Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Alfred A. Knopf, 1996
619 pp., $30.00
ISBN 0-679-44695-8
This book is a bit of a rant. It is a good rant, an expanded doctoral dissertation by a young professor of political science at Harvard. The book exemplifies how creative writing that is bolstered by 125 pages of footnotes can be put to telling effect. Certainly you are likely to learn a great deal from it that you might not already know, principally about the gruesome tactics of the Holocaust. It also makes short work of some of the academic nonsense on the subject that has become fashionable in recent years, such as the hypothesis that the Jewish communities of Europe were killed by an accidental confluence of local initiative and administrative negligence. It proves to any reasonable judge that the extermination of the Jews was an act of high policy by the German government during the Nazi era. It also shows that the government's public antisemitic measures were not unpopular and that ordinary Germans did not need to be coerced to carry out the Holocaust itself. What the book does not prove is its thesis, which is that "eliminationist antisemitism" was a long-standing peculiarity of German culture to which the Nazi regime simply gave free rein.
In this long and important book, Goldhagen directly addresses the point he is trying to make only twice, both times very briefly. On page 71, he cites a survey of German antisemitic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century in which nineteen authors were reported to have proposed the physical elimination of the Jews. This, as far as I can tell, is his direct evidence for the existence of widespread eliminationist antisemitism in German culture before the Nazis came to power. On page 419, we are told that "It is precisely because antisemitism alone did not produce the Holocaust that it is not essential to establish the differences between antisemitism in Germany and elsewhere." He then goes on to argue that we may, however, safely assume that German antisemitism was in fact peculiar. These two passages (with some paraphrases elsewhere in the book, since he is rarely content to make a point only once) really are the only direct arguments for his thesis.
Goldhagen is aware of the lack of direct evidence: he seeks to prove his thesis by indirection. The procedure is rather like proving the existence of an invisible planet by noting perturbations in the motions of celestial objects that you can see. The author's argument is that people do not commit collective mass murder unless they are very strongly motivated, whether by fear of punishment for refusing to participate, or by hatred for the victims. He therefore believes that, if he can show the participants were not coerced into the killing, then he has proven they must have been acting out of hatred. If he can further show that they had not been ideologically brainwashed by the Nazis, then he believes he will have demonstrated that they must have brought their hatred with them from the larger German culture. Thus, by its effects, he will have proven the existence of widespread German enthusiasm for killing the Jews, despite the paucity of direct evidence for this enthusiasm outside the circle of the leading Nazis.
The physical perpetrators of the Holocaust were not for the most part fanatical SS men or soldiers chosen for their special devotion to Nazi ideology. In large part, neither was the Holocaust a semi-industrialized process in which the victims were delivered to camps, gassed and incinerated. On the order of a million of the Jews of Poland were killed by the systematic reduction of the ghettos of that country. Many victims were shipped to camps to be gassed or worked to death in a few weeks, but Goldhagen is principally concerned with the massacres that were done on-site. This was a labor intensive process. A typical action might go like this. German troops would surround a village before dawn. At first light they would roust the Jews from their homes and assemble them in the village square. Then they would form them into a column or small groups and march them off to a place of execution, often a pit the victims had to dig themselves. The Germans (or their Slavic auxiliaries) shot them one-by-one, in the back of the neck, so that the perpetrators got blood and brains splattered all over them. Then the pit was filled in. The author dwells on the details of the killings to emphasize the fact they were viscerally disgusting, something that no one would do without a strong motive.
In Poland, at least, the men who did these things were generally civilian German police, called up as army reservists for occupation duty and serving in special units. (The factual history of one of these units is detailed in Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" (1992); Goldhagen's book is largely a critique of Browning's analysis.) The members of these units were older than the typical recruits, commonly married men with children. For the most part they were without strong political interests or affiliations. The ideological training they were given was lackadaisical. Goldhagen provides strong anecdotal evidence that Himmler's order that no German be coerced into taking part in the extermination campaign was respected. According to testimonies later given by these men, their officers repeatedly gave them the option to abstain from killing in any given operation. Some few exercised the option and served in support roles. Some transferred out. No soldier, it seems, anywhere in the Nazi empire, was ever punished for failing to kill Jews. Nevertheless, almost every soldier who was asked to kill civilians in this way did so.
Killing was not the only evidence of their enthusiasm. The policemen were cruel. They made old men perform antics before they shot them. They beat prisoners to death without reason. When Jews could not be taken unawares in their beds, they hunted them through the forests with great ingenuity and persistence. They did these things even when no officer was looking, wholly on their own initiative.
What was true of the policemen was true of almost all of the randomly-selected people who actually committed most of the Holocaust. The author gives an account of one of the death marches out of the concentration camps the Germans conducted as the Allied armies approached. The march in question began at a minor work camp in southeastern Germany for women of various ethnic groups. It straggled to an exhausted end on the Austro-Czech border. The guards, both men and women, soon lost touch with their superiors. The prisoners who were not Jews were let go or left off at various points on the route. The guards starved the remaining Jewish prisoners, as they had in the camp, despite the offers of food by sympathetic peasants. Many prisoners were shot even after it became known that Himmler had ordered the killing of the Jews to cease. All of this happened when the Germans had clearly lost the war, when the guards knew they could soon be held responsible for the mistreatment of prisoners, and when no one was making them do these things. Certainly this behavior is evidence of internalized malice on the part of Germans of unremarkable background. Unfortunately for Goldhagen's thesis, his "thick" description of these harrowing events gets us no closer to an understanding of the motivation of the perpetrators.
The problem with Goldhagen's hypothesis of eliminationist antisemitism as an ingrained element of German culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that it is clearly false. The monster to which he seeks to draw our attention simply is not there. You cannot draw the inference from the literature, the art or the politics of those years that the "common sense" of the people was that the Jews ought to be driven out or killed. Jews in the German-speaking lands experienced the era from the Napoleonic Wars to the rise of Hitler as a time of fairly steady progress in attaining civil liberties and full participation in social and economic life. Progress in this direction was, of course, far greater in Germany than in the lands to the east of it. People who lived in German Europe had no good reason to expect these trends to be reversed. The Jews of Germany were surprised by the success of the Nazi movement. I do not think this happened because they were inattentive.
What was the "common sense" about the Jews in Germany and Austria in the century before the Nazis? Well, there was a great deal of immemorial religiously-based antisemitism for one thing, though probably rather less than was to be found farther east. While antisemitism has not been part of the systematic theology of any period, it has often been a feature of the folk culture of Christian countries, so that Jews in late medieval and early modern times joined witches and heretics as bogeymen in the popular imagination of many areas. Goldhagen has seized on the notion that Christianity is inherently antisemitic and he clings to it for dear life. If nothing else, the conviction provides him with a logical introduction to his extensive treatment of the appalling record of the churches in Germany during the Nazi period. The history is worth repeating, of course. The Catholic Church on the whole did pretty poorly, sometimes failing to defend even Jewish converts from ostracism in their own parishes. Some evangelical churches did even worse, actually promulgating the doctrine that Jews could not be saved by baptism. Still, distressing as these attitudes may be, they were pretty clearly effects rather than causes of Nazi policy.
As Goldhagen acknowledges, religious antisemitism is different in kind from the biological antisemitism that began to appear in the nineteenth century. Religious antisemitism meant everyday discrimination but rarely posed a physical threat. Even then, the options of flight or conversion were usually available. The new antisemitism that grew up in the century of Darwin, on the other hand, was an antisemitism of the body rather than the soul. It was a species of racist essentialism. If being a Jew was bad, there was no cure; the problem was not what you believed or even what you did; it was what you were. Systematic theories of this sort did in fact proliferate throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but then so did a lot of other odd ideas, from anarchism to homeopathy. Some of them even became well-known. That is far from saying that any of them became features of German culture. There is a great gulf between "common knowledge," the things that everyone has heard of, and "common sense," things that everyone assumes to be true. While there has always been a great deal of xenophobia of various kinds, there have never been many systematic racists of any description. True ideologues are rare animals. However, as we will soon see, this is not to say that those few were therefore negligible.
There was, of course, the Jewish Question. Goldhagen has to assume, without proving or even seriously arguing the point, that the "Judenfrage," the "Jewish Question" or "Jewish Problem" of which so many Germans spoke a hundred years ago, is coincident with the notion of eliminationist antisemitism. The Jewish Question has many origins, but we should recall that in the later nineteenth century it was in large part an immigration question, particularly in the German-speaking parts of the Hapsburg lands. The immigration of Jews from what today is Poland generated alarm and hostility in Austria and Germany, to some extent even among the highly assimilated Jewish communities in those countries. More generally, in an era in which every "people" was supposed to have its own "nation state," an ethnic group with no country of its own was bound to appear as more and more of an anomaly. Zionism was itself an expression of the "Jewish Question," in the sense of being a response to the perception that the Jewish people were in inescapable tension with the societies in which they lived.
This is not to say that the Jewish Question was unrelated to systematic antisemitism. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Kaiser Wilhelm II's favorite philosopher, wrote a formidable and widely-read account of western history ("Foundations of the Nineteenth Century") as the struggle of the transcendent Germanic spirit against the legalistic obscurantism of Judaism and Roman Catholicism. (It was, by the way, one of the features of late nineteenth-century antisemitism that Jerusalem and Rome were supposed to be in cahoots at some deep level.) For Chamberlain, the Jewish Question meant the problem of how German culture could best achieve self-expression. Chamberlain's thought also illustrates how, as Goldhagen notes, the new antisemitism tended to move the Jewish people from a rather peripheral position in the scheme of things to the status of being the source of most of what's wrong with the world. However, it is hard to see how Chamberlain could be considered an "eliminationist" of any description. He did not want the Jews killed, expelled or even disenfranchised. He was a Germanic triumphalist, who felt that the Judeo-Catholic threat had already been defeated. As Goldhagen also notes, the Kaiser would not have stood for violence against the Jews, even as a proposal.
The final point we may note about the Jewish Question is that there was never anything particularly German about it. It had a lively enough incarnation in the United States, not least in the minds of people like Charles Lindbergh or Joseph Kennedy Sr. (In America, too, it was occasioned in large part by immigration.) However, its correlation even with the polite antisemitism of exclusive clubs and the anti-Jewish quotas for university admissions was very imperfect. Goldhagen's assumption that it formed the implicit template for genocide is far from obviously correct.
Eliminationist antisemitism did indeed arise during roughly the period Goldhagen indicates. However, like the Social Darwinism to which it was so closely related, it was not a characteristic feature of German culture. It was far more a phenomenon found among cranks and sects. Goldhagen does not mention any of the antisemitic writers who advocated the physical destruction of the Jews, but I suspect that fairly typical specimens might be Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels and the other mystical Viennese racists whom we know influenced the Nazi leadership. (There are lots of bad books on this subject. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's "The Occult Roots of Nazism" is good, but perhaps James Webb's "The Occult Establishment" is still the most comprehensive treatment.) Such people and their ideas might be politely described as a little on the obscure side. You could find people in Germany who thought like this, even people who were prominent, but there were not very many of them. There was no great advantage to blaming the world's problems on the Jews. Public antisemitism was hardly rare under either the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Weimar Republic, but it did not, for instance, help much in electoral politics. Even the Nazis toned down the antisemitic elements of their program when they saw a practical possibility of electoral victory. Eliminationist antisemitism was important, not as a popular enthusiasm, but as an organizing principle for would-be elites. To paraphrase George Orwell, it was the kind of thing you had to flunk out of college to believe.
And when those would-be elites became actual elites, how did they get the rest of the Germans to kill most of the Jews of Europe for them? Well, they continually shouted the unhumanity of the Jews through every medium of communications between 1933 and the beginning of the Final Solution in 1941. They created an apocalyptic society in which the normal rules of morality did not apply. Then they sent ordinary Germans to destroy a whole people. And the ordinary Germans did it. Perhaps that is the most unnerving lesson of the Holocaust for later generations. It is appalling to think what perfectly sane and pleasant people will do, what you yourself would probably do, if put in a social situation where atrocity is a duty. There has been a lot of psychological research into the willingness of individuals to follow terrible orders. There has been even more into what crowds will do that their individual members will not. Goldhagen dismisses it all as "ahistorical." He shouldn't. It is something we must never forget.