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124 of 148 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A much-hyped new book on the Holocaust goes too far, November 24, 1996
By A Customer
This review is from: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Hardcover)
Daniel Goldhagen has created a storm in the study of the Holocaust with his new book Hitler's Willing Executioners (based on his PhD research). The furore that the book unleashed was immediate and intense. In a symposium on the book held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Yehuda Bauer dismissed the book, the author and the fact that the research was deemed good enough for a PhD. The book has also raised scholarly eyebrows because the author makes the claim that his version of events is `totally new'.
A.J.P. Taylor once said that in history, the most important duty of the historian is to ask the right questions. Daniel Goldhagen does this even though the academic world has descended upon him. Goldhagen asks how ordinary Germans become perpetrators in the Final Solution. The question, is obviously important, but unfortunately what Goldhagen gives us is a monocausal answer: `antisemitism' or, as Goldhagen terms it `eliminationist antisemitism'. His thesis is that `eliminationist antisemitism' was a cultural norm in Germany by the late 19th century; that all the perpetrators shared this view of the Jews; and, furthermore, most Germans accepted this view of the Jews.
Yet, what I think is more disturbing than this argument is Goldhagen's claim that his thesis is totally new: `the perpetrators, "ordinary Germans", were animated by antisemitism, but a particular type of antisemitism that led them to conclude that Jews ought to die... Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say "no"' (p. 14).
One certainly does not have to dig that far into the literature to find the origins of some of his ideas. Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany From Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990), for example, pre-empts Goldhagen's ideas on eliminationist antisemitism. Rose, interestingly, in foreshadowing Goldhagen, calls German antisemitism `destructionist', but shies away from Goldhagen's monocausal thesis. Likewise, the willing participation of the German population in the enforcement of racial policy has previously been discussed by Robert Gellately.
While Goldhagen certainly `proves' that antisemitism was the main motivating factor for the killers of Jews, such `proof' leaves the reader unsatisfied. If antisemitism is the motivating force, then how do we account for the other victims of the National Socialists such as Gypsies, Russian POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses and countless others? According to Goldhagen (p. 175), the Romani were treated `most murderously'. This understatement aside, Goldhagen provides no account of the history of anti-Gypsy legal repression and violence in Germany despite the fact that the registration of Gypsies had been occurring in Germany since 1899 with an accompanying `Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Workshy' introduced in Bavaria in 1926. Goldhagen does not say that Romani were persecuted on racial grounds similar to Jews and that many laws originally applied to the Jews were later extended to Gypsies. Again, how are we to explain the killing of 70,000 mentally ill people in Germany in the so-called `euthanasia' (T4) campaign? Friedlander has stressed that if we want to find the origins of the Final Solution we have to look at this program as the precursor of the gas chambers.
A large section of Hitler's Willing Executioners discusses the role of the Order Police in the `Final Solution'. The study of this little known group of killers was pioneered a few years ago by Christopher Browning. Some of Goldhagen's ideas on the police battalions have previously been aired and we find the extension of these ideas in the book. Goldhagen has gone beyond Browning's original findings by studying a number of police battalions and showing that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was by no means unusual when it was presented by its commanding officer with an offer not to kill. Indeed, research being conducted by the reviewer suggests that officers exercised a great deal of their own leeway in the carrying out of their orders (even if the order was explicit). As Goldhagen shows, there were a significant number of men who were offered the chance not to kill Jews but who then chose to do so. Far beyond a mere account of the many actions that the men of the Order Police perpetrated (some of whom had their wives present during the actions), Goldhagen has drawn a picture of the lives of the men during their auswärtiger Einsatz: men who `went to night spots and bars, drank, sang, had sex, and talked. Like all people, they had opinions about the character of their lives and what they were doing' (p. 187). Previous research and my own study confirms this picture of men who enjoyed themselves knowing full well that they had and would commit further massacres in the name of the German people.
Yet this section is also problematic. Goldhagen has disregarded any testimony from postwar trials in which perpetrators expressed remorse for their actions or even attempted to save Jews. Thus Goldhagen has guaranteed that his explanations are skewed. How do we explain the role of collaborators from Eastern Europe-a force of some 300,000 men at their peak-who formed auxiliary police battalions that murdered Jews? Were they motivated by antisemitism? Unfortunately, Goldhagen has nothing to say on this score, but rather weakly asserts that `non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the genocide...(and) what can be said about the Germans cannot be said about any other nationality or nationalities combined-namely no Germans, no Holocaust' (p.6), an extraordinary statement when one considers the fact that the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion itself killed around 40,000 Jews between July and November 1941. Furthermore, the question thus arises as to how we are to account for large-scale pogroms in areas like Lithuania which broke out before German troops arrived. There is something more than a particular form of German `eliminationist antisemitism' at work here.
In many ways Hitler's Willing Executioners is a throwback to earlier interpretive models. It is almost a theory of collective guilt which is presented as a hybrid of the long outdated Sonderweg thesis. Goldhagen is right in arguing that we should not deny the importance of antisemitism to the Nazi program, but is it, as he presents it, the ultimate missing link in the German national character from the beginning of the 19th century until 1945? If it is, does it explain the Holocaust? I'm afraid that his `antisemitism is the missing link' explanation resembles `Piltdown Man' more than `Lucy'.
Richard Tidyman is a War Crimes Archivist at the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney. He is currently writing his PhD on the role of a Lithuanian police battalion in the Holocaust.
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233 of 292 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply flawed study with some good points, September 10, 2003
This review is from: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Hardcover)
One hopes that at some future date, Goldhagen (or an editor who acutally knows his job) will return to this work and do some serious editing. Clearly Goldhagen simply took his doctoral thesis, and with precious little revision, transformed it into a book that is barely readable, due to its dense and repetitive language. The reader should be warned that the narrative does not flow freely in this book. For those readers who have the stomachs to wade through the book to its conclusions, they will find some useful material. In particular, Goldhagen has shown that more ordinary Germans were active participants in the Holocaust than has been previously believed, and in this he is to be commended. If he had left it at that (and had made his book somewhat more readable), most of the criticism this book has received never would have occurred. Unfortunately, Goldhagen attempts to extend his argument by stating that virtually all Germans were culturally hard-wired to participate in a Holocaust, once the right circumstances were in place. He maintains that German culture has essentially programmed Germans to be eleminationist anti-semites, either tacitly or actively, and furthermore, this is a cultural feature unique to the Germans. The flaws in this argument should be obvious to anyone. For one thing, Goldhagen assumes that the average German, if he or she did not actively oppose the Nazi regime, was therefore tacitly supporting it and by extension was anti-semitic, abetting the more active Holocaust participants. How does one prove that one is not an eliminationist anti-semite under the conditions Goldhagen has provided? It would be virtually impossible for any human on the planet to prove that he or she wasn't ready to participate in the Holocaust, except that Goldhagen has focused his sights on the Germans alone. This raises the most glaring flaw: obviously, a great deal of the killing was done by non-Germans, and the majority of the victims in the Holocaust were not Jewish! From Eastern Europe to France, Germany certainly had plenty of help in liquidating the millions of victims it did. How does Goldhagen reconcile this with his argument? Simply put, he doesn't. The sections of the book where he tries to rationalize these discrepancies are unravelling before he even finishes them. In fact, even his argument that Germany had a uniquely historical predisposition towards anti-semitism is difficult to accept. How does one explain that Jews in 19th century Germany were probably the most prosperous in Europe, if they are living in a region filled with people who are programmed to kill them under the right circumstances? How does one explain away the fact that anti-semitism in France was probably even more virulent at the turn of the century? For that matter, how does one explain away the pogroms in Russia which were clearly taking place long before Nazi ideology began to form? Goldhagen's argument that Jews were killed by Germans because, well, that's what Germans do, in its own perverse way lets the rest of us, the human race, off the hook. The implication is that the rest of us shouldn't worry about a holocaust in our back yard because we aren't Germans hard-wired to participate in a holocaust. This is very troubling, because obviously the human race at large is very much hard-wired to engage in genocidal activities just as the Germans did, given the right circumstances. The events of the past century should demonstrate that genocide is by no means a German specialty, although the Nazis practiced it with unequalled efficiency. Goldhagen seems to have focused his enmity towards the Germans to the point he is able to ignore the plentiful evidence of genocide all across the globe, and in so doing, he has cheapened the lives of the victims of genocide who happened not to be Jewish. Genocide isn't a Jewish problem, and it isn't a German problem, it is a human problem. I don't think Goldhagen has fully accepted that; otherwise his book would have been written much differently.
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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
True, but narrow in vision, January 22, 2000
By A Customer
Mr Goldhagens book has been acclaimed for its revelatory analysis of the holocaust, yet this book does not really tell us much that is new about the anti-semitic genocide that took place in europe during WW2. Rather what this book does is break necessary taboos regarding the accountability of an entire nation or ethnic group. The reason the conclusions reached by this book have never attracted so much attention (for they are hardly new) is because their potential for misuse is staggering. The attention of this book is focused squarely on the German responsibilty for the holocaust; little attention is given to the antisemitic violence of the rest of central and eastern Europe. Where for instance was the recognition and analysis of the particulary savage Ustace Croat genocide against the Jews (and the Serbs and the gypsies), or indeed the Latvian, Romanian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and even French and western European compliance in the holocaust. The History of the modern world has shown that violent anti-semitism or any racial prejudice extreme in nature allowed to precede unchecked leads inevitably to eliminationist policies be it in Turkey, the Soviet Union, the United States of America or Australia (all instances of eliminationist genocide against native or minority peoples). What of the Russian pogroms or the anti-semitic genocide planned by the Young Turks (which they had already instigated against more than a million Armenians) around the period of WW1? By singling out the German people in the 20th century this book falls prey to the trap of identifying and demonising an entire nation and ethnic group allowing for the justification of allied atrocities like the Dresden firestorm. This suspicion was confirmed by NATO's use of Mr Goldhagen and his book to demonise the Serbian people during the Kosovo conflict. The Goldhagen conclusion that crimes committed by a democratically elected regime are the fault of an entire ethnic group and nation have been used to justify and shroud the acceleration of the conflict and the bombing of civilians in a mist of bogus moral crusade. I recognise that Mr Goldhagen has a right to his private opinion, but as a historian he has a responsiblity to strive for a level of academic detachment. To attack the opinion of the Nazis from a subjective viewpoint is to disagree with it, not to discredit it. Only through objectivity can totalitarian atrocities be judged. Any other course places justice in the hands of the victims at which point perspective is lost and vengeance prevails. If the historian has made any error or has ignored evidence pertaining to his conclusion he is then responsible for the consequences of vengeance that is misplaced. While his theories and analysis are largely applicable to the holocaust in Germany he should be aware of the danger of making generalised conclusions (for how can one correctly determine the responsiblity of an entire group or nation without taking into account the circumstances and situation of every component individual). The assertion that the German treatment of the Jews was "so horrific that it can hardly be compared with that of other peoples" relies almost entirely on the genocide committed inside the massive concentration camp network and that of the einsatzgruppen and anti-partizan units and effectively ignores the death of the three and a half million captured Russian soldiers marched to death, starved and forced to eat each other, packed into freight wagons, sealed and left in sidings and many other horrific forms of mass murder perpetrated against slav prisoners that were not part of the mechanised concentration and extermination camps designed to deal specifically with the genocide of the Jewish people. To be so incensed as to accuse the entire German nation of genocide, but then to decide other crimes were less horrific and in doing so excuse their perpetrators, establishes a hierarchy of criminals in inverse proportion to the Nazi hierarchy of victims, a reflection not a refutation of racist doctrine. Hatred against one group is not excusable because another group is hated more. If it is Goldhagen's point that the nature of persecution was more horrific in Germany then the alleged relatively lower incidence of persecution elsewhere cannot exclude the need for its mention. The cold war and the need to demonise the Soviet Union has meant the apparent minimalisation of slav suffering as well as of the knowledge that the Russians took a hideous revenge against the Germans and other eastern European peoples as they drove the Germans back and, like the yugoslav partisans against the Ustace Croats, practiced mass murder against their neighbors. Mr Goldhagen does not go far enough in saying that gypsies were "treated similarly" to the Jews, he is right to say that the Nazi's considered the Jews the lowest form of humanity but he does not say outright, as he should that the gypsies were victims of "eliminationist" genocide. The annihilation of the Jews was indeed the purpose of the extermination camps but the annihilation of the gypsies was also an example of total genocide. Thank you for reading
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