Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

It's hard to even sit down to write about such a book on such a subject. Each of us has his own way of dealing with it. Some choose humor, in the face of the total opposite in the activities described. So I can only make my own weak attempt and say that there is one piece of good news in this book. If you look at the last page and think, "Over 600 pages -- how will I ever read all that," the good news is that there are under 500 pages. The last hundred pages are footnotes. I have to credit Goldhagen or his editors as well for that fact that this is the first book I've read where the footnote pages say at the top of each page what pages in the main text they refer to. Useful because you will be flipping to those footnotes often. Why? Because Goldhagen here explains the other side of Germany and the Holocaust. Not another book about the Jews and how they bore, or struggled against, almost completely in vain, against the Nazis. No, rather a book about the Germans - the nation, its people, and their minds and hearts who could get up every morning for an insane two decades to the project of dehumanizing and then eliminating every Jew they could. Why will you want the footnotes? Because every single piece of evidence, every single statement, almost exclusively by Germans who witnessed, or carried out the torture and killing, is given in their own words, their own testimony, and footnoted. Goldhagen totally negates the common understandings about Germans of the century leading up to World War II -- that Hitler and the Nazis made them do it, that only Nazis did it, that they were following orders, and that certain death for themselves was the power behind those orders. In its place, Goldhagen hammers home, with page after page, chapter after chapter, of evidence that German religious history and cultural attitudes towards The Jew -- Der Jude -- made the Germans ready and interested to exterminate the Jews. How non-Nazi Germans -- soldiers and policemen -- were proud of their successes, and wrote home to their wives and girlfriends, sending picture postcards of themselves murdering Jewish men, women, and babies -- either by the hundreds or individually. How police commanders, before killing sessions in recently conquered communities, told their men that anyone who couldn't stomach it could opt out, but very few did. There are hundreds of pages of this evidence, in indvidual Germans' own words; I will just share the edges of one example. Somewhere partway through the chapter on police battalions, at the bottom of a right-hand page, there is a table listing police battalions by number, and how many Jews they killed. This table follows several pages of text about a particular police battalion. The table's appearance is no surprise: the reader needs only one case in detail; the table can then summarize the rest. The table is about 5 rows long, and the numbers range from thousands to, in one case, 100 000. It closes the presentation of evidence that peace

The question is not whether each and every German contributed to the Holocaust. The question is not even whether a 'majority' of Germans contributed to the Holocaust. The point that Goldhagen makes is that a considerable part of the German people willingly and eagerly contributed to the murder of millions of innocent people. The 'name' therefore of Germany and the German people which so many reviewers seem interested in preserving from generalization is irreparably tainted . The ' willing executioners' were a large enough share of the German people to mean that this crime is a central part of the German historical identity. I would even say that this is true were the murderers to be a small minority of the people. And this not because of the ' number of murderers' but because of the number of victims, and the cruelty in which they were murdered. As for the Germans and their relation to the total dehumanization of the Jews. Anyone who wishes to know about the German attitude need only look at any of those films of the Fuhrer's speeches in which he rants and raves against the Jews while the crowd in massive hypnotic cheering shows their total approval of his Hate Doctine. How is it possible to hear a people called the source of Evil of all mankind and not approve their destruction? The German people heard the Hate, they cheered it , they agreed with it, then a good share of them took a willing part in the greatest crime Mankind has ever known.

In one of the most controversial and sensational books published in the last decade, Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen forwards a provocative thesis regarding the culpability of the German people at large for the execution of the Holocaust. In a massively documented, carefully argued, and enormously researched effort that was in fact culled from his doctoral dissertation on the same subject, the author weaves together a stunning indictment of millions of Germans who, through their active participation and willing consent, helped in the achievement of the Nazis' so-called "Final Solution". However, while this is truly a fascinating and often spellbinding argument, in the end Goldhagen fails to sustain the argument with enough evidence to prove the German people were active, willing, and even enthusiastic executioners of its Jewish citizens. This is neither to deny the power of Goldhagen's narrative nor to deny that this is a work of great historical importance, being quite as authoritatively written and documented as it is, and based on the evidence he provides. Nor is it to deny that "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is a titanic work that has fundamentally changed the reading public's perception of both the Holocaust itself and of the German people during the reign of the Nazi regime. However, while there is no denying this or the fact that Goldhagen reaches conclusions that are quite uncompromising and very well substantiated, I believe that ultimately he failed to provide adequate actual evidence that the German people, as racist and as predisposed as they might be toward scapegoating, vilifying, and victimizing the Jews among them, actually were actively aware and consciously and deliberately and voluntarily involved in the systematic murder of the Jewish population in the Holocaust. One of the primary problems that is evident in this work is the fact that most of the European Jews exterminated were in fact not German. So too, the vast majority of the extermination camps were located in other countries, especially in Poland. Moreover, it does not appear that the movement toward the systematic campaign of murder of either the German Jews or their European brethren was as organized or as well thought-through as Goldhagen maintains. Other scholars, many of them Jewish themselves (as is Goldhagen) argue that the Holocaust appears to have evolved from a number of factors, including the lack of coherent and cohesive control over the Nazi bureaucracy, especially in conquered territories. What transpired seems as much the consequence of exigent circumstance (lack of food, potable water, and lack of space to house refugees) as it was the deliberate decision to systematic murder the Jews. This isn't to suggest that the Nazis were intending to spare either the German Jews or the indigenous Jewish population in the conquered areas, but rather that they originally intended to starve and work them to death, in concert with teir general plans to so use all t

What is it about Daniel Goldhagen's book that stirs up such controversy? Could it be that Goldhagen is wrong in his central thesis, or did he get the facts wrong, or is he biased, or does he choose his evidence selectively to prove his point, or did he ignore important other explanations in an obsessive focus on all things German? Or, perhaps, could it be that the controversy stirred up by Goldhagen's book is NOT that he is wrong at all, but that he basically is RIGHT, and that this is deeply disturbing to many people. Because if Goldhagen is right, that means that ORDINARY people (specifically, the Germans in Goldhagen's case, although the way I read Goldhagen, "Hitler's Willing Executioners" really could have been any "ordinary" people, like you and me for instance, and not NECESSARILY Germans) are almost inherently evil (or at least naturally inclined towards hatred and violence towards another race, religion, ethnic group, etc.), and need essentially no encouragement whatsoever (so much for the "few evil leaders" theory, Stanley Milgram's "obedience experiment," the "banality of evil," etc.) to commit the most despicable, heinous acts against people who never did anything to them, and who pose no tangible (as opposed to psychological) threat to them. That's a disturbing view of human nature - people not only killing, but killing spontaneously, for fun, and even with pride (posing for pictures with the victims, for instance). All because they have projected all their own inadequacies, self-loathing, frustrations, etc. onto another people. This is all very disturbing, yes, and hard to accept (much easier to accept that the Holocaust was the result of a few evil leaders and a coerced or slavishly obedient population), but just because he's hit a raw nerve doesn't mean that Goldhagen's incorrect! So, the important questions here are: 1) does Goldhagen get his facts right; 2) does Goldhagen draw the correct conclusions from his evidence; and 3) how does Goldagen's thesis compare/contrast with other attempts in the literature at explaining the Holocaust?As far as the first question is concerned, while it is certainly possible (if not probable) that Goldhagen has gotten some details wrong, it seems impossible that the vast majority of his facts, which after all come from all kinds of documents (the Nazis were nothing if not meticulous) as well the killers' own words, pictures (often of proud killers and degraded victims), diaries, etc., could possibly be erroneous. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that most of Goldhagen's facts are correct (if somewhat selective) and proceed to the analytical conclusions.The second question (does Goldhagen draw the correct conclusions from his evidence) is probably the crux of the controversy here. Personally, I believe that he does for the most part. Can anyone really deny that Germans were infused with anti-Semitism, combined with other grievances stemming from World War I, and a shaky sense