How Could They?

We know a great deal about how Germans, in the last years of the Third Reich, killed the Jews. But in spite of many shelves of books and research works, still rapidly extending year by year, we still do not really know why. There is a mass of evidence, often contradictory, about the motives--social, political, psychopathic--which appear to have influenced those who took part directly in the killing, those who organized it and those who were passively aware of it and did nothing to protest. But the central, simple, human question--”How could they?”--remains without a satisfactory answer.

In the last 35 years, there have been three great intellectual battles among historians of modern Germany. The first, in the early 1960s, raged around Fritz Fischer’s assertion that World War I had been deliberately started by imperial Germany. The second, historikerstreit, broke out some 12 years ago, when the conservative historian Ernst Nolte suggested that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event in the 20th century and that it derived to some extent from the example of the gigantic massacres already perpetrated in the Soviet Union by Stalin.

The third battle is about Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” The book has been hugely successful, selling some 500,000 copies so far. But it is also furiously contested, and “A Nation on Trial” is only the latest of many onslaughts on Goldhagen’s work. Unhappily but inevitably, this battle is being fought not only by reason and scholarship but with frantic abuse and hatred. Goldhagen’s thesis was supple. There is no mystery, he said, about how “some Germans--or SS men, or Nazis”--could murder millions of helpless and unarmed men, women and children. They killed them because they intensely wanted to do so. A murderous strain of anti-Semitism that preached extermination as “the solution to the Jewish problem” had permeated German society long before Hitler came to power. The killing of the Jews was not the act of a fanatical minority but a “national project,” solidly supported by German “common sense.” Goldhagen argued that it was sheer obfuscation to label the killers “Nazis” or “SS men,” because “their chief common denominator was that they were all Germans, pursuing German national political goals--in this case, the genocidal killing of Jews.”

The book unleashed pandemonium on several fronts. In Germany, there was a complex split of opinion among liberal intellectuals. Some thought Goldhagen was right to puncture the comfortable myth that most Germans had nothing to do with the crimes of a tiny minority; the book’s appearance in Germany coincided with a devastating exhibition about the Wehrmacht that showed that ordinary German soldiers--not just the black-uniformed SS--committed terrible atrocities throughout Europe during the war. Other critics, however, protested that Goldhagen’s scholarship and method were so wild and defective that he had made it harder, rather than easier, to get at the truth.

In the outside world, above all in North America, the conflict was even more painful. Simmering feuds between rival concepts of Jewishness in the post-Holocaust world burst into flame, and the band of Holocaust scholars exploded into struggling factions. Among the walking wounded so far is Ruth Birn, one of the authors of “A Nation on Trial” and chief historian of the war crimes section of the Canadian Department of Justice. When she wrote an article in a British journal suggesting that “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” distorted evidence and read “like a bad crime novel,” she was threatened with an action for defamation by Goldhagen’s lawyers. Meanwhile, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is calling on the publishers to pulp “A Nation on Trial” before it reaches the bookstores. He proclaims that Norman Finkelstein’s views have no credibility because they are “tainted by his anti-Zionist stance.” Foxman’s final argument, which should figure in every lexicon of censorship, is simply this: “The issue . . . is not whether Goldhagen’s thesis is right or wrong but what is ‘legitimate criticism’ and what goes beyond the pale.”

“A Nation on Trial” is not exactly a joint work but consists of a critical essay by each author. Finkelstein’s is much the longer and the more aggressive. “Replete with gross misrepresentations of the secondary literature and internal contradictions, Goldhagen’s book is worthless as scholarship,” he declares on the second page and goes on to savage the weakest part of the Goldhagen thesis: the claim that “exterminist” anti-Semitism had been a prevailing German mind-set for many years before the rise of the Nazis. Finkelstein demonstrates that there is no real evidence for this and plenty of evidence pointing the other way. There was certainly widespread anti-Semitic ire, but almost nobody thought in terms of mass murder. I think Finkelstein is right about this, but I would add another point: Although Germany’s pre-1933 Jewish population knew they were resented and often hated, they never seriously supposed that their lives were in danger. Was this intelligent and observant community completely deluded about public opinion before the Nazis? Or were Germany’s Jews justified in their risk assessment at the time, and did the public mood turn toward apocalyptic racial violence only later, under Nazi manipulation? To evade this problem, Goldhagen performs a semantic trick. He claims that the idea of “elimination,” ranging from wishing that Jews could be kept out of the professions to wishing that they could all be expelled from Germany, is actually the idea of “extermination” in embryo. In other words, the Germans were committed to the mass murder of the Jews long before they knew that they were. Even the pro-Jewish intellectuals of the German Enlightenment turn out to have been unconscious ancestors of the SS because they made Jews welcome in Christian society and thus lured them away from their own roots. Goldhagen writes about “philosemitic anti-Semites” and about “the assimilationist version of the eliminationist mind-set.” It’s hard not to agree with Finkelstein’s acid comment: “Small wonder that Goldhagen is able to prove that Germany was a nation of murderous Jew-haters.”

Finkelstein has an easy job knocking apart Goldhagen’s version of the historical background. He also points out with glee the absurdity of Goldhagen’s “happy ending”: his assertion that centuries of murderous, visceral Jew-hatred ended in 1945 when, penitent after American re-education, the Germans suddenly decided to stop being anti-Semitic. As Birn writes, “here Goldhagen’s argumentation becomes almost farcical.”

Then Finkelstein comes to the central part of Goldhagen’s book. This consists of two highly documented case studies of atrocity: the “death-march” of prisoners from the Helmbrechts concentration camp and--the key item of the author’s evidence--the chronicle of Police Battalion 101 as it moved through eastern Poland slaughtering the Jewish population of village after village. The importance of Battalion 101 for Goldhagen is twofold. First, it was composed not of selected and trained Nazi killers but of randomly selected men, often middle-aged or with young families, who had not been conscripted into the army for a variety of reasons: in other words, “ordinary Germans.” Second, the unit’s members (or many of them) behaved with monstrous and apparently gratuitous cruelty to their victims, far beyond their basic task of shooting women and children and heaping them into mass graves. For Goldhagen, these two facts are proof of his “monocausal” thesis. They demonstrate that, in killing Jews, the Germans were simply fulfilling a deep desire that they had been nursing for generations.

Finkelstein and Birn pick innumerable holes in Goldhagen’s use of this evidence. But it is Klaus Fischer, in his long, fair and carefully balanced book about the Germans and the Holocaust, who gets to the real point about “gratuitous cruelty” in a way that does further, although indirect, damage to the Goldhagen thesis.

The SS themselves were trained--as grotesque as it sounds--to suppress personal impulses toward sadism or unnecessary brutality. The executioner was to remain a moral being who was able to perform frightful deeds only because he had fully understood and internalized the “historic necessity” for them. The police reservists, on the other hand, were given no such political preparation. In Battalion 101, those who could not stomach the job were allowed to fall out and were not punished. The rest were soon behaving like fiends from hell, but for reasons that had little to do with ideology and much to do with the darkest and most disgusting mechanisms of the human psyche.

At the end of the 20th century, we know far more than our luckier grandparents about those mechanisms. As Fischer shrewdly observes, “torture, cruelty, degradation are necessary elements in destroying human beings because they make it easier for the perpetrators to kill. . . . Gratuitous cruelty conditions those who have to carry out mass killings; it makes it possible for them to do what they did.” That has been as true in Latin America or Rwanda or Bosnia as it was in German-occupied Europe. Whatever their atrocities prove, it is not that the men of Battalion 101 were acting out of any preexisting “exterminist” beliefs. They doubtlessly loathed “the Jews” and agreed that they were one of the world’s misfortunes. But to kill them willingly, even with enthusiasm, required a state of mind that had to be constructed, step by step, until the necessary condition of numbness was acquired. To dehumanize the victims, by applying bestial cruelty to them in the prelude to finally taking their lives, was the first, indispensable lesson to be mastered.

This point is eagerly snatched up by Finkelstein. Goldhagen, he claims, has painted himself into a corner by admitting that Germans with more Nazi indoctrination (like the uniformed SS) were actually less brutal to Jews than Germans who lacked party discipline and racialist training. Where does that leave the native “exterminist anti-Semitism” that Goldhagen attributes to the German nation? But here Finkelstein’s fury runs ahead of his logic, and it’s at about this stage in the book that the reader may begin to feel impatient with him.

The trouble with Finkelstein is that he is not content to win an argument. He carries on with foaming relish until he thinks he has stomped his opponent to dust. This is irritating, because so much of what he has to say is important as well as provocative. He makes, for instance, a distinction between “Holocaust scholarship” and “Holocaust literature”--the one historical and multicausal, the other “unhistorical and monocausal.” The scholars agree that popular German anti-Semitism was only one of the factors behind Hitler’s rise to power and the Final Solution. The litterateurs, in contrast, see the Nazi genocide as “the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews” and insist on the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, something that must never be “relativized” by comparison to other genocidal slaughters.

Goldhagen’s book, according to Finkelstein, is the first foray from Holocaust literature to invade the territory of scholarship. And he goes on to denounce the literature as a genre developed for “crass political motives” to provide moral support for the state of Israel. “Holocaust literature first flourished in the wake of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This is the crucial context for comprehending the Goldhagen phenomenon.”

Much of this is true, or partly true. But Finkelstein puts it so ruthlessly with such extremes and reductions that he comes close to producing his own Holocaust “anti-literature.” The truth is more complicated, and--to go back to the central piece of evidence here--it would be tragic if anybody concluded from Finkelstein that the tale of Police Battalion 101 is not worth studying. This testimony is one of the most terrible documents to emerge from the 20th century. If Goldhagen fails to extract from it conclusive evidence for his main thesis, the story of that unit nonetheless shows that “ordinary” Germans could be induced to show pitiless savagery to Jews and that a substantial percentage of other “ordinary” Germans must have known what was going on.

Fischer in “The History of an Obsession” sums up the current state of opinion among historians. “One emerging consensus . . . indicates that the German people did not subscribe to the biological-racial Jew-hatred of the Nazi leadership. The best judgment on the nature of public Judeophobia in Nazi Germany and its effects is that of Norman Cohn, who argued that ‘the majority was conditioned not so much to fanatical hatred as to utter indifference.’ This was no small achievement, for it was all that the murderers needed by way of public support to carry out their crime.”

Peter Fritsche, in his “Germans Into Nazis,” makes a different but crucial point about public opinion in the 1930s and 1940s. He recalls--and this is something that foreigners living in Germany have always understood more readily than academics--that the popular appeal of Hitler’s movement lay much more in the hope and optimism it generated than in its various invitations to hate and to fear. Fritsche agrees that the murderous Judeophobia of the Nazis was not particularly attractive to the German public. “One key plank in Hitler’s world view was neither wholeheartedly shared nor completely understood by most voters; the racial vernacular of his social Darwinism, his all-embracing anti-Semitism, and the stern eugenic administration such convictions implied may have moved true believers, but not party sympathizers.”

My own view is that support for the Nazis is best understood by the image of a bundle of assorted sticks--a fascis, indeed, in the Latin sense of the word. Hitler’s platform was made up of wildly different planks, incoherently looted from Left and Right: hatred of the old German social order, the promise to overturn the Versailles frontiers, anti-Bolshevism, nostalgia for rural purities, anti-Semitism, a program to overcome mass unemployment, worship of militarism and so forth. Most Germans believed in some of these causes; very few indeed believed in all of them. But they were all bound together into a single bundle by the party. And when the party and Fuhrer vanished in 1945, the bundle fell instantly apart again. This allowed postwar Germans to plead, absurdly but not entirely without sincerity: “I believed in an anti-Bolshevist crusade and reconquering Alsace. But I never agreed with state-run trade unions or with killing the Jews--so I was never really a Nazi!” The reasons why so many Germans took part in the mass murder of the Jews were also contained in a bundle of motives: official racial propaganda, group pressure, the brutalization of war, the impulse of revenge for German war casualties, indifference to the humanity of “others.” There was a background of traditional anti-Semitism, varying greatly from one individual to another. But to attribute the Holocaust to that one element alone does not enlarge the history of Germany. It evades it.