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

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Daniel Goldhagen Vintage Paperback, $16, 634 pp.

James Scott of Yale set the tone of the early ecstatic reviews of Daniel Goldhagen's controversial study, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. "It is rare," Scott wrote last spring, "for a book to say something new and powerful on a subject that some of the greatest minds of our and the last generation have struggled with." To the satisfaction of many, Goldhagen had done just that. The New York Times called Hitler's Willing Executioners a "landmark," and the Philadelphia Inquirer simply declared it "the most important book ever written about the Holocaust."

Other critics were less than convinced. Leading Holocaust scholars found the work flawed and repetitious--if not offensive. Historians argued that Goldhagen's research was unoriginal and his central claims maliciously overblown. Expressing the views of many, Rudolf Augstein, the influential German publisher, wrote, "One should be allowed to ask whether there is anything new to be gained from the book! The answer would be very little, next to nothing."

Amid the controversy (which has raged in both the United States and Europe for more than a year), the book became an international best seller. Sales were particularly brisk in Germany, where the first edition of 40,000 copies was snatched up in five days. Goldhagen's book tour in Germany generated the interest and publicity normally reserved for rock stars. And if recent articles in the New York Review of Books (November 28, 1996) and the New York Times Sunday Magazine (January 26,1997) are any indication, many critics have ceased debating the meaning of Goldhagen's controversial work and instead are struggling to comprehend the book's notoriety and success.

These efforts are predictable enough. After all, nothing captivates the media more than the inscrutable logic of celebrity. And while the explanations of the Goldhagen phenomenon range from the cosmetic (the book's success is due to the Harvard professor's boyish good looks) to the psychoanalytic (younger Germans find in the book an expression of their oedipal rage against their elders), all the hypotheses share a common premise--that the shortcomings of the book cannot explain the intensity of the attacks launched against it; and, conversely, that the merits of the volume cannot explain its success.

Yet this premise is both unfortunate and wrong. It is unfortunate because it deflects attention away from Goldhagen's difficult claims, and wrong because it overlooks the fact that the solution to the Goldhagen riddle lies not in the telegenic qualities of its author but in the book itself.

The thesis of Hitler's Willing Executioners is by now familiar--though frequently misstated. To grasp the book's central claim, it is important to bear in mind that Goldhagen's work presents itself as a sustained refutation of fifty years' worth of interpretations of the Holocaust. In particular, Goldhagen attacks those scholars who comprehend the extermination of the Jews in terms of the logic of bureaucratic administration. In his magisterial study, The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg argued that the process of destruction presented Nazi planners with a number of difficult logistical, technical, and ethical problems. The complex bureaucratization of the killing was, Hilberg argued, crucial for the success of "the Final Solution," for it permitted ordinary functionaries to be physically, psychologically, and morally removed from the horrific consequences of their actions and decisions. This argument, in turn, influenced Hannah Arendt's vision of the "banality of evil" and the "terrifyingly normal" exterminator in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

This understanding of the Holocaust presupposes that ordinary Germans felt moral resistance to genocide. Not true, Goldhagen argues. For--to use the social scientific jargon that both defines and mars much of Goldhagen's prose--it was the "cognitive and value structures" of ordinary Germans--namely their virulently anti-Semitic beliefs--that constituted the "central causal agent of the Holocaust."

At first blush, the claim seems not revolutionary but obvious to the point of truism. For certainly the Nazis would not have attempted to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child they could lay their hands on had they not been thoroughly anti-Semitic. Yet it is Goldhagen's claim that this "demonic" anti-Semitism was not a property of the Nazis alone, but instead defined the "cognitive framework" of all (or nearly all) Germans, regardless of class, religion, and level of education. As such, the Holocaust cannot be seen merely as a genocidal policy designed and implemented by Hitler and the SS. Rather, it was a German national project. If Hitler's fanaticism and the territorial conquest of much of Europe created the opportunity for mass killing, neither the systematic demonization of the Jews by Nazi political culture, nor the Nazi party's repressive Control of German society produced the motivations that were necessary to undertake a broad campaign of genocide. These motivations, Goldhagen argues, were supplied by a belief system that predated the Nazis and that defined a peculiarly German brand of "eliminationist" anti-Semitism.

To prove his point, Goldhagen focuses the bulk of his study not on the extermination camp, the "factory of death" which for many scholars distinguishes the Holocaust from other instances of human atrocity, but on the massacres committed by German reserve police battalions in the early days of the Final Solution. The activities of these police battalions unsettle our conventional images of the perpetrators of Nazi genocide. These reserve policemen were not, on the whole, members of the Nazi party, much less fanatical inductees into the SS; they had not been inured to killing by the trials of battle; they were, for the most part, ordinary married men with families. Yet when called upon to massacre Jewish men, women, and children, they did so willingly--even when provided ample opportunities to refuse.

How can we explain the behavior of these men, the good foot soldiers in the war against the Jews? Christopher Browning's important study, Ordinary Men (1992), attempted to make sense of the actions of members of the Police Battalion by focusing upon "situational factors." Men who otherwise would never have engaged in acts of mass murder found themselves compelled to do so by the tremendous pressures exerted by their peer group. To refuse to participate in killing, under such circumstances, was nothing short of turning one's back on a horrific collective obligation--"in effect, an asocial act vis-a-vis one's comrades." Having killed once, these men quickly became inured to the act, and became, in time, competent and callous exterminators.

Goldhagen emphatically rejects Browning's thesis. For while Browning's situational factors might explain why the reserve policemen killed willingly, his argument wholly fails to account for the most disturbing and anomalous aspects of their behavior--that they killed zealously and with untold cruelty.

Goldhagen argues that one, and only one, explanation can make sense of these actions--that these reservists were driven to kill zealously and cruelly by a shared cultural framework that constructed the Jew as a demonic presence deserving extermination. Thus, in the place of Browning's ordinary men, persons discomfitingly similar to ourselves, we meet Goldhagen's ordinary Germans, persons of such radically alien and perverted beliefs that we can reconstruct their mindset only with the "critical eye of an anthropologist."

Goldhagen's thesis, in turn, has been subject to stern rebuttal. Some of these attacks have been characterized by a disturbing vehemence. In an apoplectic review in First Things (August/September 1996), Richard John Neuhaus railed against Hitler's Willing Executioners as an "incoherent, hateful and dishonest tract," faulting it for its claim that "anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews" and for failing to acknowledge the reasonableness of the perception of Jewish responsibility for Weimar's culture of "defeatism and decadence."

Most mainstream critiques of Hitler's Willing Executioners fortunately have not used the book as a pretext to revive, however unwittingly, such canards. Yet as bizarre and offensive as Neuhaus's critique may be, there is an unfortunate quality to Goldhagen's book that invites such vehement rejections. As Omer Bartov observed in an excellent early review of Hitler's Willing Executioners in the New Republic, the book suffers from serious problems of tone. Not only does Goldhagen boldly overstate his claim to originality, but he treats his fellow scholars of the Holocaust with a patronizing and dismissive attitude that borders on contempt. Abandoning the sober voice of the scholar for the impassioned advocacy of a prosecutor, Goldhagen often seems less interested in indicting the German nation than in self-righteously holding forth on the intellectual bankruptcy of competing explanations of the Holocaust. He accuses Browning, for example, of credulously privileging the self-serving testimony of the former reservists while suppressing evidence that does not fit with his larger thesis. Browning, however, is hardly the sole object of Goldhagen's disdain. Along with Hilberg and Arendt, he joins the ranks of scholars whose grossly insufficient arguments fail to make sense of the Holocaust.

The book's strident self-righteousness leaves the reader all the less sympathetic to the flaws in its author's reasoning. These flaws, in turn, have been carefully detailed, often by precisely those scholars who have been on the receiving end of Goldhagen's scorn. Hans Mommsen, the eminent German historian, faults Hitler's Willing Executioners for its "monocausal" explanation of the Holocaust. No historical event as complex as the Holocaust, he argues, can be explained simply in terms of a unique strain of hate that purportedly infected an entire nation. Browning, by contrast, has accused Goldhagen of writing a "keyhole" history of German anti-Semitism--a narrative without context and perspective that creates a "uniform portrayal of Germans--undifferentiated, unchanging, possessed by a single, monolithic, cognitive outlook." This stereotyping of the German "cognitive framework," Browning writes, discomfitingly echoes "how anti-Semites write about Jews."

In addition to these critiques of Goldhagen's general thesis, the book's conclusions are also vulnerable. As I have already suggested, one of the most distinctive and valuable aspects of Hitler's Willing Executioners is Goldhagen's attempt to demonstrate that ordinary Germans killed Jews zealously and sadistically--that is, more zealously and sadistically than they killed (or would have killed) other civilian populations. Whether this claim is properly supported by the evidence can be debated (and this point describes a central dispute between Goldhagen and Browning). Still, it seems that Goldhagen has importantly described an extremely disturbing circumstance, one that challenges understandings that explain the Holocaust largely in terms of the impersonal logic of bureaucratic administration.

Yet even if Goldhagen is right, he draws two conclusions from this material which, I believe, are crucially flawed. First, he concludes that the fact that ordinary Germans killed zealously and with passion is proof that they believed in the "justice of the extermination of Jews." This shocking conclusion is presented as if logically entailed by the evidence, yet this seems hardly to be the case. To claim that ordinary Germans believed in the justice of genocide suggests that they considered themselves morally obligated to kill. To have refused to kill, if Goldhagen is correct, would not simply have constituted a refusal, pace Browning, to shoulder a burden placed on one's peer group--it would have been tantamount to an ethical failing, a refusal to discharge a moral imperative.

While some Germans might have subscribed to such a view, it seems difficult to believe that the ordinary-German-turned-killer did so because he saw himself as a crusader for justice. More plausibly, the actions of these ordinary Germans can be understood as offering sobering evidence of how people behave when the strictures of morality have been dangerously relaxed, when one finds oneself, to borrow Hannah Arendt's language, in a world in which "everything is permitted." If we follow Arendt's insight, the danger of racial animus is not that it radically inverts notions of right and wrong, but that it leads us to see the other as undeserving of the common protections of morality. Goldhagen's overstated claim fails as a reconstruction of the psychology and moral mindset of the killers.

Moreover, Goldhagen responds to the ample evidence of the Germans' cruelty toward their victims with a series of rhetorical questions. Why bother to beat, humiliate, starve, degrade, and deride with "Mephistophelean laughter" persons whom you are about to kill anyway? Only a demonic hatred of such persons, he argues, can explain such gratuitous cruelty. That such acts of cruelty might not have been entirely gratuitous is a reality Goldhagen never bothers to consider. Thus, other than in a dismissive footnote, he ignores Primo Levi's provocative and brilliant discussion of Nazi cruelty in The Drowned and the Saved. The omission is grave, for Levi supplies precisely what is missing from Hitler's Willing Executioners. While Goldhagen can never reason past the understandable outrage he feels at the Germans' gross degradation of persons slated for death, Levi attempts to probe the dark logic of such cruelty. These rituals of humiliation, he concludes, were hardly gratuitous: They served to constitute the victims as the very desperate and broken specimens that anti-Semitism painted the Jews to be. For it is far easier to kill a person, Levi argues, once we have reduced that person, through our own vicious acts, to a pathetic and wretched creature. Levi's paradoxical formulation captures the subtlety of his insight, an insight lost on Goldhagen: "Before dying, the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt."

Yet the very qualities that make Hitler's Willing Executioners a flawed book also account for its success, particularly in Germany. The German response to Goldhagen presents a caricature of our own troubled reception: The attack by German academics has been more sustained and widespread; the public's embrace of the book has been even more enthusiastic. Unfortunately, many of the German criticisms of Goldhagen have a distinctly ad hominem ring: Some critics have dismissed the book because the author is Jewish, and others because the author is American. In the former case, Hitler's Willing Executioners is seen as an unbalanced diatribe penned by the son of a survivor; in the latter, it is a Hollywood treatment of history--grossly simplified, and populated with exaggerated villains. Some critics have specifically compared Goldhagen's book to the ABC miniseries, "The Holocaust," which was similarly condemned when it was first broadcast on German television nearly twenty years ago. To these critics, America's institutions of higher learning and its industry of popular culture will never be able to treat the Holocaust with any degree of nuance, complexity, and fidelity to the truth.

Whatever the flaws of Goldhagen's book, to describe it as an article of popular cultural consumption is absurd. With its footnotes, matrices, and social scientific jargon, Hitler's Willing Executioners remains, in many ways, an unlikely candidate for the best-seller list. Yet Hitler's Willing Executioners is a passionate book, indeed, a deeply personal book, and though the clash between the voice of the scholar and that of the advocate creates discord on the page, it also describes the book's most compelling quality. In German, where academic prose, even more than in this country, is defined by a relentless aridity, Goldhagen's passionate voice has understandably found a large and supportive public. In this respect, resurrecting the memory of the ABC miniseries is peculiarly apt, as the television movie, despite the attack of critics, riveted the German nation in a manner not dissimilar to the book.

But the book's success is not merely a matter of rhetoric. The same passion that breathes through Goldhagen's prose also has shaped his argument. One could, I suppose, argue that Goldhagen's indictment of Germany would make the book a less-than-attractive sell in the Federal Republic (though, as Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, has observed, the book's most inflammatory rhetoric reads somewhat muted in translation). Against this, one could argue that the book is a hit in Germany precisely because it implicitly supports what Chancellor Kohl has described as "the grace of belated birth" (die Gnade der spaten Geburt). For Goldhagen insists on drawing an absolute divide between the Germany of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and the Germany constituted since the war's end (an argument made only in a footnote in the book, but one which he continually emphasized during his German book tour and in his interview in Der Spiegel). Thus the book that purportedly delivers a terrible indictment, in fact offers the most pleasing absolution, providing Germans--and Americans--with the comforts conspicuously absent from Browning's quietly chilling account.

While this no doubt explains a measure of the book's success in Germany, its larger resonance with the reading public on both sides of the ocean must be understood in terms of Goldhagen's passionate plea that explaining the Holocaust is not like explaining quantum physics. In the face of those scholars and thinkers who blanch before the monstrous evil of the Holocaust, who believe that the Holocaust defies rational explanation or can be made sense of only through elaborate theories of group psychology and the structure of modernity, Goldhagen offers a simple and powerful rejoinder. There is much flawed with his claim, and his own examples, I believe, undermine it. Yet he emphatically reminds us, to paraphrase Robert Frost, that hate suffices.

Lawrence Douglas is an assistant professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is currently working on a book about Holocaust trials, to be published by Yale University Press.