Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Knopf, 622 pages, $30
The Third Reich did not slaughter Jews only at night and in fog, in the death camps. It also slaughtered Jews on bright sunny days, in full view of the camera. On Page 407 of this book is one such photograph, taken in the summer of 1942, in Ukraine. It shows a German soldier taking careful aim with a rifle, not 4 feet from a woman clutching a child. For tens of thousands of genocidal killers, scenes like this Holocaust Pieta were, as one put it, “our daily bread,” and there was no dearth of volunteers willing to pull the trigger. Indeed, Germans fell to the Final Solution with a vengeance, attested by the many souvenir photographs recording their proud achievements in the killing fields of Poland and Russia.
“Hitler’s Willing Executioners” is about those who pulled that trigger, or clicked that shutter, about perpetrators–“two-legged beasts” to their victims, “ordinary Germans” to their compatriots–who killed Jews with abandon, with fury and with delight. It is about the other Auschwitz, the slaughterbench that was the handiwork of police battalions, “work” camps and death marches. It is about German political culture–long contaminated with “eliminationist anti-Semitism” (which called for the physical and spiritual removal of Jews from Germany)–and about the German psyche, its cognition and values giving vent to mass murder and “exterminationist impulses.”
It is about the Holocaust from the standpoint of “ordinary Germans,” those hundreds of thousands who implemented the Final Solution and those millions who knew and approved of it. It is in every respect a book about a society immured in radical evil–“an extraordinary, lethal political culture”–and it levels a j’accuse at the heart and soul of the German nation itself.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has emerged from the archives of the other Auschwitz with an inspired work of argument and scholarship, an exacting analysis that provides an answer to the fundamental question of the Holocaust: “Why?” His take-no-prisoners argument–because they were Germans first, Nazis second–places the Holocaust at the center of German existence, as the “defining feature of German Political Culture.” Taking exception to the prevailing wisdom, that “ordinary Germans” metamorphosed into “two-legged beasts” only under duress, Goldhagen proceeds to trace the Holocaust backwards, to its racialist and religious sources in a malevolent anti-Semitism endemic to German history. Long before Nazis turned to extermination, Jews were anathema in virtually all segments of German society, already well on their way to the “social death” the Nazis consummated in the 1930s.
This is a book as relentless in its pursuit of the German psyche as it is formidable in its research and summary in its judgments. Indeed, Goldhagen chases down every excuse, every justification, every rationale that Germans offer for pulling that trigger, and proves beyond a reasonable doubt that ordinary Germans did so because they wanted to do so, because in their minds and consciences, as one killer put it, “the category of human being was not applicable” to the Jew.
“The German perpetrators,” Goldhagen writes, “were assenting mass executioners, men and women who, true to their own eliminationist anti-Semitic beliefs, faithful to their cultural anti-Semitic credo, considered the slaughter to be just.”
Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, has sought to “radically revise” our thinking on the Holocaust by focusing on the minions who did the dirty work of ghetto clearing and mass slaying, who were dispatched to Poland and Russia to “kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.” Supplying an in-depth description of the genocidal exploits of these largely neglected henchmen–members of the Order Police, in particular Battalion 101 (also the subject of Christopher Browning’s recent book “Ordinary Men”)–Goldhagen flatly contradicts the received wisdom on the motives and modus operandi of the perpetrators. These are not robotic, one-dimensional killers following orders, besotted and dehumanized functionaries of a monstrous, kill-or-be-killed Nazi bureaucracy.
Indeed, as unlikely a genocidal cohort as could be found in Nazi Germany, this group of overage middle-class conscripts from Hamburg (the least-Nazified city) did not have to be dragooned into serving in the mobile abbatoir that slaughtered more than 2 million Polish (and German) Jews. Instead, Goldhagen shows in page after gruesome page that these nondescript time-servers, family men for the most part, readily became accomplices in genocide, “willing killers.”
“These Germans viewed the genocidal killing, their primary activity in Poland, and themselves favorably,” Goldhagen writes. “They repeatedly showed initiative in killing, did not shirk their assigned tasks, though they could have without punishment. They gave priority to the killing of Jews and even acted with cruel abandon. Their dedication to the genocidal slaughter was such that they persisted in it despite the gruesomeness. . . . Much of the killing was also personalized, in that the men often faced their victims one on one. Frequently, they were facing children.”
For Goldhagen “the moral approbation that the work met explains why only a small minority of Police Battalion 101’s men asked to be excused from killing, and why the officers could rely upon volunteers to fill out the killing squads.” Goldhagen places full weight on the moral autonomy of the perpetrators, and indeed his argument turns on the failure of ordinary Germans to revolt or recoil from murder on a horrific scale.
As he notes, “The evidence that no German was ever killed or incarcerated for having refused to kill Jews is conclusive.” Germans could say “no” to mass murder. They chose to say “yes.”
Not only did they say yes to mass murder, they also said yes to wanton cruelty far beyond the call of homicidal duty. In these pages, ordinary Germans exercise their autonomy to inflict horror upon horror on their victims. As Goldhagen shows in his close reading of the “work” camps and death marches (in the last months of the war), neither economic rationality nor impending doom could divert the German onslaught against its “metaphysical enemy.”
Even after Himmler gave the order to cease the killing, ordinary Germans continued to work and march their victims to death. Goldhagen persuasively argues that the Holocaust could not have been carried out so smoothly, so efficiently, with such astonishing alacrity in time of total war if it did not carry the status of a moral imperative. Indeed, the author concludes that the Holocaust was not only the consummation of Nazi race thinking but a German national project commanding a logic completely at odds with our assumption of a common Enlightenment humanity.
“The overwhelming impression of those who ever witnessed a German ghetto clearing was that they were observing not men who were brought to their tasks reluctantly, but men driven by the passion, determination, tirelessness, and enthusiasm of religious zealots on a holy, redemptive mission.”
That mission was long in the making, Goldhagen argues. He closely reads the anti-Semitic frenzy of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and recounts in harrowing detail the “social death” of German Jewry during the 1930s. It is not the least of this book’s virtues that it should establish beyond all doubt that German political culture was consumed with the Jewish Question long before Hitler.
Goldhagen writes that the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany was “but a more accentuated, intensified, and elaborated form of an already broadly accepted basic model.” By the 1930s the fine line separating elimination from extermination had become all but effaced. The “social death” suffered by the Jews in Germany during the 1930s only prefigured the physical annihilation of the Jews of Europe during the 1940s. Indeed, the chapter on the 1930s is the linchpin of Goldhagen’s “monocausal” thesis: that eliminationist anti-Semitism laid the track to Auschwitz. It is a powerful, moving account and rescues his book from reductionist history.
Writing with authority and passion, Goldhagen makes large claims for this book. Those claims are more than justified. This is a brilliant, often profound reckoning with the German psyche, as bold and fierce and seminal a study of the Holocaust as has been written. Quite simply, Goldhagen’s baldly provocative thesis, that eliminationist anti-Semitism was “pregnant with murder,” goes far toward explaining what happened on that bright sunny day in Ukraine more than 50 years ago.
