With its ambitious claim to reconceive the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners was in the New York Times bestseller list for 11 weeks. In August, the German edition was published and within a month it had sold 80,000 copies. Daniel Goldhagen sets out to challenge most of the existing literature on the Holocaust by arguing that its driving force was the "eliminationist" anti-Semitic beliefs of ordinary Germans. To the consternation of his scholarly peers, and apparently to the satisfaction of a large reading public, he offers us a Holocaust without politics.
Goldhagen's book has received a huge amount of favourable attention in both the English-speaking world and Germany. When the English edition appeared in April, all of the serious press in Germany carried extensive reviews. In August, when the German edition appeared, Die Zeit published a six-page response by the author to the many commentaries. Der Spiegel made the book its cover story (for the second time) and featured an interview between him and Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the magazine. When Goldhagen visited Germany in September 800 people turned up for a panel discussion in Frankfurt. There were some protests about his portrayal of the average German under Hitler, but the German response to his book has been broadly positive.
Yet the book scarcely deserves such respect. Goldhagen offers a tendentious, if familiar, reading of German history which selectively draws on the existing scholarly literature. He concludes that anti-Semitism was so pervasive in German society and the countervailing currents so feeble that Hitler's historical significance is merely to have lit the touchpaper to a popular hatred waiting to explode. He claims that the documentary record does not even come close to supporting those who argue that there were powerful countercurrents to anti-Semitism. German liberals were really "philosemitic antisemites" who fought for citizenship rights for Jews in order to convert them. Goldhagen asserts that the vast majority of Germans, including members of the resistance, subscribed to the Nazi view of Jews.
In Ordinary Men (1992), the American historian Christopher Browning showed that police battalions-forces recruited from German police departments-played a more significant role in the murder of the Jews than had been previously appreciated. Goldhagen's book contains a detailed and original examination of this group of men. They are crucial to his argument about the susceptibility of ordinary Germans to eliminationist anti-Semitism because, unlike the SS, they are not products of intense ideological indoctrination in Nazi institutions.
Goldhagen and Browning come to different conclusions after examining much of the same materials. This is perfectly normal in historical debate. Suffice it to say that Goldhagen makes a powerful and plausible case to demonstrate what is obvious. When a man holds a gun less than a foot from a child's head before blowing it off, his action is more easily understood by placing it in the context of his anti-Semitic beliefs than by viewing it as the product of the fragmenting division of labour in complex modernity.
Goldhagen's arguments quite properly set out to combat the idea of an impersonal, industrialised mass murder carried out by a ruthless clique. But there is nothing original in it. His stress on the primacy of ideology is in the tradition of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Lucy Dawidowicz's War Against the Jews. Goldhagen takes ideas which have been applied to political elites and extends them to the study of ordinary killers.
But the evidence of radical antiSemitic beliefs among the killers cannot be generalised to all of German society in 1941-45 or backwards into German history to the extent that he has done.
The leading scholars of the Holocaust such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Bracher, Eberhard J??ckel, George Mosse, Leon Poliakov, Peter Pulzer and Fritz Stern view anti-Semitism as one, albeit powerful, current in German history-a necessary but not sufficient cause of the Holocaust. They are interested in the politics which permitted this current to triumph and view German history before Nazism as open to alternatives. They have not retrospectively interpreted German history as suffused by "the infinite longing for the final solution," in Leah Greenfield's phrase. Despite half-hearted qualifications, Goldhagen sees just one-anti-Semitic-continuity in German history.
Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe for almost 2,000 years and led to countless episodes of persecution, yet the Holocaust occurred only once. Anti-Semitism was compatible with coexistence, emancipation, the expansion of citizenship rights for Jews as well as with indifference to their suffering, and a desire to bring it about. Goldhagen does not explain why anti-Semitism of a murderous sort won out in Germany after 1933. If German history had no significant counter-tendencies to anti-Semitism, why was there any effort to establish citizenship rights for Jews in Germany? Why were German Jews spared the agony of the pogroms that descended on Jews in eastern Europe and Russia in the 19th and 20th century? The central argument of the book is not that the killers were anti-Semites-that is rather obvious-but that they were anti-Semites because they were Germans. That begs the question: why did ordinary Germans kill Jews in these times and not earlier? Why are they not still killing them?
When the mass murder of Jews began in 1941, the Nazi regime had been in power for eight years. During that time, the regime had an unbroken record of economic recovery and foreign policy successes. It also had total control over the mass media from which it disgorged anti-Semitic propaganda on a daily basis. However pervasive anti-Semitism had been in German society before 1933, the Nazis used state power vastly to expand its presence in the minds of ordinary Germans.
Being a Nazi in Nazi Germany did become "ordinary," but being a Nazi was not ordinary in the context of German history. Of course, Nazism drew on some powerful continuities in German history. Yet Goldhagen fails to acknowledge the extent to which the Nazis represented an attack on important German political traditions that were present at the end of the Weimar Republic-communist, social democratic and liberal Catholic. Nazism was the dictatorial rule of the radicalised traditions of part of German history and the repression of all those other Germanys which stood in its way. I cannot recall another book about the Holocaust which so radically diminishes the historical specificity and significance of the Nazi regime and its impact on ordinary Germans. Indeed, Goldhagen's focus on the variable of anti-Semitism is so heavy that Hitler and the Nazi regime cease to be necessary conditions for the Holocaust.
To point out these obvious things is not to play down the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic traditions in German history. The failure of Germans to resist the Nazi regime is clear. Yet without recognition of the impact of the Nazi dictatorship on ordinary Germans and of the ability of the Nazi leaders to implement the final solution one has no explanation of the Holocaust.
Conversely, once we take into account both these pre-existing traditions and the power of the Nazi dictatorship, we have a plausible explanation for the existence of the large number of Germans who, between 1941 and 1945, were willing to participate in mass murder. Holocaust scholars have been doing this for many years-and there's the rub. The enormous commercial success of Hitler's Willing Executioners is inseparable from its claim to challenge the existing scholarly literature. Where Goldhagen does break with tradition he leaves us floundering with a de-politicised and ahistorical Holocaust; but much of the time his claims to originality are bogus. For example, scholars have argued for decades that the Holocaust flew in the face of economic rationality. Yet Goldhagen cites only those historians who have minimised the role of anti-Semitism and argued the case for the economic rationality of the Holocaust. Here and elsewhere he refuses to acknowledge that his own view of German history echoes and develops already existing scholarly traditions. This hostility to other scholars, lack of generosity of spirit and excessive claims to originality are perplexing and troubling.
Hitler's willing executioners
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
London: Little, Brown 1996
