danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I spent the entire day today writing an essay for my ethics class. I might have had an easier time had I selected a different topic, but I opted instead for the one that most immediately got me incensed. My paper had to do with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which posited that the Holocaust was brought about by a Germany mired in a virulent “eliminationist anti-Semitism”. Goldhagen suggests that a venomous climate permeated the Fatherland in such a way that Hitler provided a convenient excuse for the greater population, and not merely dyed-in-the-wool Nazis, to animate a vast killing machine.

At least that is the way that Goldhagen’s conclusions read in part.

What made my essay so difficult to write was that Goldhagen also wrote that, ”the most committed, virulent anti-Semites in human history took state power in Germany and decided to turn private, murderous fantasy into the core of state policy.”

That seems like a more plausible argument to me. But, while I cannot comprehend, much less excuse, the Germans’ long-standing record of anti-Semitic rhetoric and activity, I think it is simplistic to equate an ordinary German civilian to a member of the Einsatzgruppen. I just cannot accept that the horrors of Auchwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, or any of the other extermination camps would have been acceptable to a majority of Germans. That “ordinary” people of any nationality could be so cruel to their fellow human beings contradicts my understanding of human nature.  To quote Fulbright scholar Burton Hersh:

“A study of the SS documents that dealt with Kristallnacht, in 1938, makes plain that the party activists were unable to arouse the citizenry to pillage Jewish shops, and so sent Gestapo officials in mufti to ravage the stores and synagogues. Once the Final Solution was under way, every euphemism imaginable came into play to disguise the nature of the disposal process. Letters and documents of all sorts throughout the period among the principal planners are very emphatic as to the importance of concealing the true purpose of the eastern camps from the population at large.”

My paper was also hard to write because I found it difficult to square Goldhagen’s implicit condemnation of German society as a whole–and his simultaneous denial of assigning “collective guilt”–with a body of contrasting scholarship.

There is more text pertaining to the rise and fall of the Third Reich than any man could read in a lifetime. Perhaps I have been exposed to selected perspectives that contradict Goldhagen’s. For instance, I was aware that there were many who spoke out against Hitler and Nazism. Joachim Fest’s book Plotting Hitler’s Death sheds light on a wide-spread, albeit unlucky effort to kill Hitler; the Führer survived some 15 different assassination attempts. And William Brustein’s The Logic of Evil details how economics was a closer-to-home explanation for the political success of the National Socialists. Hitler offered the “best prospects for a better life” through “programs that addressed the material needs of millions of Germans”. It wasn’t, according to Brustein, due to “irrational leitmotifs such as anti-Semitism, hypernationalism [or] xenophobia”.

Most of all, what I found so perplexing about my topic was trying to jibe Goldhagen’s book’s conclusions with his widely-published cries of foul against an array of critics’ “radical misreading[s]” of his positions. It would seem, from what I have read, that Goldhagen accuses anyone who disagrees with his premise of misinterpreting him.

How do you argue with that? I am not sure, but I tried my best.

Filed under: History, Literature and Books, School on July 22nd, 2007