Germans Denounce Holocaust Theory

German historians and critics furiously assail an American author for arguing that the Holocaust sprang from a rabid anti-Semitism that was peculiar to Germany.

The uproar over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” is one of the loudest in this country over how to explain the murder of 12 million people, 6 million of them Jews.

“We don’t dispute the atrocities,” Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein wrote in the magazine. But to say that most Germans wanted Jews exterminated “is ignorant, if not in fact malicious,” he said.

Similar reactions to Goldhagen’s book have shown up in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, two of Germany’s most respected newspapers.

In years past, there have been arguments among German historians over how it happened that normal Germans let Adolf Hitler come to power and then looked the other way as Jews were sent off to extermination camps.

So far, however, the consensus among German historians is that Goldhagen’s own theses are way off base.

Norbert Frei, a Berlin historian, agrees with Goldhagen that the Third Reich was suffused with anti-Semitism. But Frei says it is wrong to assert that “nearly the whole German society wished for this genocide.”

In his book, Goldhagen says as many as half a million Germans were active participants in the Holocaust and that many of them killed with relish.

Goldhagen tells of Police Battalion 101, whose 500 members included only a few from the Nazis’ elite SS force. It was one of many such units that executed Polish Jews and oversaw their deportation to extermination camps.

Goldhagen said a commander of the battalion offered to excuse anyone who didn’t want to take part in killings, but that few accepted the offer. Some officers even invited their wives to witness an Aug. 25, 1942, blood bath at Miedzyrzec, Poland, Goldhagen says.

According to Goldhagen, the wives watched as their husbands forced hundreds of Jews, including children, from their homes, made them sit in the burning sun and shot those who moved.

Frei says hatred of Jews was not the only motive of those who participated in the killings. Also playing a role, he says, were peer pressure, emotions that had been numbed by the war, alcohol abuse and other factors.

Frei says Goldhagen’s book contains virtually nothing new, pointing out that American historian Christopher Browning wrote about Police Battalion 101 in a book published four years ago.

Other critics say that Goldhagen has revived a theory about the origins of the Holocaust that first was introduced by American and British historians after the Nazis’ defeat and later abandoned because it assumed “collective guilt” for all Germans.

More recent theories have argued that ordinary Germans supported Hitler because of his charisma and his promises to end the country’s 1930s economic crisis.

Frank Schirrmacher, cultural editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said Goldhagen seems to be arguing that Germans always will be anti-Semites.

“If one believes the thesis of this book, the Germans’ road into the 21st century can be viewed only with skepticism and fear,” Schirrmacher wrote.

Freiburg historian Manfred Messerschmidt, a Third Reich expert, said he welcomes Goldhagen’s book because the discussion about guilt for the Holocaust needs to be kept alive. But he said Goldhagen goes too far.

“It is wrong to say that Germany was the only anti-Semitic culture,” because there were strong anti-Jewish sentiments in France and other countries, Messerschmidt said in an interview.

Other critics of Goldhagen’s work point out that Latvians, Lithuanians and others eagerly helped the Nazis kill Jews.

But Klaus Dede, a journalist who has researched the Third Reich, says he thinks Goldhagen has hit the nail right on the head.

When he was a youth, says Dede, boys his age sang an anti-Semitic song with gusto. One of the stanzas goes:

“Farmers, townsfolk and workers are wielding sword and hammer, fighting for Hitler, for work and for bread. As for Jews--they should be dead.”

Dede says he thinks many of the boys really wanted Jews to die.