It wasn’t too many years ago that the bad teeth of the English, the bad breath of the French, and the bad manners of Americans were accepted as modest rules of thumb: not very edifying, perhaps, but serviceable in their way. That’s not to say people were blind to those Frenchmen (to choose one example) who were even bigger louts than the average Americano–far from it! They just reckoned that if they could draw a reasonable pattern from the known facts then it was worth losing a few million pushy Frogs in the calculation.
These images and phrases are so fixed in the popular mind they have become cliches. For Germans it’s a great relief to hear that their country was hijacked by a gang of demons and then driven down the road to perdition by soulless functionaries and citizens too mindful of their duty. And even outside Germany, is there anyone with a grain of optimism who really wants to believe that an entire nation was bent on such a goal? The prospect is an assault on the idea of humanity itself. Better to focus the blame down to a small, intense ray that obliterates just the madmen, monsters, and enthusiasts of death, and so spares all the others who did the dirty work. They may get singed badly, but at least they can survive as human beings in the way we prefer to think of the species. The rest will feel the heat, but in the end they’ll be able to adjust to some ghastly holes in the moral fabric of their country.
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Very well, professor,” you must be thinking, “but wasn’t German anti-Semitism just another racial prejudice, perhaps no worse than our own, until it was seized by the Nazis and turned into a murderous mass hysteria?” Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. In making his case against the German people Goldhagen has presented anti-Semitism as their motive for the Holocaust; now he needs to show that the accused acted deliberately, free of any (collective) mental illness. This is the second part of his argument, and his reasoning goes like this: if Nazi Germany was suffering from hysteria, or from any other kind of social pathology, then the derangement should be apparent above all in those given the task of actually killing Jews. Therefore let us select the most ordinary Germans we can find at the front lines of the Holocaust–not Nazi zealots, but people broadly representative of the society as a whole–and put their behavior under the microscope. This inspection forms the bulk of Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The author looks for signs of pathology, for robotic killing machines or berserkers crazed by propaganda, but finds none; he looks for reluctance, and finds very little of that either. What he does find is clearheaded thoroughness, enthusiasm, and gratuitous brutality.
And just who is Goldhagen’s ordinary German? He has drawn every one of his breaths inside the inimical, hate-filled atmosphere of German anti-Semitism. He knew what Hitler stood for long before he came to power–there was never any doubt about that. He could well have voted for the Nazis: in 1933 more than 17 million other Germans did. After that the waves of propaganda didn’t hypnotize him; he already knew the truth. The official boycotts of Jewish businesses, the expulsion of Jewish citizens, and the herding of Jews into ghettoes didn’t outrage him; these measures answered his fears. When the brownshirts burned the synagogues, he went to rallies the next day and cheered. When the Jews in his town were marched down Main Street and away to the first concentration camps, he stood on the sidewalk and spit at them. So when the masterminds of the “final solution” drafted this ordinary German out of his settled civilian life and sent him to Poland they had reason to believe he would be fit for the task, and they were right. He knows who the enemy is, and his instincts will teach him the special ethos of this war. He routinely humiliates his victims. He terrorizes them before death. He inflicts pointless cruelties. He volunteers for “Jew hunts,” small parties that comb through the countryside to root out every last Jew in hiding, often whole families, and when he finds them he shoots them on the spot. From village to village he celebrates victories with his comrades. He goes home on furlough and comes back for more. He has pictures taken to commemorate his part in this historic undertaking. He is neither a monster nor is he ashamed. He is a human being.
That’s not to say there aren’t real problems with this book, which bears all the stigmata of the academic dissertation: it is repetitive, truculent, and filled with rebarbative jargon. As soon as you hack off a branch of “non-cognitive structural features” you get slapped in the face with “allegedly universalistic social psychological processes,” while “situational variables” keep buzzing around your head. It is not an easy slog. Even more dispiriting are the passages where Goldhagen invents the most intimate details of the Germans’ psychology out of thin air. Who can say what thoughts they had as they blew the heads off eight-year-old girls? The author apparently feels he has to try, and the results are always puerile and inflammatory. This sort of zeal, which is made worse by Goldhagen’s unbecoming taste for sarcasm, often leaves you feeling you’ve been buttonholed rather than instructed. Perhaps it is too much to ask someone who has spent years exploring the minds of genocidal killers to remain completely dispassionate, but his book would have been a lot better had he simply led us into the moral landscape of the ordinary German and let us view it with our own eyes.
