No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

The Bad Germans

In 1994, the American Political Science Association awarded Daniel Jonah Goldhagen an award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. Two years later, when Goldhagen expanded his Harvard dissertation into a 600-page book, the dominant reaction from scholars seemed to be, “What were Harvard and the A.P.S.A. thinking?” From book reviews to symposia to books about the book, critics reprehended Goldhagen’s tome as hyperbolic and racist pseudoscholarship, by the young son of a Harvard professor out to make a name for himself.

Indeed, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Knopf, 1996) polarizes much of a half-century of research and study on the extermination of European Jewry during the Nazi era. Goldhagen largely dismisses the conclusions of several generations of eminent scholars, and proclaims their interpretations “deficient” (8), “marred by a poor understanding and undertheorizing” (7), or marked by “grave error” (14).[1] As passionately as he disdains qualifications and subtleties, Goldhagen repeatedly asserts his originality. What, then, does he have to say, and does his work, as his publisher declares on the book’s front flap, “radically transform[] our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period”?

Hitler’s Willing Executioners rests on the conviction that a unique mindset peculiar to the German people, embedded in the very fabric of German society and culture, made possible the murder of six million Jews. Anti-Semitism, in this view, is the sole necessary and sufficient cause explaining the Holocaust, for the quality and capacity of ordinary Germans to become genocidal killers existed long before the Nazis seized power; Hitler and his gang had only to tickle a “disastrous potentiality” lying dormant within the German soul (15). In this way, the Jew as a foil and the enemy was always the glue amalgamating the Nazis’ contradictory and ambiguous ideology,

What made German anti-Semitism unique? Goldhagen argues that the Germans carried the Christian anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages continuously to the nineteenth century, mixed it with social Darwinism and the concept of “race” to make it appear “scientific,” and transmitted this national phobia to the twentieth century. Anti-Semitism thus defined what it meant to be German, and so Germans sought to amputate the Jewish presence from the fatherland. Such “eliminationist” anti-Semitism became the Germans’ “common sense” (77) and their normal way of thinking, what Goldhagen terms their “cognitive model” (46). To then mobilize people from eliminationist to “exterminationist” anti-Semitism was the logical, easy part. Inverting Voltaire’s observation, people who commit atrocities believe absurdities.

* * *

In any work of huge, bold, and categoric declarations, we should heed punctiliously the author’s evidence. Goldhagen catalogues his into 150 pages of endnotes and appendices (though, curiously, he omits a bibliography). Yet by his own admission, the evidence is scant and suspect. “Contemporary documents which illuminate in sufficient detail the perpetrators’ actions, or anything at all about their motivations, barely exist.” Regarding the Police Battalions, the work camps, and the death marches, “virtually no contemporary documents of any kind have survived. Therefore, the primary material for this study has been drawn mainly from materials amassed during the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar legal investigations of Nazi crimes” (466). And yet these investigations are themselves problematic. The “testimony [of the perpetrators] is replete with omissions, half-truths, and lies.” With the exception of lies, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, as a whole, suffers from similar one-sidedness.

One byproduct of one-sidedness is overselectivity. Indeed, it appears that Hitler and the Nazi leadership were less confident in the ubiquity of eliminationist and exterminationist anti-Semitism in their country than Goldhagen is certain of it. For instance, in the decisive campaigns from 1930 to 1932, which brought the breakthrough of the N.S.D.A.P. as a party of the masses, anti-Semitic agitation proved to be counterproductive, and so the Nazis’ campaigns deliberately deemphasized it. To be sure, once in power the Nazis milked anti-Semitism; but anti-Semitism failed to sweep Hitler into office. Likewise, the Nazis’ propaganda machinery and surveillance organizations took many precautionary measures to keep the Holocaust secret and to monitor the people and their attitudes. Indeed, the Gespato doubted that the Germans would think “correctly” about the Final Solution.

For further overselectivity, consider Goldhagen’s brief discussion of the first nationally organized boycott of Jewish businesses and professional people, on April 1, 1933. After acknowledging the recollection of one person “that a few Germans defiantly expressed their solidarity with the beleaguered Jews,” Goldhagen ties the “general attitude of the public” to an incident also cited by a sole observer: a German woman, accompanied by two uninformed Nazis, returned goods she had purchased earlier to a chemist because she did not know he was a Jew (90). But there is another side to the story, which Goldhagen omits. The Nazis initially planned the boycott for a week, but for several reasons—including lack of public support—Hitler limited it to one day. For Goldhagen, however, the boycott expressed the collective will of the Volk.

Another byproduct of one-sidedness is overgeneralizing. Consider Police Battalion 101, one of Goldhagen’s three focuses. From N.S.D.A.P. and S.S. files and the Berlin Document Center, Goldhagen establishes the ages of 517 members, the occupations of 291, and the martial status of 96. The only other specific information he is able to glean is that 179 were party members and 21 were S.S. members. On the strength of these data, which he admits are “scanty, so only a partial portrait of the battalion can be drawn” (206), Goldhagen not only draws a profile of the “overall character” of the battalion, but also projects that profile onto the entire German populace (402).

But we know nothing of the educational backgrounds of these men, their religious affiliations, their income, their memberships in social clubs, their political views or any of a dozen other pieces of biological information requisite for a representative profile. Seemingly, Goldhagen agrees, observing that the weekly Regimental Orders covering health, recreational, social and other matters, from which he draws extended conclusions about the “fullness” of the lives the battalion members led, are “paltry in volume and variety in comparison to the reality of the stream of Germans’ daily actions while on duty or at leisure” (266). Apparently, however, these data about 550 Germans are not so paltry as to deter Goldhagen from equating them to the views, attitudes, motives, and biases of some 80 million of their countrymen.

Why such extravagant overgeneralizing? As an out-and-out intentionalist, Goldhagen argues that Germany was a “qualitatively unique” nation-state pursuing a special path (Sonderweg). As such, however else they differed in education, religion, class and politics, all Germans shared one characteristic—a worldview Goldhagen labels “eliminationist” anti-Semitism. Whereas in 1992, historian Christopher Browning acknowledged that unique pomp and circumstances facilitated the evil of Ordinary Men, Goldhagen prefers overwhelming dependence on a single cause, which facilitated the evil of Ordinary Germans. “Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews . . . induced ordinary Germans to kill . . . systematically and without pity” (9).

For instance, owing to the elderliness of its members, Police Battalion 101 was sparred massive indoctrination. But Goldhagen argues that because these reservists had so internalized eliminationist anti-Semitism, even though they were given ample opportunity to forgo killing, and to do so without punishment, they mass murdered with pride and “for pleasure” (451). And they tortured their victims—innocent children and adolescents, defenseless mothers and fathers, harmless grandmothers and grandfathers—beforehand, not as sadists, but as Germans.

* * *

Arguing against those who believe everything the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand said is Truth, social theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarked: “Serious scholars use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon.”[2] As such, a theory of responsibility—especially one that seeks to criminate an entire nation-state—must be contextual; it must (1) probe all credible explanations, (2) draw distinctions among different types and degrees of guilt, and (3) compare itself to the most similar cases.

Goldhagen scorns all this as “moral alibis” (383), but we may use his words to question his theory. One explanation is that of coercion; “[p]ut a gun to anyone’s head . . . and he will shoot others to save himself” (11). A second explanation holds the Germans were just “following orders,” the “result of Hitler’s charisma,” or “because of a particularly German reverence for and propensity to obey authority” (12). Third, the perpetrators were subject to “tremendous social psychological pressure” (12). Fourth, the perpetrators were “petty bureaucrats, or soulless technocrats,” who were advancing their careers (12). Fifth, “because the tasks were so fragmented, [and] the perpetrators could not understand what the real nature of their action was; they could not comprehend that their small assignments were actually part of a global extermination program” (12).

To Goldhagen, these explanations absolve the perpetrators of accountability; they treat them “as if they had been people lacking a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances. They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant psychological propensities” (13). No account of the Holocaust is therefore plausible without an appreciation that the vast majority of Germans believed killing Jews was just. Moreover, if the perpetrators did not act from ideology alone, why did they continue to murder the Jews when they could have exploited them for labor as it became clear Germany would lose the war? Absent significant evidence of moral outrage or public dissent, should we not hold the Germans guilty for the Holocaust?

While Goldhagen’s case for the affirmative is persuasive, I, and I suspect he, have never seen firsthand anyone executed on the whim of a police officer, and with the sanction of the state. I have always been free to express my political views, however radical and opposed to state policy they are. The only peer pressure my melting-pot country has exerted on me is to garb myself in name brands. I have also never lived hand-to-mouth. In short, my life has always been very safe—which makes me uncomfortable in describing a totalitarian Germany and then blaming its citizens for not behaving as though they lived in a democratic America. Why did the Volk not rise up? Because, as the essayist Clive James writes, “you had to be a hero to do so.”

Still, as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. That the executioners acted, in one way or another, out of volition is indisputable; only an individual can pull a trigger. That they “did not want to say ‘no’” (13) is disputable. After all, twelve years of an exceptionally sophisticated system of state-run propaganda dehumanizing der Jude and six years of world wartime brutalization is not circumstantial, but necessary to make men monsters. Material interests, as always, also had their role. As Hans Mommsen, Professor of Archaeological Science at the Rheini Friedrich William University Bonn, notes: “Many of the avowed executioners like Adolf Eichmann and Theodor Dannecker first became reckless and fanatical anti-Semites in the course of their careers in the S.S., which let them forget an unfavorable vocational situation in civil life.”

We also cannot disentangle the Holocaust from the extraordinarily complex historical conditions in which it evolved—what Professor Roland Wagner has called “a multivariate nexus of factors operative at a unique juncture of German history.” Wagner cites the following: Germany’s defeat in World War One, the punitiveness of the Versailles treaty; French postbellum ambitions for territorial acquisitions; Germany’s wounded national pride; the Great Depression and political collapse, social turmoil, and economic ruination of the middle class; polarization between the extreme Left and the Right; fear of rampant Communism looming from the East; the association of the Jews with Bolshevism in the popular mind; the vulnerability of a population to seek scapegoats during periods of rapid social change; and, yes, a widespread historical tradition of anti-Semitism throughout Europe. To marginalize the above in toto decontextualizes a crucible in which context is crucial.

Furthermore, by Goldhagen’s own account, eliminationist anti-Semitism included two courses. Whereas some Germans sought to kill the Jews (genocide), others were content with limiting or denying them rights (discrimination). Contrary to the Nazis’ conception of the Volksgemeinschaft, the German people were not a monolith; like any “ism,” anti-Semitism comes in varying intensities. But Goldhagen, as Clive James puts it, “wants all the grades of anti-Semitism, from the enthusiasm of nutty pamphleteers down to the mild distaste of the Kleinbürgertum at their dinner tables, to add up to just one thing: the eliminationist fervor that led to extermination as soon as it got its chance.”

We should similarly distinguish between “Germans,” people of German descent, and “the Germans,” a whole people. For not even a “vast majority” of Germans wholeheartedly, or even actively, supported the Holocaust. Yet by attacking such a caricature, Goldhagen commits the fallacies of undifferentially upholding the most iniquitous or vocal Germans, and then reifying them as the whole. In this way, he blames the Holocaust, not on the Nazi regime, but on the German national character. Given this focus, although Goldhagen never expressly uses the term, “Germans” well assumes a “collective-guilt” dimension.

But, in fact, while this is a book about “willing executioners,” if we ask the most immediate question—how many such people were there in the Third Reich?—Goldhagen alternates among “tens of thousands” (4, 24), “hundreds of thousands” (8, 166), “over 100,000” (167), “500,000 or more” (167), and the millions (167). Ultimately, just as the number of anti-Semitic Germans “cannot be ascertained” (75), the number of executioners is “unknown” (11).

Finally, Goldhagen asserts that it “strains credibility” to think “ordinary Danes or Italians” could have been Hitler’s willing executioners (408). This of course ignores that ordinary Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles and Ukrainians were just that—and sometimes much more, informing on concealed Jews and slaughtering them in lockstep with the Nazis. Goldhagen dismisses a comparative approach, both with other countries and with other genocides. This sore thumb of such a scholarly staple makes Hitler’s Willing Executioners methodologically unsound.

This is unfortunate because, overall, Goldhagen’s book is a welcome addition to Holocaust studies. Though it does not “radically transform[] our understanding,” it solidifies it. How? In response to the Allies’ refusal to check the Holocaust—to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, to accept European Jews fleeing by boat—the Jews coined a motto: “Never forget.” Above all, Goldhagen deserves credit for keeping my generation, whose closest idea to genocide, horrible as it was, is 3,000 New Yorkers instantaneously killed in less than two hours, alive to the horror that Jews call the Shoah, and through his vivid descriptions for reminding us never to forget those years of infamy. The author also deserves credit for reinvigorating the intentionalist-functionalist debate, and for his courage in retackling and embracing the provocative former.

* * *

The history of Hitler, the historian Michael Stürmer wrote, is largely the history of how mankind has underestimated him. Hitler himself recognized this, when in 1939, before invading Poland, he told his commanding officers, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” [1] Indeed, studying the Third Reich has convinced me of the thin patina of civilization, that wretched circumstances can unleash “The horror! The horror!” in even the most civilized of human beings. To this end, Goldhagen has shown that murderous anti-Semitism was far more prevalent among the German people than we may want to believe. (His book would have fared far better with this thesis, instead of criminating what historian Alfred Kelly calls “the bad Germans.”) As the philosopher Richard Rorty has said, someday, someone will write the book exonerating Hitler. Someday, there might even be another Shoah, of Israelis. Most of us trust that neither will ever occur, but after reading Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I will not be altogether astounded if they do.

Footnotes

[1] Similarly, according to a tape captured by rebels, and later obtained by Human Rights Watch, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who led the Iraqi campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, told members of Iraq’s ruling Baath Party: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!”