Dear sir:
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The praises heaped on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Michael Solot reveal a startling ignorance of the basic facts of German history [“Genocide and the Ordinary German,” June 14]. Goldhagen and Solot’s belief that the Holocaust “expressed the will of the German people as a whole” has been treated with the scorn it deserves by a wide variety of Israeli, English, and American scholars who have no desire to make excuses for the Germans. Goldhagen’s charge that even before 1914 “a near universal acceptance of the central aspects of the Nazi image of the Jews characterized the German people” is ridiculous; Solot should know better. From 1860 to 1879, the Liberal Party dominated elections in Germany, and their opposition to anti-Semitism earned them the title of “the Jewish party” by German reactionaries, even though 95 percent of Liberal Party members and voters were gentiles. Moreover, the Progressive Liberal Party, even more opposed to anti-Semitism, was a potent political force during the 1880s and trounced the reactionary anti-Semites in many big cities, including Hamburg and Berlin. And even at the height of the anti-Semitic firestorm of the 1890s, the Progressive Liberals and the Social Democrats–who also opposed anti-Semitism publicly and often put up Jewish candidates for office–gained over 40 percent of the vote. Moreover, anti-Semitic parties never won more than 25 percent of the popular vote before 1914, and they reached that percentage only once, in the 1893 elections, elections which Goldhagen falsely claims gave the anti-Semites a majority. And in 1912, the Social Democrats gained an unprecedented one-third of the German vote, while other nonracist parties received another one-third and the anti-Semitic parties lost heavily. But the kaiser, the army, and the all-powerful bureaucracy prevented the expression of the democratic will of the majority. Nor is it true, as Goldhagen claims and Solot believes, that liberals expected Jews to cease being Jews as the price of liberation. German liberals, like liberals in all nations, supported religious freedom and tolerance.
Lest I be branded an apologist, let me say that I write as one who knows that many German historians have grievously underestimated the unique power and class diffusion of anti-Semitism in modern German history. (See John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1996.) Unlike Goldhagen, however, I and many other scholars have studied anti-Semitism in other lands, which Goldhagen ignored so that he could rattle on about a supposed universal German desire to murder the Jews. It is not that simple. To truly understand the causes of the Holocaust and why it happened in Germany, one must strive to understand the effects of Christian and secular anti-Semitism upon German society and identify the classes, groups, and political parties that did or did not support these abominations. Above all, one must understand why anti-Semitism was so powerful among the German elites and ruling groups, the people who could and did elevate the Nazis to power. But collective guilt? No, Mr. Solot, that is far too easy; one should not fight racism with racism, nor praise those who do.
Michael Solot replies:
