Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

Daniel Goldhagen
634pp
Vintage: 1996
$18

Holocaust literature, of course, presents a number of problems. What should one hope to learn from the study? It is entirely unclear whether we should try to "understand" the thinking of the most ardent perpetrators. There may also be the danger of falling into a kind of thrilled fascination with the horror of it all, a possibility sometimes described as pornographic obsession. But surely the victims have earned a right for their voices to be heard. And there is an argument to be made that we today have inherited some obligation to examine the mechanisms and social psychology and politics of that murderous industry, it being our duty to ensure no such events occur again.

The subtitle "Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" suggests that Goldhagen's book may provide useful insights here. And the book begins very promisingly, with the story of a police battalion commander who indignantly refused to ask his company to sign a pledge not to steal from the local Poles, on the grounds that the request insulted the honor of the moral men under his command -- the irony being that the commander and his men were perfectly willing to engage in genocidal actions. The story illustrates a well-known moral inconsistency of many holocaust perpetrators, and perhaps more importantly points to their self-righteousness, suggesting that the following text will shed some important light on that dreadful time

Unfortunately, the promise is not fulfilled: a surprising amount of the text is merely polemical. Goldhagen's thesis can be summarized simply: the holocaust was the work of ordinary Germans, and they were motivated by a long-ingrained cultural anti-Semitism. There is, of course, some truth to both of these assertions. The industrial scale extermination operations required enormous coordination and quite substantial numbers of collaborators. Nor is there any question that a widespread rabid anti-Semitism was involved.

But Goldhagen's polemic obscures important features of the catastrophe, and the heavy ratio of polemic to evidence prevents the exposure of important and informative detail. Having stated his simple thesis, Goldhagen defends it by arguing against adding to it any social psychological or political mechanisms that might have contributed to the catastrophe. Goldhagen does not believe than anyone was coerced into cooperating with the extermination, nor does he believe that (say) the Milgram experiment can shed any light on those times. He dismisses such possibilities almost by rhetoric alone, as if convinced that they are only ever mentioned to exonerate the perpetrators

In the service of his simple thesis, Goldhagen first fails to examine the history of German anti-Semitism, a story not as clear over the centuries as Goldhagen's portrayal might suggest. Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933 (Picador: 2002) might be a useful antidote here. More importantly, Goldhagen appears to have little or no understanding of the sudden changes that occurred after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933: political opposition was banned; opponents disappeared overnight into concentration camps; the Hitler salute soon became mandatory. With the Nazis in control of all the organs of modern propaganda -- radio, cinema, newspapers -- those who refused to subscribe to the totalization were isolated and very often brutally intimidated, while the Nazis engaged in political and propaganda maneuvers intended to win hearts and minds

The resulting moral collapse is likely to have taken many forms. Many people do not like to make waves and so avoid moral controversies, even when they know better. Here, for example, is a story from the American South in the early civil rights era, told by a very civilized professor at Harvard Medical School:

Many people do what they're told, or do what they believe is expected of them, especially if consequences such as job loss loom if they fail to obey: in the Nazi era, there were a number of frightened Germans who made their hearts small and kept their heads down, deciding not to notice exactly what was happening around them or what "service" their jobs might actually render to the Reich

Goldhagen misses all of this and more. His dedication to his simple thesis, and his unwillingness to look in closer detail at the complexities, unfortunately produce a book from which we can learn almost nothing practical about how to ensure that this never happens again