New book on the Holocaust stirs angry debate among scholars

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-To author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, it seemed like common sense: The Germans who participated in the deaths of 6 million Jews in Germany were not a small or coerced group of killers. Challenging the work of his fellow scholars and invigorating the Holocaust debate with his first major publication,”Hitler’s Willing […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-To author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, it seemed like common sense: The Germans who participated in the deaths of 6 million Jews in Germany were not a small or coerced group of killers.

Challenging the work of his fellow scholars and invigorating the Holocaust debate with his first major publication,”Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”(Knopf), Goldhagen asserts that the atrocities committed against Jews during the Holocaust were the actions of”ordinary Germans”and not those of a small group of Nazis whose goal was to eliminate the Jewish race.


Goldhagen’s focus on what he calls”eliminationist”or”exterminationist”anti-Semitism among average Germans strikes some Holocaust scholars as a”keyhole view of German history”that lacks comparative historical analysis. Others-adhering to conventional arguments that the Holocaust was the result of Adolf Hitler’s power and Germany’s economic distress-angrily view his work as an indictment of the collective German character.”I’m maintaining what seems to me to be the unremarkable, and indeed commonsensical, position that the German killers of Jews were like the perpetrators of other manslaughters,”Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, said at a symposium at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in April.

Goldhagen’s 622-page book-an extension of a doctoral dissertation for which he received the American Political Science Association’s 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award-cites German post-war legal investigations of perpetrators, survivors and bystanders as well as memoir literature.”My motivation is an intellectual one-to try to understand how the Holocaust happened,”said Goldhagen, 36, who dedicated the book to his father, Erich, a fellow scholar and Holocaust survivor.”To understand (the Holocaust), you have to understand the people who were the killers. Many of the perpetrators were not members of the SS (a Nazi military unit). They were Germans who came from all walks of life, all social classes, and yet they killed even when they knew they didn’t have to kill.” In his book, Goldhagen makes the point bluntly:”The evidence that no German was ever killed or incarcerated for having refused to kill Jews is conclusive. It is also incontestable that the knowledge that they did not have to kill, if they preferred not to, was extremely widespread among the killers.” Some longtime Holocaust scholars have embraced Goldhagen’s thesis as overdue. Writer Elie Wiesel, the 1986 Nobel Peace laureate and a Holocaust survivor, called the book”a tremendous contribution to the understanding and teaching of the Holocaust.” In a review in the London Observer, Wiesel wrote:”Driven by the suffering of his people, he (Goldhagen) directs his scholarly attention to the motives of their murderers. His aim is to show, with the overwhelming support of documents and facts, that aside from rare exceptions, the collective German conscience is far from untainted.” But Goldhagen’s work has also drawn bitter criticism.

Some Holocaust scholars are upset at his claims to provide-as the book jacket states-“a work of utmost originality and importance … that radically transforms our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period.””The claims that this is totally path-breaking … are somewhat overblown,”said Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta and author of”Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.””He has marshaled a tremendous amount of information-some of which is new, some of which has been brought to us before. The way he presents it highlights it.”But when one scholar promotes his work as totally new and other scholars have discussed the information, the others aren’t likely to receive it enthusiastically, she said.

Konrad Kwiet, a scholar-in-residence at the Holocaust Research Institute, said at the Washington symposium,”What I find somewhat irritating is Goldhagen’s claim to have discovered the key to understanding, finally and fully … the Holocaust, a claim which to my knowledge, no other Holocaust scholar has made.” Debate stems, too, from Goldhagen’s thesis that it was only anti-Semitism-and not coercion from Hitler’s military forces-that motivated Germans to participate in the killing of Jews.

Christopher Browning, history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., examined the actions of some Germans closely in his 1992 book,”Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.”He told the symposium,”I doubt that most (Germans) would have killed willingly and enthusiastically, motivated by the lethal, demonological anti-Semitism uniformly attributed to ordinary Germans by Goldhagen.” Michael Berenbaum, director of the Holocaust Museum Research Institute, said his study about the Holocaust also led him to a different conclusion than Goldhagen’s. The existence of”factories of death,”where killers did not have to face their victims, he said, affirms his belief that face-to-face murders were difficult for German civilians to commit.

Some also believe that Goldhagen has suggested Germans have a fundamental character or genetic flaw that made them a murderous people. Such claims, Goldhagen said, are”just rubbish.””I’m not talking about German national character or any kind of eternal unchanging beliefs or qualities,”Goldhagen said.”Merely that for peculiar historical reasons, a brand of virulent anti-Semitism became part of German culture.”I am not saying that anti-Semitism, or even this kind of virulent and eliminationist anti-Semitism alone, produced the Holocaust”without other factors coming into play, Goldhagen added.”It needed to be activated by the state. For the Holocaust to occur, the Nazi state had to mobilize the people and organize the genocide, and the people had to be prepared to mobilize. … Both were necessary.”(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

A. James Rudin, interreligious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee and a Religion News Service columnist, said Goldhagen’s work is controversial because he questioned the”convenient position”that a small clique was responsible for the murder of millions of Jews.”What Daniel’s book has done is call that position or explanation into severe question not just on anecdotal evidence but on the whole apparatus,”Rudin said.”It has profound implications for Europe, for Germans, and for people in the United States.”For every Oskar Schindler (the German industrialist whose effort to save Jews was memorialized in the award-winning film”Schindler’s List”), there were hundreds of thousands of people just the opposite.”


MJP END CAMPBELL

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