt’s ‘calumnies about the Jews’.
The New Republic, 9 October 1995. Yet
Arendt’s indictment of Jewish collaboration pales beside that of Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising leader Yitzak Zuckerman: ‘We didn’t figure that the Germans would put
in the Jewish element, that Jews would lead Jews to death... There isn’t
another chapter in Jewish history in which the murderers themselves were
basically Jews.’ A Surplus of Memory,
New York 1993, pp. 210, 212; see also pp. 192 , 208-9. Arno Mayer’s main
blasphemy was emphasizing the salience of anti-Bolshevism alongside
anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology. The hatchet man in his case was then-Harvard
graduate student Daniel Goldhagen. See The
New Republic, 17 April 1989.
76. Alongside Holocaust studies, a veritable
Holocaust industry has sprung up. The recent publication of a Holocaust
cookbook – to rave notices, no less – points up the marketing possibilities of
Holocaust kitsch. Cara DeSilva, ed., In
Memory’s Kitchen, New York 1996.
77. Revealingly, Holocaust studies has been exempted
from the current mainstream assault on what is disparagingly dubbed ‘victim
studies’ – for example, women’s and gay and lesbian studies. The explanation
for this discrepancy is plainly not comparative scholarly worth. One may also
note that the field of Judaic studies has enjoyed comparable immunity from
current mainstream attacks on ethnic studies.
78. Indeed, Goldhagen is to
Holocaust scholarship what Elie Wiesel is to Holocaust memory. In a highly-praised
new memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea,
New York 1995, Wiesel documents his credibility as a witness. Recently
liberated from Buchenwald and only eighteen years old, he reports, ‘I read The Critique of Pure Reason don’t laugh!
in Yiddish.’ (pp. 139, 163-4) Leaving aside Wiesel’s acknowledgement that at
the time ‘I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar’ (pp. 139, 163-4), The Critique of Pure Reason was never
translated into Yiddish. This is only one of a number of extraordinary episodes
in the book (for others, see pp. 121-30, 202). He who ‘refuses to believe me’,
Wiesel protests, ‘is lending credence to those who deny the Holocaust.’ (p.
336)
79. In Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons, New York 1986, a richly detailed portrait of the New
York Jewish intellectual scene through the late 1960s, there is scarcely a
mention of either Zionism or Israel. The memoirs of prominent American Jewish
intellectuals across the political spectrum confirm that ‘none of us were
Zionists’ (Sidney Hook, Out of Step,
New York 1987, p. 5), that ‘the Six-Day War probably formed a turning point’
(Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, New
York 1982, p. 277), and that Israel after the June war was ‘now the religion of
the American Jews’ (Norman Podhoretz, Breaking
Ranks, New York 1979, p. 335). To cite one illustrative example, Dissent
magazine devoted only two or three articles to Israel from its founding in 1954
through the 1967 war. Yet in subsequent years, Dissent editors Irving Howe and Michael Walzer were seen both here
and in Israel as intellectual mainstays of the Jewish state. One may further
note that the only allusions in Dissent before the June war to the Nazi
Holocaust were two critical reviews of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and an article commemorating the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising.
80. Goldhagen locates ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’
– the tendency towards extermination – in Germany. Yet, in his formulation, it
must be a general tendency. At any rate, Goldhagen never specifies why it was
peculiar to Germany. To adduce the Nazi holocaust as evidence is plainly a post
hoc, ergo propter hoc argument.
81. A full discussion of the origins of Holocaust
culture would also have to include domestic sources. Aligned with black people
against the Jim Crow system in the South, many Jews broke with the Civil Rights
alliance in the late 1960s when the struggle for equality no longer turned on
caste discrimination from which they themselves had suffered but rather
economic privilege. Articulating the class outlook of an ethnic group that had
largely ‘made it’ in the US, Jewish neo-conservatives figured prominently in
the assault on the poor. Playing the Holocaust card to deflect criticism, they
wrapped themselves in the cloak of virginal innocence and bandied about the
claim of ‘black anti-Semitism’. In addition, former Jewish leftists joining the
political mainstream exploited the Holocaust as they tarred the New Left with
charges of anti-Semitism.
82. For the Joan Peters hoax, see Edward Said and
Christopher Hitchens, eds, Blaming the
Victims, New York 1988, ch. 1; and
Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the
Israel-Palestine Conflict, ch. 2.
For the record, an abridged version of this manuscript was submitted to Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic
and The New York Review of Books. No
editor disputed the findings; none, however, expressed interest in publishing
them.
83. Naumann, Auschwitz,
p. 91; Primo Levi, The Reawakening,
New York 1965, p. 214; Zillmer, The Quest
for the Nazi Personality, pp. 79, 48; Trials
of War Criminals, vol. iv, p. 500. 54
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW:
REVISING THE HOLOCAUST By RUTH BETTINA BIRN [The views
expressed in this article are those of the author and not those of the
Department of justice, Canada.]
Chief Historian, War Crimes
and Crimes Against Humanity Section, Department of Justice, Canada (in
collaboration with Dr Volker Riess)
Hilter’s
willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. By Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen. London: Little Brown and Company, 1996. Pp. x+622. £20.
I
Questions about the motives of the perpetrators and,
by implication, the causes of the Holocaust, have long been in the forefront of
academic or non-academic discussions of the Nazi period – from the time of
contemporary observers to the present day. A wide range of possible responses
to these questions has been put forward, drawing on concepts from a variety of
disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology or theology. Daniel
Goldhagen’s book on the motivation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust claims
to be a ‘radical revision of what has until now been written’ (p. 9). This
claim is made on the book-jacket and by the author himself. His thesis can be
summarized as follows: Germany was permeated by a particularly radical and
vicious brand of anti-Semitism whose aim was the elimination of Jews. The
author defines this as ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. This viral strain of
anti-Semitism, he states, ‘resided ultimately in the heart of German political
culture, in German society itself’ (p. 428). Medieval anti-Semitism, based as
it was on the teachings of the Christian religion, was so ‘integral to German
culture’ (p. 55) that with the emergence of the modem era it did not disappear
but rather took on new forms of expression, in particular, racial aspects. By
the end of the nineteenth century ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ dominated the
German political scene. In the Weimar Republic, it grew more virulent even
before Hitler came to power. The Nazi machine merely turned this ideology into
a reality. The course of its actualization was not deterred by anything save
bare necessity: ‘the road to Auschwitz was not twisted’ (p. 425). When the ‘genocidal
program’ was implemented along with the German attack on the Soviet Union, it
was supported by the general German population, by the ‘ordinary Germans’ – the
key phrase of the book – who became ‘willing executioners. They had no need of
special orders, coercion or pressure because their ‘cognitive model’ showed
them that Jews were ultimately fit only to suffer and to die’ (p. 316).
Daniel Goldhagen’s book has become an international
event. He has been interviewed and quoted, appeared on TV and travelled widely
to discuss his work. [196] Reviews, both enthusiastic and critical, have poured
from the presses in many countries. It is hard to think of a large academic
book that has had such a reception and even harder to explain why. The book
itself is made up of three parts: an overview of German history and the
significance of anti-Semitism therein, three case studies, and roughly two
pages of conclusions. The first, general section has been the subject of most
of the attention of reviewers. This review will, therefore, concentrate on the
case studies, the sources which Mr. Goldhagen has used and the methodology on
which the book rests. I only want say one thing with respect to the general
issues that Mr. Goldhagen raises. His assertion that German anti-Semitism was
unique can only be made by comparing it to other forms of anti-Semitism. If one
claims that only Jews were treated in a special way, one has to analyse the
treatment of other victims; if one claims that only German committed certain
deeds, one has to compare them to the deeds of non-Germans; if one claims that
all Germans acted in a certain way, one has to compare the behaviour of
different groups in German society. It is odd that a professor of political
science makes no attempt to look at his evidence in a comparative framework.
The evidence itself has not been examined by
reviewers, because most of them are not familiar with Mr. Goldhagen’s sources.
In fact, the author uses historical documents only to a minimal extent; apart
from some Nuremberg documents and a few files from the German Federal Archives,
he relies mainly on secondary literature. For his case studies, he uses
material mainly from German post-war investigations of Nazi crimes, which are,
for the most part, to be found in the ‘Central Agency for the Prosecution of
Nazi Crimes’ (1) in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
[1 Abbreviated as ZStL.]
The importance of investigation and trial records for
research on the Nazi period has been recognized by scholars for more than
twenty-five years. However, historians also appreciate that these records must
be interpreted critically. Not only are witness statements recollections of
things past, and therefore subject to retrospection, but due to the context of
a criminal investigation itself, they demonstrate how additional incentives for
distorting the truth must be taken into account. Goldhagen’s methodology for
dealing with statements of perpetrators is to ‘discount all selfexculpating
testimony that finds no corroboration from other sources’. The bias created by
this selection he considers ‘negligible’ (p. 467, see p. 601, n. 11).
This approach is too mechanical and inadequate for
dealing with the complexities of the issue, in particular since Goldhagen’s
stated aim is to study the complex motivational aspects of murder. Statements
about their motives form an integral part of a perpetrator’s testimony, and
evaluating them is not as easy as sorting out corroborated from uncorroborated
facts. A number of other variables have to be considered: (1) the context of
the investigation (great differences exist between individual investigations,
in part due to the investigative body responsible, when the investigation took
place, and in part due to contrived testimonies), (2) the context of the
statement (perpetrators often gave different statements, in different settings
and at different times, which can differ considerably in content), (3) the
manner in which the statement was recorded (statements in the German legal system
are not verbatim transcriptions, but are a summary prepared by the
interrogator. They are not the words of the person himself. Only in some cases
are direct quotations inserted.)
A comparative approach is imperative when evaluating
interrogations. Only by reviewing as broad a base of statements as possible are
discrepancies, distortions and [197] omissions likely to be revealed. Moreover,
only the comparative method can place the statements into their proper
historical, and individual, context and allow for informed conclusions. In this
respect, Goldhagen’s study falls short. His evidentiary base is extremely
small; for each of his major topics, he has concentrated on only one
investigation, or parts of investigations. The number of statements on which he
bases his conclusions is fewer than 200, which is a very narrow selection from
the tens of thousands of statements in existence on those topics.
In addition, he uses only snippets of indictments,
verdicts or case summaries by German prosecutors. He also uses portions of
statements from a wide range of investigations which are unrelated to the
topics he discusses in the book. In light of this paucity of sources, it is not
surprising that Goldhagen’s book had neither a bibliography nor a listing of
archival sources.
II
The empirical evidence, which Goldhagen marshals in
support of his hypothesis, is derived from three aspects of the Nazi era: (a)
the Order Police and Police Battalions, (b) Jewish labour and (c) the death
marches.
Goldhagen rightly deplores the fact that a
comprehensive history of the Order Police in the Nazi period has not as yet
been written. The participation of the Order Police in the Holocaust has,
however, been dealt with in the major general histories of the Holocaust, as
for instance by Raul Hilberg in The
destruction of the European Jews, or by Browning in his recent study of
Police Battalion 101. (2) Goldhagen, while contending that Police Battalions
provide ‘an unusually clear window’ (p. 181) for the understanding of the
genocide, does not think a ‘thorough comprehension of institutional development’
(p. 181) necessary for an analysis of its significance. Consequently, he has
not dealt with any of the extensive materials on the Order Police (apart from
four files from the R 19 collection in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz), though he
could have avoided a number of basic mistakes through a closer acquaintance
with the subject.
[2 Christopher Browning, Ordinary men. Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (New York, 1992).]
Goldhagen’s argument asserts the following: police
battalions were the ‘organizational home of a large number of Germans’ (p.
182), who were ‘randomly selected’ (p. 183); these battalions were ‘populated
by neither martial spirits nor Nazi supermen’ (p. 185). In order to
substantiate this, he examines the members of one battalion, ‘Polizeibataillon
101’, in greater detail. Its members, when sent to Eastern Poland in 1942, were
mainly reservists. They were older men, neither over-proportionally party members
nor SS members, and, as Goldhagen argues, their collective social backgrounds
are such that they can be seen as a representative sample of German society as
a whole. They are ‘... representative of German society – that is, ordinary
Germans – in their degree of Nazification...’ (p. 207). Despite the controversy
in the social sciences as to the presumed correlation between a person’s social
background and behaviour in a given human situation, Goldhagen turns
presumption into premise by abandoning all pretence of examining empirical
data. He boldly asserts that this allows for insight into the ‘...likely
conduct of other ordinary Germans’ (p. 208). This leap from a limited quantity
to a collective quality, by which real events are grossly relativized is rather
breathtaking – particularly given the existence of other police [198]
battalions which were also active in the Holocaust and were not comprised of
reservists, but comprised of career police officers or volunteers. (3)
[3 For instance: Police Reserve Battalion 45, ZStL SA
429 Indictment StA Regensburg 14 Js 1495/65; Police Battalion 306, ZStL SA 447
Verdict LG Frankfurt 4 Ks 1/71; Battalion 316; ZStL, SA 387, Verdict LG Bochum
15 Ks 1/66.]
Goldhagen’s argument develops in the following way:
the statements of former members of Police Battalion 101 disclose an incident
in which the commander, Major Trapp, explicitly told his men that they did not
have to shoot if they did not want to. This was on the occasion of the unit’s
first mass-shooting of Jews. Obviously, the commander here is unwilling to
comply with his orders. A few men availed themselves of the offer not to shoot,
the majority did not. This raises the obvious question of what the motives of
the complying men were. The motivating force for compliance was, according to
Goldhagen, the ‘...great hatred for the Jews’ (p. 425). Goldhagen suggests that
they took part because they wanted to kill, and, in one of his many
extrapolations on all police battalions, he states that, one can ‘...
generalize with confidence ... by choosing not to excuse themselves... [that]
the Germans in police battalions themselves indicated that they wanted to be
genocidal executioners’ (p. 279).
During the investigation into their activities,
members of Police Battalion 101 gave explanations for their behaviour. They
form the core of Christopher Browning’s study. These statements point towards a
different interpretation of motivation from that supplied by Goldhagen,
particularly with respect to the first mass-execution. By and large, the men
were not eager to conduct the mass-killing operation, a fact which is
corroborated by those who remained behind and did not shoot. But they did
participate in the executions, nevertheless. Over time, when mass-killings
continued, certain character types emerged: the very few who continued to stand
apart, those who enjoyed the killing and who volunteered and gave free reign to
their sadistic impulses and those who simply continued on with mass-murder and
grew increasingly barbaric. Browning discusses a wide range of explanations for
this behaviour, based on sociopsychological concepts, and argues that the most
likely explanation is a mixture of peer-pressure, careerism and obedience.
In order to support his hypothesis, Goldhagen is
forced to reject not only Browning’s interpretation but also the explanations
offered in statements themselves. The statements are attacked as ‘...unsubstantiated,
self-exculpating claims’ (p. 534, n. 1) and Browning as gullible enough to fall
for them. It is noteworthy that a considerable part of Goldhagen’s discussion
of factual evidence is given over to attacking Browning in unusually strong
language. Why has Goldhagen concentrated exclusively on Police Battalion 101
when there are roughly one hundred and fifty investigations of other police
battalions to choose from? While it would make sense in the context of a larger
study to revisit this one case, it is peculiar to concentrate on this one case
when it has already been evaluated by a reputed historian.
In evaluating witness testimony, one can reject or
view circumspectly all perpetrators’ statements, particularly as to motive.
They are a reflection of the perpetrators’ selfimage based on the desire for
exculpation and tainted by retrospection. In doing so, however, one would lose
one of the few possibilities available of gaining insight into the mentality of
perpetrators, especially in those cases where a perpetrator feels compelled to
unburden himself by confessing to his criminal acts and then tries to offer an
explanation for his behaviour. Nevertheless, wholesale rejection [199] is a
legitimate position. Goldhagen does not avail himself of this option though. He
seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. This is the
problem. He prefers instead to use parts of the statements selectively, to
re-interpret them according to his own point of view, or to take them out of
context and make them fit into his own interpretative framework.
One example cited by Goldhagen is a letter by a
captain in Battalion 101. He considers that it is of the greatest importance: ‘This
one letter provides more insight ... than do reams of the perpetrators’
self-serving post-war testimony’ (pp. 3-4, 382). The captain complains to his
superiors about having to sign a declaration not to plunder. Goldhagen depicts
this as significant proof that Germans had a scale of values and were able to
make moral choices. However, when one examines this letter in the context of
his other correspondence, the captain is revealed to be a malcontent. This
letter has no great significance. (4)
[4 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 27/62, III, pp. 379-412. Goldhagen
also depicts the content of the letter wrongly.]
Another example of Goldhagen’s handling of the
evidence is his description of an incident in which one of the officers brought
his newly-wed to a ghetto-clearing and mass execution, angering many of the
battalion members. (5) Trapp reprimanded this behaviour publicly. Goldhagen interprets
this as merely ‘a sense of chivalry’ (p. 242) and concern for ‘her welfare’ (p.
242), because the woman was pregnant. He also insinuates that wives ‘participated’
(p. 241) rather than simply being spectators of mass-murder, which they were
occasionally. Later on in the book, the whole incident is generalized (pp. 267,
378) as a representation of the fact that perpetrators routinely shared their
murderous experiences with their wives. This generalization rests on a very
small foundation of evidence, and totally disregards the many examples of
strict separation by the perpetrators of their ‘home life’ from their life in ‘the
East’. This, by the way, led presumably to the disproportionally high number of
divorces among perpetrators immediately after the war.
[5 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 27/62 V, pp. 1031-38, F.B.; VI, pp.
1359-68, F.B., VII, pp. 1493-96, H.E.; VIII c, indictment StA Hamburg 141 Js
1957/62, pp. 430-47.]
Expressions of shame and disapproval in the
statements, if not rejected out of hand for methodological reasons (p. 533, n.
74, in connection with Pol Btl 65), are discredited by Goldhagen as mere
expressions of ‘visceral disgust’ (p. 541, n. 68) and not of ‘ethical or
principled opposition’ (p. 541, n. 68). To illustrate how this view is a
misrepresentation and, thus, unacceptable, one need only refer to the statement
of the medical orderly of Battalion 101, who, due to his function, did not have
to shoot. He is very open and forthright in his interrogation. He describes his
feelings with respect to the killing of the sick in a ghetto hospital quite
sincerely: ‘it was so repulsive/disgusting to me and I felt so terribly ashamed’.
(6) While the notion of ‘principled opposition’ would make sense when, for
instance, dealing with attitudes of the German civilian population, its
heuristic value becomes questionable when dealing with a group who, after all,
did participate in crimes and can hardly claim ‘opposition’ of any kind. For an
honest statement under similar circumstances, one should more likely turn to
one of the tentative and groping explanations Browning analyses, in which the
person is very open about what he saw, using descriptions like ‘cruel’ [grausam],
‘murder plain and simple’ [glatter Mord], ‘a crying shame’ [lausgesprochene
Schweinerei] and also very candidly talks about his participation in [200] it.
At the same time he describes his frame of mind within the context of the war,
i.e. that he could not even imagine refusing to obey an order. (7) There are
even examples of expressions of shame and guilt coupled with self-incriminating
statements. One such statement cited by Browning (Browning, pp. 67-8) is, not
surprisingly, ignored by Goldhagen.
[6 ‘Derartig angeekelt und ich habe mich derartig
geschaemt.’ ZStL, 208 AR-Z 27/62, V, pp. 971-9, F. V. See also Goldhagen’s
version, p. 546, n. 16.
7 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 27/62, VI, pp. 1114-28, E. N.]
Using Goldhagen’s method of handling evidence, one
could easily find enough citations from the Ludwigsburg material to prove the
exact opposite of what Goldhagen maintains.
III
Goldhagen uses the activities of police Battalion 65
as another illustration of his theory that ‘the Germans’ killed ‘any Jew whom
they discovered’...with neither ‘prompting nor permission’ (p. 194), because
this reflected ‘their own inwardly held standards’ (p. 193), their ‘internalized...
need to kill Jews’ (p. 193). As proof, he recounts a number of killings which
are contained in the investigation report of a German prosecutor. A reading of
this report in full, and not selectively as does Goldhagen, reveals that the
activities of Police Battalion 65 mirror the course of the German occupation
policy; they implemented whatever orders were given to them at a specific time
and place. They killed Jews and Russians in Lithuania and Russia, Jews and
Poles in Poland. They deported Jews from Denmark and, at the end of the war in
Northern Yugoslavia, they killed Yugoslavs. (8) The report does not support
Goldhagen’s interpretation that priority was given to the killing of Jews and
that ‘every German was inquisitor, judge and executioner’ (p. 194).
[8 ZStL, 206 AR-Z 6/62, VIII, Einstellungsverfugung,
pp. 2073-97.]
Individual statements are treated with similar
selectiveness. Goldhagen cites the account of one witness who describes how a
person was beaten to death, just because the name Abraham appeared in his
papers (p. 532, n. 54). (9) This incident is mentioned on page 2 of the
statement, and on pages 3-4, the brutal and sexually sadistic murder of a young
girl by one of the officers is described in graphic detail, vividly
illustrating the atmosphere prevalent in Russia. Goldhagen makes no reference
to it. The victim was not Jewish.
[9 ZStL, 206 AR-Z 6/62, III, pp. 782-5, E. L.]
Goldhagen describes the activities of Police
Battalion 309 in June 1941, in Bialystok (pp. 188-191) as ‘... the emblematic
killing operation of the formal genocide’ (p. 191) He maintains that the
battalion knew of the planned destruction of the Jews before its entry into the
Soviet Union. (For a number of years, the majority of holocaust scholars has
endorsed the view that initially an order was given to kill Jewish men and
Soviet functionaries which was enlarged after roughly two months to a general
killing order, including women and children.) Consequently, when entering
Bialystok ‘these Germans could finally unleash themselves without restraint
upon the Jews’ (p. 188), so the whole battalion without any prompting ‘became
instantaneous Weltanschauungskrieger or ideological warriors’ (p. 190). The
Jewish quarters were searched, accompanied by many acts of cruelty, the Jewish
population was herded into the market place, finally in part forced into the
Synagogue, and there burned alive.
Detailed examination of the statements themselves
modify this one-dimensional picture and show Goldhagen’s conclusions to be
without foundation. Goldhagen stresses the importance of the extermination
order, and attacks Browning for having [201] failed to mention it (pp. 529-30,
n. 22). However, while some former members of the battalion confirm its
existence, (10) others give differing statements, among them the clerk
[Schreiber] through whose hands the orders would have had to pass. (11) One
battalion member changes his story radically in a series of statements, and he
speaks of an order to kill all Jews in his final statement only, the one which
Goldhagen relies upon. (12) This should arouse the suspicion of a researcher.
Closer scrutiny reveals the likely reason for the change of story as a defence
strategy of the main defendants. As soon as the investigation commenced,
intensive communication between former battalion members took place. (13) Two
defence strategies emerge: to suggest a superior order in support of ‘military
necessity’ and to shift blame to the commander, who died during the
investigation. This conclusion is corroborated by investigations against other
battalions of the ‘Polizei Regiment Mitte’ that, by the end of July 1941, still
murdered male Jews only. (14)
[10 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, V, pp. 1339 rs, A. A.; VI,
p. 1416, J. B.; 202 AR 2701/65, I, pp. 95-6, H. G.
11 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, I, pp. 289-90, G. E.; see
IV, pp. 1115-16 and IX, indictment StA Dortmund 45 Js 21/61, p. 2303, H. Sch.;
III, p. 681 and VII, p. 1926 rs.; R-J.B.; II, pp. 485-6, E.O.; II, p. 514, T.
D.
12 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, III, p. 764 (1963); XII, pp.
2794-95 (1965); VII, p. 1813 rs (1966), E. M.
13 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, I, pp. 73-7, M.R. P. 78,
letter E.W., pp. 177-93; E.W., II, pp. 459-62, H.Sch.; see: Heiner
Lichtenstein: Himmlers gruene Helfer. Die Schutz-und Ordnungspolizei im
‘Dritten Reich’ (Koeln, 1990), pp. 86-8. This has happened in other cases
concerning Order Police.
14 Police Battalions 316 and 322, see ZStL SA 387;
verdict L. G. Bochum 15 Ks i/66 and SA 133; verdict LG Freiburg 1 Ks 1/63.]
The incident described by Goldhagen seems to have
been in the nature of a pogrom, caused by a group of officers who, through
their proximity to the SS, were ideologically zealous. (15) This is
corroborated by two men from the regular members who say that they were hustled
into the action before they knew what was happening to them. (16) One describes
how he was disgusted by the burning alive of defenceless people in the
synagogue. Since both men confess, their testimony should carry great weight.
While Goldhagen only speaks of ‘the Germans’, the perpetrators in this case can
be specifically identified. Of the fourteen main perpetrators who stood trial,
13 were career police officers and one came via the Waffen-SS; 8 were party
members. (17) One of the two company leaders had been involved, after World War
I, with right wing groups such as the ‘Freikorps’ while the other was a SS
member in 1933. They can hardly be considered ‘ordinary Germans’.
[15 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, V, pp. 1217-20, H.B.; II,
p. 374, A.O.; 11, pp. 465-73, H. Sch.; V, PP. 1343-44, J.O.; SA 214, verdict LG
Wuppertal 12 Ks 1/67, pp. 60-5.
16 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, III, pp. 788-92, R.I. and V,
pp. 1280-84, W. L.; IX, pp. 2327-33, indictment StA Dortmund 45 JS 21/61.
17 ZStL, 205 AR-Z 20/60, IX, indictment StA Dortmund
45 Js 21/61; SA 214, verdict LG Wuppertal 12 Ks 1/67, P. 8, ad R-J. B.]
The inadequacy of conclusions which are reached by
not using a comparative approach is clearly illustrated by Goldhagen’s
discussion of the decision-making process within the phenomenon of the
Holocaust. The lack of a comparative approach also illustrates that he,
himself, ignores his own warning about the uncritical use of sources. He is not
adverse to using exculpatory statements if it suits his line of argument.
Goldhagen, as mentioned above, supports the older view that a general order was
given to the Operational Task Forces [Einsatzgruppen] before they set out. His
argument, [202] though, is not up to the present level of the international
debate on the subject. He bases his opinion mainly on two statements made by
former Commanders of Einsatzkommandos, Blume (p. 149) and Filbert (p. 149), as ‘conclusive
evidence’ (p. 153). Blume stood trial in Nuremberg, and he was part of a
defence strategy organized by Otto Ohlendorf which had as its purpose the
proving of an alleged order by Hitler before the murder commenced. The presence
of this order was intended to provide the foundation for a defence which used
superior orders as an excuse. Alfred Streim has demonstrated the existence of
such a strategy by means of a painstaking and thorough analysis of the wide
range of statements available. He also showed how statements by the same person
could change substantially over time. The Blume and Filbert statements are
examples of this. (18) Goldhagen, in his account, accepts uncritically the
Ohlendorf line; he wrote a paper on Ohlendorf in his undergraduate degree.
Goldhagen habitually dismisses as inadequate the works of the most respected
scholars of the Holocaust, yet refers repeatedly to his own B.A. work (p 583,
n. 45). The most telling example of the uncritical use of sources is what
Goldhagen announces as ‘what may be the most significant and illuminating
testimony after the war’ (p. 393). This testimony corroborates, according to
him, that the perpetrators were genuinely motivated by ‘demonological hatred’
against all Jews. The testimony is given by R. Maurach in defence of Ohlendorf
in Nuremberg. Again, the best line of defence available, in the face of the
indisputable number of murders committed by Einsatzgruppe D, was to claim
orders from above and sincere ideological convictions. This, however, does not
make this defence, which was rejected at Nuremberg, conclusive proof; the one
argument ‘leaving us no choice but to adopt it’ (p. 583, n. 46). In general,
Goldhagen seems to have difficulty comprehending that when perpetrators claim
to have been motivated by Nazi propaganda, it need not be sincere; it can be a
subterfuge or a very plausible line of self-exculpation psychologically. It
attempts to supply ‘idealistic’ motives for crimes committed.
[18 Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer
Kriegsgefangener im Fall ‘Barbarossa’, (Heidelberg, 1981); Alfred Streim, The
task of the SS Einsatzgruppen, volume 4, Alfred Streim: Reply to Helmut
Krausnick, volume 6, both: Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual.]
IV
In general terms, Goldhagen’s descriptions of the
activities of these police battalions entirely ignores the fact that the police
units operated in an occupied country during a war and that some of these units
had been conducting killings for some time in Poland, or other areas, before
being sent to the Soviet Union. This neglect also applies to the examples he
uses. (19) The factual, social and historical context in which these policemen
operated is entirely omitted. A police environment has a specific culture which
is particularly manifest in a para-militaristic setting. One illustration of
this is Goldhagen’s attack on Browning who accepted the perpetrators’
explanation of not wanting to appear cowardly if they refused the order to
shoot. Goldhagen overlooks entirely the scale of values and perceptions of
manly behaviour prevalent in these particular settings at the time. It might be
disturbing that somebody would shoot children because he did not want to ‘appear
soft’, as expressed in a statement, but it captures something of the atmosphere
of the time. (20) The framework of permissible action delineated by war and
occupation is neglected in the same way. Failing to refuse [203] a given order
is imperceptibly changed into an entirely voluntarist act of Jew-killing.
Examples of the voluntary killing of Jews do, of course, exist, but they are
not to be seen in the cases to which Goldhagen refers.
[19 For instance, Battalion 309: see ZStL, 205 AR-Z
20/60, II, pp. 462-4, H.Sch. and pp. 482-4, E.O.
20 Ed. E. Klee, W. Dressen, V. Riess, Schoene Zeiten
(Frankfurt, 1988), pp. 81-3.]
The most severe shortcoming of Goldhagen’s treatment
of the Order Police is that he analyses activities outside of their proper
historical and institutional context. In his introductory description of the
Order Police, cited above, he states that police battalions are ‘most
intimately involved in the genocide’ (p. 181). How is this a given? A more
plausible argument with respect to this can be made for the smaller units of
the Order Police, stationed all over the occupied cast. They were involved in
every step of the ghettoization, exploitation and, finally, murder of the
Jewish population over a prolonged period of time. They might have known the
victims; they witnessed every detail of the Holocaust. In contrast, mobile
units like the police battalions only sporadically moved into a particular
region for mass-killings. So why not choose the smaller units instead? If he
had used stationary police units as his defining example, his hypothesis would
have been devoid of any real content.
The Order Police in the Second World War grew
enormously. The shortage of German personnel prevented effective policing of
the occupied east. Non-German police forces had to be used to a great degree.
The ratio of Germans to non-Germans ranged from between 1: 10 to 1: 50; in some
places it was even higher. The majority were incorporated into the structural
organization of the Order Police. In practical terms, the dispersion of limited
resources meant that any rural police post would have been manned by a few
German, and a much larger group of non-German, policemen. All of them took part
in the persecution of Jews. Goldhagen would have had to address the question of
what differences are to be seen in their respective behaviour. And the same
question can be asked of the police battalions themselves. ‘Schutzmannschaften’,
comprised of non-Germans, had been set up and were assigned the same functions
as the German units. For example, Police Battalion 11, mentioned by Goldhagen
in connection with its murderous activities in Belorussia in the fall of 1941
(p. 271), was augmented by the Lithuanian ‘Schutzmannschaftsbattalion 2/12’, manned
by Lithuanian volunteers. (21) Germans and Lithuanians rotated in the killing
actions – two companies were shooting while two were guarding. A number of
statements of a type Goldhagen habitually accepts (though one might have
reservations about such denunciatory statements), refer to the Lithuanians’
particular bloodthirstiness. (22) Does this mean that Goldhagen’s theory of the
cognitive models of Germany’s eliminationist anti-Semitic culture applies to
Lithuanian cognitive models as well?
[21 ZStL, SA 119, indictment StA Kassel 31 Js 27/60,
pp. 14-17; Report of the investigations of war criminals in Australia, edited
by the Attorney-General’s Department, Canberra (1993), pp. 124-9.
22 StA Kassel 3a Ks 1/61. F.W.; E.B.]
V
The second empirical basis of Goldhagen’s argument is
the fact that Jews were used as forced labour. This part of his book he
considers to be the ‘toughest test’ of his hypothesis (p. 465). He studies
conditions in Jewish work-camps, using concrete examples of two camps in
Lublin: the Lipowa camp and the ‘Flughafen’ camp. The many acts of cruelty and
torture to which inmates were subjected are described in great detail.
Goldhagen sees the economic irrationality of these conditions as a crucial
feature. ‘Why did Germans put Jews to work?’ (p. 283), he asks. ‘Why did they
not simply kill them?’ (p. 283). The answer he gives is that the German ‘cultural
cognitive [204] model of Jews’ (p. 285), which was ‘ingrained in German culture’
(p. 320), did not allow for Jewish work to be rationally motivated but only
allowed such work to have ‘a symbolic and moral dimension’ (p. 285). The view
expressed by Hitler, namely, that Jews are ‘lazy’ and ‘parasites’, is taken as ‘the
common view in Germany’. This collective view ‘echoed Hitler’s’ (p. 285) own
and led to the wish to make Jews suffer. ‘Germans derived emotional
satisfaction’ from putting Jews to work (p. 284). They enjoyed the ‘production
of Jewish misery’ (p. 320), even if it was counterproductive. ‘Jewish “work”
was not work... but a suspended form of death. In other words, it was death
itself’ (p. 323).
Though not without a certain explanatory potential,
Goldhagen’s concept of the use of work to inflict gratuitous suffering on a
doomed population is vitiated by the examples he cites. The work camps he is
describing were operating in 1942/43. At that time, the genocide, i.e. the
overall plan to murder the Jewish population of Europe, had been in effect for
two years. The idea of making Jews work was not a change in plans but rather a
side issue, borne out of the idea of getting the most use of the victims before
having them killed. These facts are set out in detail in Goldhagen’s main
source, (23) in the prosecutor’s report. However, the general, immutable plan
in which this occurred involved ultimate destruction. Therefore, to compare the
Lublin work-camps to slave labour programmes is nonsensical. Slave labour of
Polish or Russian people was designed to utilize their work capacity, albeit
under the harshest of conditions. Consequently, work conditions varied, in
particular, when individual labourers were working on German farms, where some
of them were not treated too badly. His premise that a German farmer treating a
Polish forced labourer with some decency can be proof of the theory that
Germans tortured only Jews, because concentration camp guards ill-treated Jews,
is clearly illogical (pp. 313ff.). A more viable comparison to the situation of
Slavic forced labourers would be with the situation of those Jews who were, in
1942/43, still within a German environment. (24) In order to support his stance
that ‘Germans were murderous and cruel towards Jewish workers and murderous and
cruel in ways they reserved especially for Jews’ (p. 315), Goldhagen depicts
the conditions of Slavic forced labourers in somewhat too rosy a manner (p.
314). For instance, he ignores the fact that Russian women were forced to abort
their unborn children, or were killed when found to be pregnant, even when the
pregnancy resulted from rape. He also overlooks the fact that millions of
soviet POWs were starved to death before it dawned on the German authorities
that they had a problem with a labour shortage. These and other examples do not
support the thesis that Germans dealt with everybody but Jews in a manner that
was dictated by economic rationality.
[23 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 74/60, LIV. Secondary sources exist
as well.
24 In detail described in: Victor Klemperer, Ich will
Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (Berlin, 1995), 11, pp. 21-48.]
The appropriate comparison for the conditions in the
Lublin work camps is the conditions in other camps. Everything Goldhagen
describes was a daily occurrence in every concentration camp (which
parenthetically existed from 1933 on before and apart from the Nazi policy to
kill every person just because they were Jewish): the endless roll-calls during
which inmates perished from excessive heat, excessive cold, cruel punishments,
public hangings, senseless work which was only meant to exhaust, health-care
which was a means of expediting death, and the plethora of arbitrarily
inflicted humiliations and tortures from guards. What Goldhagen describes as
being inflicted by the ‘camp’s ordinary Germans’ (p. 307) onto ‘Jews, and only
for Jews’ [205] (p. 313) reflects what really happened if one replaces ‘Germans’
with ‘guards’ and ‘Jews’ with ‘inmates’. Of course, the behaviour of guards was
a reflection of the hatred of Jews, which was at the centre of Nazi beliefs,
but it also reflects the multitude of other individual personalized hatreds.
Jews were very often the object of the cruelty of guards, but so were gays,
people wearing glasses, intellectuals, people with a disability, overweight
people, and people who offered any type of resistance.
The Commander of the ‘Flughafenlager’ in 1942/43 was
Christian Wirth and the majority of guards were his men. Wirth, who started out
as a career police officer, was, from 1939/40 on, one of the central figures in
the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, in which mental patients were killed. He moved on
to the Lublin district where he was instrumental in setting up death camps.
Wirth was an expert in the gassing of people. To refer to Christian Wirth and
his subordinates as ‘the camp’s ordinary Germans’ (p. 307) is misleading. In
the same vein, the guards in the ‘Lipowa’ camp, who are referred to as ‘an
unextraordinary lot’ (p. 299), were three quarters SS men, hardened in camp
duty. (25) In contrast to the behaviour of these men, a group of 15 employees
of the SS-company in charge of production in the camp, are depicted by all
victims as essentially harmless. (26) Goldhagen cannot have missed this telling
juxtaposition; he cites the prosecutor’s report in the middle of the page after
these facts are set out. How does this fit into Goldhagen’s claim that ‘post-war
testimony ... reveals little consciousness of differences in attitude or action
between those who were either Party or SS members and those who were not’ (p.
274)?
[25 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 74/60, XLVI, pp. 8400-12,
Aktenvermerk.
26 ZStL, 208 AR-Z 74/60, XLVI, pp. 8441-42,
Aktenvermerk.]
One additional point should be made in connection
with Goldhagen’s description of the Lublin work camps. An all too common
feature of his discussion is a use of nearly malicious language for the
description of particularly terrible facts, which is presumably intended to be
sarcastic detachment. It is wholly undignified. A reader can conclude for him
or herself that the murder of forty thousand people within a few days is an
enormous crime and that the code-name ‘Action Harvest Festival’ is a travesty,
without being told by the author that this was ‘aptly named in keeping with the
German’s customary love of irony’ (p. 291) – to name only one of many examples.
One final example comes from the Helmbrechts camp, in
which there were male and female guards. It is reported that sexual
relationships between the guards existed. Goldhagen deliberates on this ‘community
of cruelty’ (p. 338) as follows: ‘the Germans made love in barracks next to
enormous privation and incessant cruelty. What did they talk about when their
heads rested quietly on their pillows, when they were smoking their cigarettes
in those relaxing moments after their physical needs had been met? Did one
relate to another accounts of a particularly amusing beating that she or he had
administered or observed, of the rush of power that engulfed her when the
righteous adrenalin of Jew-beating caused her body to pulse with energy?’ (p.
339)
VI
The third empirically-based section of this book
deals with ‘death marches’. One march, concerning the Helmbrechts camp, is
described in detail. A group of Jewish female inmates were taken on foot,
accompanied by male and female guards, through the border area of Germany and
Czechoslovakia. No contextual framework for these events is provided; the
events are merely related in a narrative style. Conditions on the [206] march
were terrible, as they had been in the camp. The Jewish women were already
emaciated and starving, food and shelter were denied them and they were
relentlessly forced to continue marching. A number of them were killed during
the march. Even after an explicit order by Himmler to refrain from killing, the
murder continued.
Supported by a few similar examples from other death
marches, Goldhagen arrives at a general explanation: this irrational, extremely
cruel behaviour by ‘ordinary Germans’, directed exclusively against Jews, is
proof of the demonological, undying hatred of ‘Germans’ against ‘Jews’. ‘To the
very end, the ordinary Germans willfully, faithfully and zealously slaughtered
Jews’ (p. 371). He argues that, in this situation, the behaviour of the German
guards was entirely irrational, since Germany had already been defeated. He
posits that the only reasonable thing in the circumstances would have been a
change in behaviour and that the reason for a continuation of the killing must
reside in deeper irrational urges.
Goldhagen’s account of the death marches is extremely
distorted. In consulting the secondary sources he cites, we quickly encounter a
number of facts which contradict the picture drawn. Krakowski, for instance,
relates the fact that there were Jewish and non-Jewish inmates on death marches
and gives detailed break-downs of the percentages of each group on the marches
he mentions. In the period of March-April, 1945, in which the Helmbrechts march
took place, Krakowski estimates that 250,000 prisoners were forced to take part
in marches, one third of whom were Jewish. (27) Other examples, not cited by
Goldhagen, show that conditions on all of these marches were very similar,
including those with only non-Jewish inmates. (28)
[27 Shmuel Krakowski, ‘The death marches in the
period of the evacuation of the camps’, in: The Nazi concentration camps (Yad
Vashem, 1984), p. 482; Krakowski, Death marches, in: Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust.
28 See, for instance, the death march from
Wiener-Neudorf, where no Jews were present, Bertrand Perz, Der Todesmarsch from
Wiener Neudorf nach Mauthausen. Eine Dokumentation, in: DOW jahrbuch 1989 pp.
117-37. 29. Perz, Der Todesmarsch, pp. 117-137.]
When compared with investigations of other death
marches, one finds that the range of behaviour patterns is much wider than that
suggested by Goldhagen. One can find examples for almost any attitude on the
part of the guards, ranging from extreme cruelty to what might be considered
its opposite, and, also to some degree, of the two attitudes co-existing.(29)
[Text of footnote 29 is missing] On an individual basis, guards behaved quite
differently from each other, reflecting their own degree of identification with
camp behaviour. This is reported to be the case in the Helmbrechts march,
although Goldhagen does not mention it. (29) The same diversity of behaviour
can be observed in the civilian population. In the Helmbrechts march, the
German population seems to have been supportive of the victims, offering food
and shelter, but all succour was disallowed and thwarted by the guards. (30)
One also finds entirely different behaviour, like the sudden outbursts of
animosity and violence towards the miserable marchers, who were already in a
desolate condition. (31)
[29 ZStL, SA 343, verdict LG Hof Ks 7/68, p. 82; see
pp. 58-9 and 210.
30 ZStL, SA 343, verdict LG Hof Ks 7/68, pp. 57-9,
82-3, 194-5 and 210.
31 As examples of both types of behaviour: Solly
Ganor, Der Todesmarsch, in: Dachauer Hefte 11, 1993; Peter Sturm: Evakuierung,
in: Dachauer Hefte 11, 1995; Verdict LG Marburg 6 Ks 1/68, ZStL, SA 386;
Indictment StA Hannover 11 Js 5/73, ZStL, SA 503, Verdict LG Hannover 11 Ks
1/77, ZStL, SA 503.]
A comparative perspective casts further doubt on
Goldhagen’s notion that the only rational behaviour for the guards, in the
shadow of the imminent defeat of Germany, would have been to either release the
inmates or treat them humanely. The extensive [207] materials on crimes
committed in the last weeks of the war (32) show numerous instances when the police,
SS and German Army members turned, in a rabid and destructive way, not against
Jews, but against the German population themselves, i.e. against whomever was
showing signs of ‘defaitisme’. Hitler’s own response to the certainty of defeat
was the wish to see the German population destroyed. In this period of chaos
and destruction, human behaviour did not seem to conform to what Goldhagen
describes as being the only ‘rational’ way.
[32 Available in published form, for instance, in the
edition of German verdicts by Rueters, also in numerous printed works.]
VII
Thus far, a close review of Goldhagen’s evidentiary
base has shown the selective way in which he has interpreted his sources. On a
larger scale, the greatest short-coming of the book is that he uses such a
small sample of the investigations and sources available. He takes selected
parts and blows them up out of proportion. Sweeping generalizations then emerge
from these distortions so that they look like an image reflected from a
magnifying mirror. However, if he had used a broader source-base and applied
the comparative method, a truer picture would have revealed itself. In the last
part of the book, a brief section has the heading ‘comparative perspective’ (p.
406). It does not serve the purpose of making any real comparisons, as
Goldhagen only brushes the whole issue aside by applying his own style of
argument and logic. He starts out with a question: Could we conceive of Danes
and Italians committing the Holocaust? This is a biased rhetorical question
since these are the two generally well-known examples of groups who did not
participate in the genocide. So why is the question asked? Danes were not
enlisted in any of the units that committed massmurder, so how is it that they
can be used in a comparison?
Goldhagen’s theory of the motivation of perpetrators
is flawed by the absence of any comparison between a German and non-German
perpetrator. As mentioned above, the contribution of non-Germans to policing
Eastern Europe was substantial, and policing in the context of German
occupational policies included the involvement in crimes. Did their behaviour
differ? And if so, in what way? For Eastern Europe, comparisons would have been
made easier as Germans and non-Germans in police units and posts were working
side by side. Comparisons with collaborating police forces, such as with the
French, or with allies like the Croatian or Hungarian police, might have been
more complex.
A classic example of non-Germans, who fit the picture
Goldhagen wishes to paint of Germans, is the ‘Arajs Kommando’. Named after
their leader, Viktor Arajs, this was a group composed of Latvian men, mainly
students or former army officers with rightwing political backgrounds. Within
days of the arrival of the German forces in Riga, Arajs made contact with the
leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Stahlecker, and offered his services. In the
following months, his group, officially known as the ‘Latvian Auxiliary
Security Police’, did nothing but kill Jews. They were active in Riga and moved
around all of Latvia; parts of the group were sent to Byelorussia. The guards
in camps located in Latvia were Arajs Commando members. The killing actions
were extremely gruesome, with the perpetrators literally wading in blood,
getting drunk during the killing, and afterwards participating in large
celebrations. Survivor accounts describe the terrible conditions under which
the Jews were kept in the basement of the commando headquarters. There they
were tortured, degraded, and raped. All of the [208] Arajs Commando members
were volunteers. They were free to leave at any time. (33) Goldhagen offers
evasive explanations for non-German perpetrators: ‘The Germans had defeated,
repressed and dehumanized Ukrainians and there were pressures operating on the
Ukrainians that did not exist for the Germans’ (pp. 408-9). He also states that
the ‘German’s conduct towards their eastern European minions... was generally
draconian’ (p. 409). Apart from smacking considerably of standard revisionism,
these assumptions certainly do not apply to the Arajs Commando. All the ‘typical
German’ patterns of behaviour like ‘rage, lust for vengeance, that unleashed
the unprecedented cruelty’ (p. 414) were present here as well. How does this
fit into Goldhagen’s explanatory framework?
[33 StA Hamburg 141 Js 534/60, ZStL, 207 AR-Z 7/59.]
Admittedly, the Arajs Commando is an extreme case,
but it is by no means an isolated one. Many similar examples exist. Camps in
the occupied Soviet Union were run with a minimum of German personnel. The
Koldyczewo camp, north of Baranowice in
Byelorussia, for instance was run by one German. (34)
All the other guards were non-German. The camp was operated in the same way as
all camps; inmates were tortured and worked to death and large killing actions
were conducted. A great number of camps in Soviet territory functioned without
German personnel at all and with only minimal supervision. How does this fit
into the notion of the ‘camp system’... being the German ‘society’s emblematic
institution’ (p. 459) and the view of a potential ‘Germanic Europe, which
essentially would have become a large concentration camp, with the German
people as its guards’ (p. 459)?
[34 ZSt Dortmund 45 Js 19/6, ZStL, 202 AR-Z 94/59.]
To forestall possible misinterpretation, all of the
foregoing certainly resulted from German policies. Orders for Koldyczewo, for
instance, were received from the Security Police in Baranowice. The introduction
of a comparison with non-German perpetrators does not take anything away from
the overall responsibility of Germany for the Second World War and the
Holocaust. But it is certainly highly relevant to the question of individual
motivation and its root causes.
Goldhagen studiously avoids putting his theory to
such a comparative test. Even though it is evident from the footnotes that he
is familiar with the investigation on the Arajs Commando and other similarly
telling cases, these facts are never mentioned. He simply dismisses comparisons
as irrelevant since the Germans were ‘the central and indispensable
perpetrators of the Holocaust’. This tactic allows him to analyse the
motivation of the German perpetrators while excluding a comparison which would
have revealed the falsity of his conclusions and, thus, would have denied him
the authority to conclude that all this was specifically an expression of the
German national character. He then postulates that any research on the
behaviour of non-Germans, if it were to be undertaken, would only serve as an
illumination of the Germans’ actions, because only Germans were ‘the prime
movers’ (p. 409). According to him, this research would not change his results.
An argument of immaculate circularity.
Germany was certainly responsible for the Holocaust
and it is also clear that Viktor Arajs became a mass-murderer only because of
the overall German plan to destroy the Jewish population of Latvia. Yet
Goldhagen’s procedural negligence, which results in false conclusions, is
evident with respect to the policemen in Police Battalion 101 and all other
examples discussed in the book as well. Even the concentration camp guards
would have stayed in the jobs they held before the Nazi government opened up
camps. None of the people discussed here were making policy, they all
responded, at least initially, to a given political situation. On the level of
the personal response of [209] individual perpetrators, the question of the
overall political and moral responsibility, which lies with Germany, is not
relevant.
VIII
In light of his circumscribed and biased use of
archival sources, it is perhaps not surprising that Goldhagen is also highly
selective in his use of secondary literature. This is seen early on in the
book, in the part which is devoted to an overview of German history from the
Middle Ages to the Second World War. This part is based entirely on secondary
sources. As the main facts of German history are widely known, it does not seem
worthwhile to devote too much time on a review of this part of the book.
Suffice it to say, that Goldhagen produces a tunnel-vision view of ‘this pre-Holocaust
age (p. 70), which leaves no room for either historical context or for a
comparative framework. Goldhagen posits an unbroken continuity in Germany from
the anti-Judaism of the Christian churches in the Middle Ages to the racial
anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which Jews were
seen as ‘a binary opposite of the German’ (p. 55). Consequently, German history
appears as one great endless struggle of the Germans against the Jews,
regardless of the context. When the Nazis were ‘elected to power’ (sic!) (p. 419), the teleology of German
history fulfilled itself. Needless to say, in order to support this view,
Goldhagen substantially manipulates the secondary sources he uses.
Goldhagen eliminates the political context of the
Nazi movement and ignores the fact that the Nazi regime was a repressive system
from the start. There is no reference made to the fact that the Nazis were a
right-wing party, promoting conservative and right-wing political views (some
of which turn up in the creed of right-wing movements to this day). Indeed, by
playing down all political factors, Goldhagen is able to make statements like ‘...
the Nazi German revolution was, on the whole, consensual’...’a peaceful
revolution’...’the repression of the political left in the first years
notwithstanding’ (p. 456). This beautifies the realities of the Nazi regime to
an uncomfortable extent.
The questions of how widespread and deeply-rooted
anti-Semitism was, to what extent the German population supported the Nazis’
anti-Semitic measures and how exactly the persecution of the Jews had an impact
on Hitler’s and the Nazis’ popularity are important ones indeed. They are
certainly not resolved. Goldhagen does not contribute to the debate.
IX
Goldhagen’s book is not driven by sources, be they
primary or secondary ones. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to
speak for themselves. He uses material as an underpinning for his pre-conceived
theory. The book is driven by the author’s choice of language, and it can only
be understood by analysing these choices and his generally argumentative style.
Verbosity and repetitiveness are the most striking features of the book.
[210] Discursive
techniques
Goldhagen uses several techniques to transform his
assumptions into what he describes as the ‘unassailable truth’. In particular,
the introductory and concluding chapters are full of examples, of which a few
must be demonstrated in detail. One is to use a single fact to support an
overall generalization. For instance, a protest letter by Pastor Hochstaedter
is described as being ‘all but singular’ (p. 433), a ‘tiny, brief flame of
reason and humanity ... flickering invisibly ... in the vast anti-Semitic
darkness that had descended upon Germany’ (p. 434). It is used as a foil to ‘cast
into sharp relief’ (p. 431) (a favourite expression of the author) the attitude
of the Christian churches in general who did not object to the ‘Nazi’s
ferocious anti-Semitism’ (p. 435). They were eliminationist anti-Semitic
themselves. Based on another single document taken entirely out of context, (35)
he arrives at a sweeping conclusion that the churches gave ‘an ecclesiastical imprimatur
of genocide’ (p. 433).
[35 See Kirchliches Jahrbuch fur die Evangelische
Kirche in Deutschland, 1933-1944 (Guetersloh, 1948).]
A second technique is the application of a form of
reasoning, which is boldly presented as common sense, and therefore as being
the only logically possible explanation. Goldhagen maintains that the ‘indifference’
of the ‘German people’ (p. 439) towards the fate of the Jews is a ‘psychologically
implausible attitude’ (p. 440) since ‘people generally flee scenes and events
that they consider to be horrific, criminal or dangerous’ (p. 440). Thus, since
part of the German population watched the burning of synagogues in the November
pogrom ‘with curiosity’ – a modifier added by the author (p. 440) – they were
not indifferent but rather pitiless (p. 440).
A third technique is a twisted manipulation of the
interpretations of other scholars in order to provide foils for his own line of
argument. This has already been demonstrated in a number of earlier examples. A
particularly striking one, is Goldhagen’s discussion, and rejection, of what he
calls ‘conventional explanations’. One of these, according to the author, is
the assumption that ‘the Germans were in principle opposed ... to a genocidal
program’ (p. 385). Raul Hilberg is depicted as ‘an exemplar of this sort of
thinking’ (p. 385) because he contemplates the question of how the German
bureaucracy overcame its moral scruples (p. 385). After accusing Hilberg of
heresy for assuming that ‘the German bureaucracy naturally had moral scruples’
(p. 383), Goldhagen rejects Hilberg’s analysis on the basis that ‘explanations
proceeding in this manner cannot account for Germans ... volunteering for
killing duty’ (p. 385) – which, of course, misses Hilberg’s point entirely.
Another frequent tactic is the omission of a
sufficient context or other possible evidence that might be contradictory.
Goldhagen mentions celebrations at either the conclusion of large killing
actions, as in Chelmno or in Stanislawo, or at a particular stage in the
extermination programme, as in Lublin after the 50,000th victim had been killed
(at which the ‘Germans’ ‘ take joy, make merry and celebrate their genocide of
the Jews’ (p. 453). He omits to mention that the same parties took place in ‘Euthanasia’
institutions, as in Hadamar, to celebrate the 100,000th corpse (36) or, for
that matter, in Grafeneck also. (37) The victims of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme
were mostly Germans. While this suggests that a possible explanation for this
behaviour is the progressive brutalization of members in mass-killing
institutions, the available evidence [211] does not support Goldhagen’s notion
of ‘the transvaluated world of Germany during the Nazi period [where] ordinary
Germans deemed the killing of Jews to be a beneficent act for humanity’ (pp.
452-3). Goldhagen’s crowning misrepresentation is the description of such a
celebration in Cesis, Latvia: ‘On the occasion of their slaughter of the Jews
of Cesis, the local German security police and members of the German military
assembled to eat and drink at what they dubbed a ‘death banquet’ (38) for the
Jews. During their festivities, the celebrants drank repeated toasts to the
extermination of the Jews’ (p. 453). Goldhagen fails to mention that Latvians
and Germans were sitting down at the same table and that one local Latvian
police officer instigated target practice at Jews in the course of the
festivities. This was viewed with disgust by the German army officers. (39)
[36 ZStL, 439 AR 1261/68, Sonderband 19, S.2878-79,
I.Sch.
37 Ernst Klee, Dokumente zur ‘Euthanasie’ (Frankfurt,
1985), p. 119, ZStL, Anlageband 13 AR 179/65, Vernehmungsprotokolle GStA FFM Js
8/61 u. Js 7/63, G.S.
38 ‘totenmahl’.
39 ZStL, 207 AR-Z 22/70, Sonder bande II, V. L. and
III, R. K.; StA Luebeck 2 Js 394/70.]
Finally, one can even find blatantly false rendering
of original text, as when Goldhagen refers to a verse written by a member of
Police Battalion 9, which was attached to Einsatzkommando 11 a. He states that
this member ‘managed to work into his verse, for the enjoyment of all, a
reference to the “skull-cracking blows”... that they had undoubtedly delivered
with relish to their Jewish victims’ (p. 453). These words, found in a
disgusting and anti-Semitic poem, refer however to ‘the cracking of nuts’. (40)
[40 In German: ‘Fernder (sic) die Juden und
Krimtschaken/verlernen Schnell das Nessknacken’, ZStL, 213 AR 1900/66, DokBd
IV, p. 672-7.]
The creation of the ‘ordinary
German’
‘Ordinary Germans’ is one of the key terms of
Goldhagen’s book. It rests on the shaky empirical foundation of an evaluation
of the social background of members of Police Battalion 101, and on the author’s
conclusion that the backgrounds of these members do not differ significantly
from the social stratification of German society overall. As mentioned in other
instances above, one can question whether this equation is correct since it
ignores the concrete historical and institutional context of the time. The
evidence is not examined by means of comparisons with other units because this
would have yielded quite different results. Instead, Goldhagen simply relies on
the technique of greater and greater generalization to make his point.
This he does by an indiscriminate use of language.
The term ‘ordinary German’ is used everywhere. Concentration camp guards are ‘ordinary
German women’ (p. 365), all perpetrators are ‘ordinary Germans’ (p. 371). It
becomes apparent that there is no sociological or factual meaning in this term.
This is shown to be true in a phrase like: ‘other ordinary Germans in the SS
and the Party’ (p. 178). ‘Ordinary German’ is nothing but an empty label.
The word ‘German’, both as a noun and an adjective,
is used excessively throughout the book. This is entirely in keeping with the
author’s view that the specific traits of German culture are the root cause of
the Holocaust. He states this right at the beginning of his book where he
speaks of perpetrators ‘only in the understood context that these men and women
were Germans first and SS men, policemen and camp guards second’ (p. 7, also p.
6). For Goldhagen, nationality is of the essence. Surprisingly, what is not of
the essence is a person’s actual activity or function. This is evident in the
language he uses: ‘Concentration camp guard’ becomes ‘German guard’ and, then, ‘the
Germans in the camps’ (pp. 306, 307, 371). The actual function of the
perpetrator in the commission of the crime has been eliminated. Only the [212]
nationality remains. It should be noted that this same ‘logic’ is not applied
to every instance. When describing the attacks on Jews in Vienna after the ‘Anschluss’,
Goldhagen uses the term ‘Nazis’, and not ‘Austrians’ (pp. 286-7), for those who
are torturing Jews. By the similarly excessive use of the adjective, for
instance in the phrase ‘German culture of cruelty’ (p. 255), a further step is
taken. It is not German nationals any more who commit cruel acts, but cruelty
itself becomes a German trait. ‘Cruelty’ in the camps is ‘revealing of the
Germans’ state of mind’ (p. 308).
By this method of enlarging the meaning and use of
the word, ‘German’, Goldhagen is able to make the Holocaust a ‘German national
project’ (p. 11). Finally, he combines the two methods. The genocide was
committed by ‘Germans’ with the Germans’ ‘general propensity to violence’ (p.
568, n. 108) and all perpetrators were ‘ordinary Germans’, meaning for the
author ‘Germany’s representative citizens’ (p. 456). He extends the inference
to every other German: ‘the conclusion drawn about the overall character of the
members’ actions (42) can, indeed must be, generalized to the German people as
a whole. What these ordinary Germans did also could have been expected of other
ordinary Germans’ (p. 402).
Imagination
Goldhagen argues that a full picture of the normal
lives of the perpetrators is needed to understand them fully, that they should
be shown in every facet of their existence. Only such a ‘thick’, ‘rather than
the customary paper-thin description’ (p. 7) can explain their actions. One can
only agree with this approach. Certainly, a more detailed and extensive
description of perpetrators and, in particular, their mind-set at the time of
committing their crimes than can be found in available historical literature
would be of the greatest interest. Goldhagen claims to achieve what all
previous studies have failed to do, namely, to integrate ‘the micro, meso and
macro levels’ of the individual with the ‘institutional and social context’ (p.
266).
For this purpose, Goldhagen examines a number of ‘Daily
Orders’ [Tagesbefehle] issued by the Commander of the Order Police in Lublin in
the years from 1942 to 1944, which are housed in the archives of the ‘Central
Agency’. These ‘Daily Orders’ communicate everyday events, like guard duties,
sports events or movies or whatever the commander wants to be made public.
Around the fifteen orders he selected, Goldhagen weaves a web of fantasies
about the ‘more conventional type of German cultural life’ after the ‘slaughtering
[of] unarmed Jews by the thousands’ (p. 263). He speculates on such questions
as ‘... how many of the killers discussed their genocidal activities... when
they went at night to their wives and girlfriends...’ (p. 268), or as to ‘whether
they might have seen the irony in the title of a play “Man Without Heart”‘ (p.
270).
Goldhagen has not one shred of a fact to rely on
here. Everything is written in the ‘if’ style used in bad historical novels.
This is not true historical research.
The reason for the paucity of scholarly writing on
the ‘thick lives’ of perpetrators, is not due to the lack of interest on the
part of historians. Rather, it is a result of the fact that there is hardly any
material available on which to base a study. Occasional finds in investigative
files, for example, are so few and far between that the methodical research
required would exceed the capacity of any researcher. Ordinarily, scholars
accept the limitations that are imposed on them by the sources.
X
[213] Goldhagen started out his book with some
fundamentally disturbing questions: Why do we believe that Germans are like us?
Why do we believe Germany was ‘a normal society ... similar to our own’ (p.
15)? Why assume the ‘normalcy of the German people’ (p. 31)? These remarks are
made without any qualifiers as to a specific historical period. Goldhagen’s
recommendation is not to assume, but to review the Germans ‘with the critical
eye of an anthropologist’ (p. 15), as if studying a foreign species.
Goldhagen’s book abounds with examples of his
particular image of ‘the Germans’. Suffice it to cite only a few here: the
German is ‘generally brutal and murderous in the use of other peoples’ (p.
315), and is a ‘member of an extraordinary, lethal political culture’ (p. 456)
whose cruelties stand out ‘in the long annals of human barbarism’ (p. 386).
Similar expressions, as graphic as those cited, can be found on almost every
page of the book, confirming Goldhagen’s image of the counter-species his
anthropological view has detected. Goldhagen’s book is based on his Ph.D
dissertation. Would someone receive a Ph.D. at Harvard who begins by posing the
question whether blacks or women are human beings like ‘us’?
While the reader is not left in any doubt about ‘the
Germans’, the more interesting question remains: Who are the normal ‘we’
referred to by Goldhagen in his book? The author never clarifies this
explicitly. Instead the author offers his views on how people should normally
react and hence how far outside normal human behaviour the perpetrators were.
Normal people ‘regard and respect’ elders (p. 189), feel ‘sympathy’, pity (p.
357) and the ‘instincts of nurturance’ (p. 201) towards sick people, towards
undernourished people, towards people lying in an exhausted condition on the
street. ‘After all, there is usually a natural flow of sympathy for people who
suffer great wrongs’ (p. 441).
Goldhagen’s concept of ‘natural’ human behaviour is
striking. One glance at present day American social realities should be enough
to raise doubt as to whether sick and weak people do necessarily arouse ‘instincts
of nurturance’. He ignores the equally evident human potential for evil and
destructiveness. In a footnote (p. 581, n. 25) Goldhagen addresses this
potential, but sees its acceptance as ‘cynicism’. Hence he must attack any
socio-psychological concepts that involve the allegedly ‘universal
psychological and social psychological factors’ (p. 390, see also p. 409). He
dismisses them as ‘abstract, ahistorical explanations... conceived in a
social-psychological laboratory’ (p. 391, see also p. 389). Milgram’s
experiments on cruelty are brushed aside as providing ‘untenable’ (p. 383)
explanations.
By denying the possibility that the crimes committed
during the Holocaust are within the scope of human behaviour, he places these
crimes and its perpetrators outside the realm of human possibility open to
others. Only the Germans could have behaved the way they did; nobody else.
Their behaviour is ‘unfathomable’ and outside of ‘our’ world. As a consequence,
it cannot be repeated by someone else. The Holocaust is reduced to a specific
historical event, outside of ‘our’ world, separated from ‘us’.
The same can be said of Goldhagen’s description of
anti-Semitism. He insists that it is divorced from any real historical or
social framework. On this basis, he rejects explanations which equate economics
or ‘scapegoat strategies’ with motives (pp. 39, 44). In his view, anti-Semitism
is divorced from reality; it is irrational, wild, and hallucinatory. It is
outside of the context of human interaction, and outside the context of human
reason. He argues that there is a ‘generally constant anti-Semitism becoming
[214] more or less manifest’ (p. 39) so that the observation of the decrease ...
of anti-Semitism is not accurate. It represents a ‘diminution of anti-Semitic
vituperation’ (p. 43) not ‘a decrease in anti-Semitic belief and feeling’ (p.
43), only ‘a differential expression’ thereof (p. 43); a true observation and
appraisal of reality has become impossible.
The insistence with which Goldhagen promotes this
theory – the word ‘must’ is in constant use (see pp. 392ff.) – shows the
centrality of his argument. Anti-Semitism is a demonological, hallucinatory
force, out of the reach of ordinary perception. Germans’ crimes are outside the
realm of human behaviour. This extreme polarization has its consequences. In
juxtaposition with the enormity of the injustice done to the Jews, other events
take on a much more benign aspect. Jews are slaughtered while non-Jews are
killed (p. 195). Non-Jews in concentration camps live ‘a life of comparative
luxury’ (p. 343) and enjoy ‘shocking longevity’ (p. 340). This is jarring.
Worse still is when wider comparisons are drawn. In Soviet Gulags, the ‘cruelty
of the guards did not even begin to approach that which the Germans inflicted
on the Jews’ (p. 587, n. 91). Goldhagen presumes to claim that other genocides
were actually supported by rational motivation, including the Armenian genocide
and the genocide between the Hutus and the Tutsis (p. 412, n. 86, p. 587).
In Goldhagen’s view, the Holocaust is both separated
from what is considered normal human behaviour and also demonstrates, from the
perspective of today, an historical terminableness. Goldhagen’s ‘we’ could not
have commuted the indignities of the Holocaust, but even ‘the Germans’ suddenly
and drastically changed after the war. Here, Goldhagen’s argumentation takes on
almost farcical proportions. After drawing the sinister picture of a nation
that for centuries was in the grip of ‘demonological, hallucinatory
anti-Semitism’, of a people impregnated with vicious notions of Jews, the idea
of such a sudden behavioural change is unrealistic. The change is due,
according to him, to American re-education efforts – the only time any
historian has attributed real influence to this programme (pp. 593, n. 53, 582,
n. 38) Anybody who knows anything about the real Germany is aware, of course,
that the reverse is true. Although Goldhagen’s argument is illogical, its
function is clear; the Holocaust is now firmly outside the realm of ordinary
people’s actions and it is over historically. The Holocaust is sanitized.
XI
One of the most striking features of this book is the
very broad, narrative style with which events are recounted. Goldhagen states
what his intention in having adopted this style was ‘to eschew the clinical
approach’ (p. 22). We should ‘describe for ourselves every gruesome image’ (p.
22) in order to better understand the reality of the Holocaust. In accordance
with this, the author fills page after page with graphic descriptions of
gruesome events during mass-murder actions and in camps.
Whether this is really the role of a scholar is
doubtful. After all, there is an extensive collection of survivors’ memoirs and
testimonies, in which we can hear the voice of the victims themselves. In the
approach Goldhagen advocates, the historian takes on the position of an
intermediary who is nominally interpreting sources. We hear his voice,
retelling the events in the light of his own imagination.
More than fifty years have passed since the end of
the Second World War. The ranks of Holocaust survivors are getting thinner.
More and more, the Holocaust is moving into the realm of interpreters, be they
scholars or artists, or simply anyone making use of the lessons history
teaches. This transition brings with it an obligation. We, i.e. [215] people
without acute personal involvement – be it as members of the second or third
generation – have to resist both the temptation to assume the voice of
survivors and the moral authority that goes with it. The Holocaust is the one
event with the greatest morally explosive force in the Western world. But its
meaning is being diminished by constant trivialization. Everyone can observe
daily, for himself or herself, how the terms of reference of the Holocaust are morally
abused in political and public life; every abortion clinic is called an
Auschwitz. In no way can this process be stopped. The community of Holocaust
scholars, however, is under a special obligation to counter the ongoing process
of trivialization by scrupulously differentiating between oneself and one’s
position as a researcher and the object of one’s studies, thereby preserving
and protecting the meaning of the Holocaust.
Goldhagen’s book is not a revision of everything that
has been written in fifty years on the Holocaust. A solidly researched work on
any of the topics he touches – for instance, on the involvement of the Order
Police in the Holocaust – would have been most welcome. As it stands, this book
only caters to those who want simplistic answers to difficult questions, to
those who seek the security of prejudices.
Why then review the book at such length? It was
promoted aggressively in the mass media, well before it was published and any
historian had had a chance to read it. There is no limit to what a professional
American marketing strategy can achieve, but to date, hardly any inroads into
academia have been made by this book. Its marketing presents a challenge to the
scholarly community. When the historical agenda can be dictated by advertising
and marketing, professional historians must respond.
The discourse among scholars, as it has evolved over
the centuries, respects certain rules: arguments count, not the people pushing
them. One discusses the factual value of arguments and does not defame their
authors. These rules are well worth defending. One can learn from a time when
Einstein’s theories, for example, were rejected, not because of the arguments
themselves but because their proponent represented ‘Jewish physics’. So far,
all of the experts in the area of the Holocaust, regardless of their personal
background, have been unanimous in severely criticizing Goldhagen’s book. That
this is the case, fifty years after the fact, and on such a highly emotional
and complex subject, is a very hopeful sign.
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