REVISING THE HOLOCAUST

Abstract

Hitler's willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. London: Little Brown and Company, 1996. Pp. x+622. £20.

Questions about the motives of the perpetrators and, by implication, the causes of the Holocaust, have long been in the forefront of academic or non-academic discussions of the Nazi period – from the time of contemporary observers to the present day. A wide range of possible responses to these questions has been put forward, drawing on concepts from a variety of disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology or theology. Daniel Goldhagen's book on the motivation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust claims to be a ‘radical revision of what has until now been written’ (p. 9). This claim is made on the book-jacket and by the author himself. His thesis can be summarized as follows: Germany was permeated by a particularly radical and vicious brand of anti-Semitism whose aim was the elimination of Jews. The author defines this as ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. This viral strain of anti-semitism, he states, ‘resided ultimately in the heart of German political culture, in German society itself’ (p. 428). Medieval anti-Semitism, based as it was on the teachings of the Christian religion, was so ‘integral to German culture’ (p. 55) that with the emergence of the modern era it did not disappear but rather took on new forms of expression, in particular, racial aspects. By the end of the nineteenth century ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ dominated the German political scene. In the Weimar Republic, it grew more virulent even before Hitler came to power. The Nazi machine merely turned this ideology into a reality. The course of its actualization was not deterred by anything save bare necessity: ‘the road to Auschwitz was not twisted’ (p. 425). When the ‘genocidal program’ was implemented along with the German attack on the Soviet Union, it was supported by the general German population, by the ‘ordinary Germans’ – the key phrase of the book – who became ‘willing executioners’. They had no need of special orders, coercion or pressure because their ‘cognitive model’ showed them that Jews were ‘ultimately fit only to suffer and to die’ (p. 316).