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.
