Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

THERE is no shortage of books on the great killing perpetrated mostly by Germans, mostly on Jews, mostly between 1941 and 1945. A handful -- by Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt -- have established themselves as classics. But few have taken off like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's. Already prize-crowned by the American Political Science Association, the author was promptly talk-show bound as well. Within weeks, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard had become the academic equivalent of a rock star.

Since even very good historical monographs are not usually big sellers, the reception is arguably as interesting as the book itself. In April, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial not only invited the author for a few rounds of public discussion, it even persuaded Yehuda Bauer and Konrad Kwiet to serve as sparring partners. Acknowledged authorities in the field, both are also native Central Europeans and Holocaust survivors. Neither pulled punches. The overflow audience still judged Goldhagen the winner on points. Respectful reviews appeared in some of the country's most visible book pages. The shock waves could be felt even in cyberspace, where an ad-hoc symposium on Goldhagen virtually pre-empted an on-line discussion group for historians of Germany.

Goldhagen's focus on the killers in the most literal sense is presumably one reason for the impact of the book. The camps were rationalized death factories with a minimum of personnel. But what kind of people were these so-called Order Police, he asks, who massacred hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women, children, and even tiny babies, one at a time, between 1941 and 1943, for no other reason than that they were Jews? What did they think they were doing? How could they bring themselves to do it?

The simplicity of Goldhagen's answers, in a world where simple answers are both rare and welcome, may be another reason for the impact. The killers really were ordinary men, according to Goldhagen, irrespective of their extraordinary situation. Not crazed, opportunist, specially trained, nor seething with any particular sense of zeal or mission, they were not even under duress. All that distinguished them from other people, Goldhagen argues, was that they were Germans at a particular place and time.

The book is underpinned by a massive show of social-scientific authority. Forthrightly, even relentlessly academic, Goldhagen deploys the full arsenal of traditional scholarship -- archival research, a substantial secondary literature, elaborate categorical distinctions, a heavily stylized vocabulary, even the occasional graphic model -- to assert his credibility and make his point.

The product is not without its virtues. He is not the first to look past the men with large maps on the wall and secretaries in the outer office, and concentrate on the men with the guns. But Goldhagen has gone further than most in emphasizing how it took the willingness, even eagerness, of ordinary men to pull the trigger in order to turn other people's fantasies into astonishing body counts.

He has resisted making things easy in at least two important ways. Untouched by fashionable post-modern uncertainty, he has stuck to the old-fashioned conviction that historical questions have historical answers. To a degree uncommon among his cohort, he has dared to take on a big subject, step up to the plate, and swing from the heels.

Yet his large and repetitive book adds relatively little, and certainly less than the author claims, to what we already know from benchmark predecessors like Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Leni Yahil, and Yehuda Bauer. His disregard for contrary evidence -- Marlis Steinert's Hitler's War and the Germans and Sarah Gordon's Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question, for just two examples of archival research at least as credible as Goldhagen's -- is consistent and striking.

Compared, for example, with Christopher Browning, whose Ordinary Men exploits some of the same material, his writing is prolix, graceless, and capriciously edited, his rhetoric tin-eared, frequently disingenuous, and gratuitously opinionated, his tolerance for complexity at best selective.

Worst of all are the inconsistencies and omissions that fatally damage his linchpin argument. If pre-Hitler Germans were uniquely anti-Semitic, what should we make of the Dreyfus affair in France, the ordinary pogromchiki of imperial Russia, or the anti-Semitism endemic in most of interwar Eastern Europe? If pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism was particularly virulent, why did German-Jewish Americans remain Germanophile through the 1920s, and East European Jews actually welcome German troops in World War I?

Perhaps most challenging to Goldhagen's simple answers is the reluctance of survivors to share them. This reviewer's mother-in-law, a Polish Jew who lived almost continuously among ordinary Germans from 1928 to 1949, never considered before or after that Germans and Nazis were interchangeable. Viktor Klemperer, a German-Jewish academic whose exquisitely precise diary is a unique window on German life in the Nazi years, concluded ironically that the Nazis were un-German. In a 1946 memoir that Goldhagen neglects to note, David Rousset, a French survivor of the camps, wrote that "to claim to discover the atavisms of a race" in "the insensate hate which presided over and directed this enterprise" was "to echo the mentality of the SS."

So why was there minimal compliance with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933? Why did the "Crystal Night" pogrom need to be organized from the top down five years into the Nazi era and three years after the Nuremberg laws? Why, in the midst of the great killing itself, was it mentioned only in code, and never in public? Why did a German chemist in the very heart of Auschwitz address a starved and unwashed Primo Levi by the polite pronoun? Why did some ordinary Germans offer Jewish prisoners the bread that other ordinary Germans denied them? Why did the killing that began so abruptly in Hitler's Germany end equally abruptly in its three very different successors -- West Germany, East Germany, Austria?

In a world as full as ever of ordinary men and women and willing executioners, these are serious questions in search of serious answers. Regrettably for all of us, Goldhagen's book is not the place to look for them.