Just Plain Volk : NONFICTION : HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,<i> By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 640 pp.; 31 photographs and 8 maps)</i>

Fortunately for one’s honor, the callus formed by 50 years of good living isn’t thick enough to block the rage and despair when some madeleine from hell abruptly restores the memory of what the Germans did to Jews in the period from Hitler’s rise to Germany’s defeat.

I experienced that devastating and salubrious return to reality most recently in Prague, looking at the paintings made by Jewish children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp that are exhibited at the museum attached to the old synagogue and its exiguous burying ground. Had I been someone who shouts, I might have screamed, with all the force of my lungs, “Why?” Why did the Germans kill those children, and all the millions of other Jews--men, women and children--in Eastern Europe and whatever other place the Wehrmacht overran? What was it that drove them to want to exterminate a peaceful and, one would think, nonthreatening population? Were they appalled by what they were doing? Did they feel pity or fear while they destroyed a culture that was so rich--and so beautiful in its diversity?

“Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, delivers a brutal and overwhelmingly powerful answer to such questions. Goldhagen rejects the palliative, standard explanations that blame German crimes on such factors as the coercive force of a totalitarian state, German propensity to obey orders, Germans’ imperfect understanding of the complex and fragmented nature of the murderous enterprise they were engaged in and their consequent lack of a sense of personal responsibility for it.

For him, those were German crimes, committed by ordinary Germans who were not necessarily members of the SS, although it was the democratically elected and vastly popular Nazi regime that made the crimes possible and gave them direction. Goldhagen believes that the driving force of the Holocaust was the universal and extraordinarily virulent anti-Semitism of Germans at every level of society, with roots in the medieval Christian perception of Jews as self-willed agents of evil--”a hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense, that it leaves one gasping for comprehension.”

In the 19th century, that hatred merged in Germany with the pseudo-scientific notion that Jews were a “race,” so that anti-Semitism became divorced from religion and could be directed with equal intellectual validity at Jews who who had converted to Christianity. Since the noxiousness of Jews was, according to that view, intrinsic, it could not be remedied by assimilation; indeed, assimilated Jews were perceived as particularly dangerous, carrying Jewish corruption deeper into the core of German society.

Thus came about the yearning for an “eliminationist” solution--a forerunner of the solution that was “final”--that would expel from the German volk a dangerously polluting agent. Goldhagen cites the reams of hallucinatory anti-Semitic literature produced in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, which demonized Jews through scurrilous libel and caricature, and the progressive acceptance of the view of Jews as the ultimate enemy, until it became for Germans “common sense.” For Goldhagen, anti-Semitism never disappeared in Germany; at best, until the ‘30s, it was latent.

The disorders that followed upon Germany’s defeat in World War I--the widely accepted equation of Bolshevism with Jewish influence, the weakness and scandals of Weimar and the advent of Hitler, with his ferocious personal hatred of Jews--interrupted that period of relative latency. Subsequently, the conquest of Eastern Europe and a large part of the Soviet Union gave Germans both control over a huge Jewish population and space in which the “eliminationist” theory could evolve into the practice of extermination.

Goldhagen points out that, while an immense amount of study has been devoted to the apparatus and logistics of extermination, the agents of death--the German men and women who actually did the killing--have largely escaped scrutiny. He considers these perpetrators in three settings: the police battalions that operated principally in Poland and Soviet territory and were responsible for the murder of several hundred thousand Jews, the “work camps” in which Jews were literally worked to death and the senseless, bizarre death marches that occurred at the end of the war.

The evidence cited by Goldhagen makes clear that the men of the police battalions, while they had among them Nazi party and SS members, were remarkably representative of the lower to middle strata of German society. They killed in small- and mid-sized towns, in ghettos and in the countryside. The most widespread method was one-on-one shooting: the executioner and the victim standing a weapon’s length away. Blood, crushed bone and fragments of brain often spattered the killer.

Several remarkable features marked the police battalion: It was possible to be excused from the killing, as too upsetting or unacceptable, without facing punishment and it was relatively easy to transfer to another assignment. However, the cases of men who chose to be excused were exceedingly rare. Second, the habitual cruelty--humiliation of victims before they were shot or gassed in portable installations, beatings, indifference to whether Jews about to be buried were actually dead--that accompanied the killings was voluntary and not a part of the orders issued to the battalions. Third, the men of the police battalions were not ashamed of their murders. On the contrary, quite often they arranged to be photographed “at work,” sending these mementos home and, not infrequently, they were accompanied on killing expeditions by visiting wives and fiancees.

The material relating to work camps demonstrates the noneconomic nature of the Final Solution. At a time of acute labor shortages, Germans created working conditions for Jewish prisoners--a valuable and urgently needed pool of skilled manpower--that quickly made them unfit for work. Besides, much of the work was designed to be unproductive. The underlying motive, Goldhagen believes, was the anti-Semitic postulate that Jews loathe honest work. To make them work, therefore, was in itself a just punishment, which the unbridled and spontaneous cruelty of the guards, male and female, turned into slaughter by torture.

As for the death marches, a large part of which took place in Germany itself, therefore not at all out of sight of the German population, they offer conclusive proof of the acquiescence of ordinary Germans, who witnessed beatings of marching prisoners, shootings, etc.

The task of evaluating and challenging Goldhagen’s sources, and the use he made of them, must fall to experts on modern German history. I must confess to having been troubled by his failure to explore certain subjects. For instance, how is one to reconcile the remarkable success of assimilated Jews in Germany in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in all walks of life except in the army, with the virulence and monolithic quality of German anti-Semitism that Goldhagen depicts? I suppose that the answer is in the theory of latency.

Another issue is anti-Semitism in other European countries. Goldhagen refers to the cooperation of the Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Latvian populations in the extermination of their Jews. With the exception of Poland, these were, of course, the countries where “Hiwis,” the local volunteers who assisted in the killings in ghettos and elsewhere, were recruited. But how and why was French anti-Semitism different from the German kind? Goldhagen points out that the success of the Final Solution depended on the attitude of the non-Jewish population. Thus, Danes, Italians and Bulgarians, in different ways and to varying degrees, protected their Jews. Since the Christian tradition of anti-Semitism had operated on them as well, how is one to account for the difference of attitude? Why were Germans relatively more circumspect in the former Czechoslovakia? The answer cannot be that Christians in those countries were willing to stand up for their Jews simply because there were so few of them there to hate. After all, the Jewish population of Germany was small, and so was that of France.

I have been convinced for a long time that the indispensable condition for the German attack on German Jews, which began almost as soon as Hitler came to power, was the incomprehension, fear and, finally, hatred of the Jew as the “other” who lived next door. Goldhagen would agree; he cites the massacres of Armenians by Turks and Hutus by Tutsis and vice-versa, among many other gory and shameful examples of internecine slaughter. Nazis knew how to make use of people’s inability to recognize the humanity of the “other.” Thus, Nuremberg laws were designed to make Jews “socially dead,” legitimizing and facilitating their elimination.

But, as Goldhagen points out, Germans went much further, their goal having been to kill all Jews, and not just the Jews in their midst. Had they not been defeated, it is fair to suppose that there would not be one Jew living in the lands under their control. Hatred so powerful, and so totally abstract, lacking a territorial, ideological or religious basis--Germans killed with the same enthusiasm rightist and Communist Jews and Jews who had converted to Christianity--is utterly terrifying. It leaves one feeling there is no place to hide. Is that still the German reality? Occasional desecrations of Jewish cemeteries and anti-Semitic graffiti aside, it would seem, based on such premises as political actions of the new German state (reparations, attitude toward Israel, etc.), anecdotal evidence gathered through personal experience and opinion polls, that the new generations of Germans, born during or after the war, are not particularly anti-Semitic. Is this another period of latency or a more permanent condition?