Demonizing the Germans:
A New Mythology of Collective Guilt

THE VICTORY OF HITLER'S NATIONAL SOCIALISTS (NAZIS) IN 1933 was the victory of political antisemitism. As such, however, it was but part of the victory of counterrevolution -- of the drive to eradicate the constitutional state embodied by the Weimar republic, but that had existed in the united Germany since 1871, and in its component provinces, such as Prussia, since the early 19th century. It was the destruction, not only of that state, but of the emancipatory social movements and institutions that were part of the bourgeois democracy that safeguarded them, however ineffectually much of the time. It was the stifling of the spirit of 1789 proclaiming human rights -- the reactionary undertaking openly declared by Joseph Goebbels. Reading Daniel Goldhagen,^* one would scarcely know any of this; one would remain ignorant of the historical defeat those movements and institutions suffered as the essential prerequisite for the ascendancy of German fascism to power. The postulates for the preconditions of the Holocaust which he attempts to establish pay little if any attention to the key political events, in the absence of which the Holocaust would never have occurred.

Weimar was the work of the German working class -- an attempt to establish a democratic republic, and rid Germany of its authoritarian hierarchies in government, factories, and universities. Weimar ultimately failed. It underwent relentless attacks from the right. Its extension of workers' rights was resisted by industry, often bitterly. The left remained deeply divided, in large part because the German Communists were beholden to the dictates of Moscow, resulting in policies unacceptable to the German Social Democrats. The greatest threat to Weimar proved to be the 1930s worldwide depression which caused the immiserization of great masses of people everywhere -- and which multiplied the dangers facing German democracy from the nationalist, anti-republican Right. German democracy could not overcome these dangers.

Leon Trotsky thought, at the time, that the great workers' organizations, although weakened by mass unemployment, still remained "gigantic obstacles" to a Nazi victory; and that the Weimar state, however compromised, afforded the necessary framework for those organizations' struggles. But their leadership lacked audacity and determination. It recoiled from brute force. Nevertheless, in the last multiparty elections tolerated by the Nazi regime in March 1933, elections already far from truly free, the German Left still received 12 million votes (the Nazis 17 million). The Social Democrats were the only party -- the Communist Party had been prohibited -- to vote against the enabling law which, in effect, allowed Hitler to emasculate the Reichstag (parliament). The Social Democrats' leader, Otto Wels, solemnly affirmed the values which his party defended -- humanity, justice, freedom, and socialism. Its historical defeat notwithstanding, German social democracy endured as the fundamental alternative to fascist dictatorship.

Reading Goldhagen, we would remain ignorant of the possibilities of this alternative, and what it reveals about a large and significant part of German society. One would not know about the universe of discourse -- of the rational cognitive approach to politics and the understanding of capitalist society -- which the movements and institutions of the German Left, with the exception of Stalinist ideologues, embodied and which were mercilessly suppressed by police terror, and the murder or forced exile of their protagonists. Goldhagen is unconcerned with these matters. He even tends to dismiss them as of little if any significance to his argument, even though he claims to "explain" the Holocaust.

BEFORE TURNING TO HIS EXPLANATION, WE WILL BRIEFLY RECALL some of the features of the Nazi regime as the destructive agent of German civil society. It permanently suspended all civil liberties following the Reichstag fire in early 1933. It created the secret state police (Gestapo) as one of its major instruments of political terror, with all actions of this body immune to judicial review. It abolished the principle of "no punishment outside the law," as well as the judiciary's autonomy; the Fuehrer's edict could overrule the law as well as impose the degree of punishment. It created concentration camps -- "emblematic institutions of Germany during the Nazi regime,"as Goldhagen correctly states -- where, until the late 1930s, i.e., prior to the establishment of work and death camps outside Germany, no fewer than 200,000 non-Jewish Germans were incarcerated for alleged political, racial, or "asocial" offenses. The regime dissolved all political parties other than its own, rendering parliament an empty shell, notwithstanding the fact that more than half of the German electorate had voted for parties other than the Nazis in the March 1933 elections. As a result of the suppression of civil freedoms and of all opposition (including, of course, the opposition press and publishing houses, and the banishment and burning of their earlier publications), the regime attained the monopoly of information, which facilitated the calumniation of the Jews and the measures taken against them. These lay at the core of the regime's racist policies. But they were by no means their only component. Among its objectives was the creation of a racially "homogeneous" class of overlords, a new aristocracy as represented by the S.S. (defense squads), the innermost core of the regime (Bracher). These overlords were in charge of accomplishing the regime's imperialist aims, and hence the subjection or destruction of the "racially inferior" people who inhabited the "living space" required to fulfill those aims.

The regime's monopoly of information (or propaganda) was not merely designed to stifle opposition; it was used to attain its racist objectives, in particular, to indoctrinate younger Germans with its racist ideology who would in time serve in German military organizations. It imparted distorted views of reality which contributed to the unspeakable inhumanities perpetrated upon the peoples of Eastern Europe, not least by the German armed forces of Germany. (Omer Bartov). The role of Nazi ideology, no longer exposed to competing ideas but propagated within contexts ever more carefully insulated from differing intellectual or spiritual tendencies, is completely disregarded by Goldhagen. (The exclusion of competing ideologies lay at the root of the 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI, "With deep anxiety" ("Mit brennender Sorge"), in which the Pope complained about the increasing repression of Catholic youth education by the Nazis despite assurances of non-interference contained in the earlier Concordat.)

AS IS KNOWN BY NOW BY MANY WHO HAVE READ OR HEARD ABOUT HIS WORK, Goldhagen attributes the Holocaust solely, and with single-minded conviction, to what he alleges to have been the pervasive antisemitism of German society -- an "eliminationist" antisemitism, merely intensified under the Nazis, but not qualitatively different from what it had been prior to their ascendancy, and since the early 19th century, when the religiously motivated antisemitism tended to turn political. The argument is powerfully and wrathfully presented. In its simplicity, compulsive repetition, and documentation that extends over 20 percent of the vast 600-page work, it has strong appeal to readers, many of whom will be inclined to believe that more "complex" explanations are needless at best, exculpatory at worst. However, Goldhagen's approach essentially forecloses historical analysis. I will return to this problem further on.

The German historian Hans Mommsen has written that, while Nazi propaganda was savagely directed against the Jews, this cannot explain why so many people who were directly or indirectly involved in the destruction of the Jews, did not find some way to withhold their cooperation. Officials of the Reich railways and the Reichsbank, the diplomatic service, the civilian administration in the occupied territories, the German and non-German police forces -- all contributed actively to the Holocaust in some form. The crucial question is why they were able, with such strange consistency, to suppress such knowledge as dawned upon them.

It is a question Mommsen proves unable to answer. Answers have, of course, been attempted, such as the secularization of social organization and the resultant amorality; the social distance sedulously created between the bureaucracy that implemented the Holocaust and the victims; the large-scale murder of people by quasi-industrial methods, again neutralizing contact between executor and victim; in sum, the obliteration of the victim's "face." This was of prime concern to the Nazis in regard to the Jews: the burning of synagogues, the arrest of Jewish men, and the destruction of Jewish property on November 9, 1938 was, for the most part, carried out by Nazi storm troopers from outside given localities, ensuring that they were strangers to their victims, that no familiarity would interfere emotionally with their destructive role.

The Mommsen essay cited here is titled, "The Realization of the Unthinkable." For Goldhagen, the Holocaust was neither unthinkable, nor inexplicable. The title of his book summarizes his indictment -- ordinary Germans, represented by a few battalions of middle-aged policemen, willingly, even eagerly, killed Jews in occupied Eastern Europe, their voluntarism evidenced by their having been otherwise free to desist from the killing, had they so desired -- and desist without prejudice to their status or the need to fear punishment.

What motivated the perpetrators, what fueled their voluntarism was, writes Goldhagen, "a particular type of antisemitism that led them to conclude that the Jews ought to die." (Emphasis in original) Their antisemitism was shared by other "ordinary" Germans -- the Holocaust was "a German national project"; the Germans' antisemitic beliefs were "the central causal agent of the Holocaust."

Goldhagen stresses the ordinariness of the police battalion members time and again: only one third of them, he reports, were members of the Nazi party; they had not been selected for their military or ideological fitness; their weapons training had been "poor"; they had had no preparatory training for their genocidal tasks. Moreover, the civilian police from which they had been recruited was not specifically a Nazi institution. Furthermore, as noted above, "the men knew they did not have to kill," i.e. they were not coerced into killing Jews. Goldhagen's case rests on his claim, bolstered by intensive research from court records assembled over the 1962-72 decade, of the "ordinariness" of the police battalion members, which meant that "the regime proceeded as if any German was fit to be a mass executioner."

Statements like these cannot be either accepted or dismissed lightly; they require exploration, which cannot be done here. Suffice it to note that beginning in 1933, the police in German cities and rural areas were "assisted" by auxiliaries recruited from Nazi Storm Troopers. The demise of the Storm Troopers, who represented a radical threat to the regime, came in 1934 with the murder of their chief, Ernst Roehm, and many of his associates. Thereafter, according to K. D. Bracher's authoritative work on the German dictatorship, there was the "revolutionary regrouping of the police" which, in time, and within the organizational framework of Heinrich Himmer's S.S., made them fit to participate in ruling the occupied territories of the East. The police were perhaps not subject to the same selection process as members of the S.S. but were under the general command of the S.S., with Himmler as the supreme police chief, in addition to heading the S.S. It is not entirely credible that the members of the police battalions Goldhagen researched were quite as "ordinary" as he views them.

The police battalion members Goldhagen studied were presumably representative of the German population at large. Goldhagen, of course, does not (and would hardly be able to) defend this inference on statistical grounds. He does so in light of his larger argument, that "Nazi antisemitism was integral to the beliefs of ordinary Germans"; that it constituted "an axiom of German culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries"; and that the antisemitism of the Nazi period represented "a mere accentuated and elaborated form of an already broadly accepted basic model." This was the "cognitive model" of the Jews as pernicious and malevolent, inassimilable into, and corruptive of German culture which, being socially generated and diffused, became part of the structure of the German mind. Hence, the emblematic character of the police units and of their behavior.

THE GERMANS' ANTISEMITISM IS CONSTRUED BY GOLDHAGEN AS DIFFERING SO WIDELY from the antisemitism of the "West" that he believes that anthropological methods are required to comprehend it. He imputes a generic murderousness to the Germans -- to be sure, to generations preceding the present one -- that, as Omer Bartov has observed, bizarrely inverts the Nazis' portrayal of the Jews.

It is beyond dispute that antisemitism was widespread in Germany, particularly among those who were academically trained. Although antisemitism was far more virulent in Eastern Europe and possibly also in France, "Death was a Master from Germany." No other state lent itself fully to murdering Jews. But, again, it took the virtual destruction of the basic civil institutions in Germany, and certainly the war, to carry out the Holocaust.

There is also the more banal question: why, if killing Jews was so popular in Germany, did Himmler and his henchmen attempt to keep their murderous actions secret? Was it because the German people were not sufficiently "mature" to accept their actions with equanimity? (Bracher.)

GOLDHAGEN CONSISTENTLY DISMISSES OR BELITTLES German opposition to the Nazi regime. Such opposition, he says, was hardly ever directed against the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. Referring to the men who plotted to kill Hitler in 1944, he writes that they were "not moved ... by a principled disapproval of the elimination of the Jews from German society." It is an astonishing statement, attesting to the author's incomprehension of anti-fascist politics whose first imperative was the overthrow of the Hitler regime. He gives no credence to the motivation of those men, which was to stop the war and restore Germany as a civil society. Reading such testimony as Helmuth von Moltke's (executed by the Nazis as one of the hundred men accused of having plotted against Hitler) and other pertinent works, who would doubt that the murder of the Jews would have stopped, and antisemitic decrees been nullified, had they succeeded.

Goldhagen asserts that the Nazis might have moderated their anti-Jewish measures, had the German churches protested. Perhaps. It is true that the German churches, with rare exceptions of courageous individual clergymen, did not play an honorable role in Nazi Germany. They never inveighed against the militarization of the country. They conformed to the Nazis' "Aryan" standards of race "purity," dismissing pastors not meeting them. Converted Jews could not expect the Catholic Church's fidelity to its own teachings. The churches remained silent when, in November 1938, synagogues were burned, and Jewish men were incarcerated and killed; and largely silent about the deportations of Jews. Goldhagen points to the protest of the bishop of Munster, von Galen, in 1941 against the euthanasia program (which was meant to eliminate "life without value"). The program was stopped as a result of the protest. Hence his belief that similar protests might have cautioned the Nazis about their anti-Jewish policies. Here again, the underlying argument is that the churches, like all Germans, were too possessed by antisemitism to venture such protests.

Goldhagen misreads the implacable hostility of the leading Nazis to all contesting views. The euthanasia program he cites had been operating for years before Bishop v. Galen rallied himself to oppose it publicly; thereafter, he remained under close Gestapo surveillance. (Sarah Gordon) Nor was the exception the churches took to the Nazis' racist doctrines, however circumlocutious such exceptions were, countenanced by the Nazis. For example, a lengthy, theologically-based protest against Nazi "paganism" and racism by a synod of the German Confessing Church in 1935 was answered by the imprisonment of 500 pastors; they were soon released, except for 27 of them who were sent to concentration camps. Protestant magazines were prohibited. The writers of memoranda to Hitler protesting concentration camps were severely punished. The Nazis' response to the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, mentioned earlier, was to accuse hundreds of Catholic clergy and monks of moral turpitude, incarcerating them, and closing many convents and theological institutions. (NS Dokumente)

The churches were caught up in their own tradition-sanctioned anti-Judaism, as well as in the Lutheran doctrine, largely also abided by the Roman Church, of keeping the affairs of religion separate from the affairs of the state -- a pernicious doctrine under which immoral actions by the state would remain unquestioned. (Of prominent churchmen, only Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, executed in 1945 for participating in the plot against Hitler, protested this stance.) The churches failed to intercede for the Jews, and were Hitler's allies in the war against the Soviet Union ("godless Bolshevism"). They remained suspect nonetheless. Serious protests against Nazi racist policies might be met by harsh anti-Church and antisemitic measures -- as the examples cited show and as also occurred in Holland during World War II. When, in 1942, Dutch bishops protested the antisemitic "excesses" perpetrated in their occupied country, the Gestapo arrested a number of Catholic priests and religious of Jewish descent (including the nun-philosopher Edith Stein), and sent them to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. (New Catholic Encyclopedia)

Hitler's Willing Executioners features a lengthy chapter on the evolution of "eliminationist" antisemitism in modern Germany. The chapter reflects the author's "understanding of 19th-century antisemitism," and "emphasizes the underlying continuity of German antisemitism and asserts its ubiquity." It is thus meant to reaffirm his thesis that the Holocaust was the outcome of the Germans' demonic conception of the Jews. This conception, however occasionally modified by circumstances, Goldhagen believes to have been integral to the social and political evolution of modern Germany. Antisemitism underlay not only the resistance to the emancipation of the German Jews, but its very understanding and the conditions implicitly attached to its fulfillment. The secularized image of the Jew as inassimilable alien, formulated by various academic writers early in the century, gradually took on political weight, especially during and after the 1870s, and was heir to the "ubiquitous and profound hatred of the ghettoized Jewry" in Germany during medieval and early modern times.

TO ANYONE ACQUAINTED WITH THE HISTORY OF THE GERMAN JEWS, Goldhagen's description of the evolution of antisemitism in Germany is both puzzling and questionable. It is puzzling because he ignores the political functions of antisemitism, which were not directed against the Jews alone but sought to integrate anti-enlightenment and anti-emancipatory tendencies deliberately directed against the rise of social democracy, workers' rights movements, pacifism, and the rights of minorities, such as the Poles who resided in much of northeastern Germany. (Zmarzlik) It is questionable because the struggle for emancipation ultimately succeeded. In 1870, the constitution of the German Empire incorporated the emancipation law that had been passed in 1869 by the (unified) Germany's predecessor, the North German Federation.

Emancipation lifted all special laws imposing disabilities upon Jews and restricting the rights of citizenship. It did not eliminate social discrimination. Jews could not become officers (except during World War I). They were unable to advance in the judiciary or in the civil service. Few Jews became full university professors; none has been known to be appointed a teacher in a primary school prior to Weimar. Emancipation progressed but haltingly. In France, it was proclaimed in 1789; in Germany, it took on a "probationary" character. Hundreds of petitions opposing emancipation were filed with provincial diets throughout much of the l9th century. They remained rearguard actions; the opponents of emancipation impeded but could not stop it. (Ruerup)

It is true that the non-Jewish proponents and supporters of emancipation expected the Jews to assimilate; many, perhaps most of them, presumed that assimilation ultimately entailed baptism. (Stern) Such ideas flowed from a conception of the nation as a historically homogeneous organism, homogeneity being also defined in terms of adherence to Christian beliefs. Such monolithic conceptions of the nation were subscribed to in most continental countries, and became a source of virulent antisemitism late in the l9th and during the 20th centuries. It should be noted here that the German Jews did not generally compromise their religious beliefs. Quite the contrary. For example, Leopold Zunz, an outstanding scholar and, co-founder of the Science of Judaism, opposed all discussion of matters of Jewish faith in demanding emancipation; not an inch should be yielded to the adversaries of emancipation when they accused the Jews of separatism or of adhering to parts of the Talmud or the Thora supposedly not in accord with "morality." Gabriel Riesser, an uncompromising fighter for emancipation, and 2nd vice president of the 1848 preparliaments, published a periodical provocatively titled, The Jew, and, wielding an eloquent pen, would allow no one to doubt the right of the Jews to full citizenship in "their fatherland." Similarly, to the reproach of certain editors of the German liberal press voiced in 1893, that the Jews were still teaching the Talmud (widely viewed as obscurantist and anti-Christian), a spokesman for the Jewish community responded that German Jewry would not abandon its historic tradition, including the oral law, in order to achieve complete equality in Germany. (U. Tal)

If antisemitism in Germany prior to the Nazi regime was as "eliminationist" as Goldhagen contends, then we cannot account for the social and political advance of the German Jews -- their virtual "eruption," as one historian has termed it, into German culture, commerce, journalism, the natural sciences, and (although decreasingly) finance. It isn't possible here to list even the more representative names of the participants in those fields and what they achieved, or the data documenting their rising occupational and economic status. It is worth noting, however, that during the era of the Wilhemine monarchy, some 4,000 Jews were elected to town councils -- indicating the confidence of broad layers of the public in Jewish citizens as public officials, a confidence that lasted throughout much of the Weimar period. (Zmarzlik)

THE RAPID EXPANSION OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM, THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF IMPERIALIST CONQUESTS, and a disproportionately high attendance at high schools and universities, were the essential conditions for the Jews' advance (as was true for the Western and Central European middle classes generally). The spread of mass production, department stores, and free international trade, however, threatened the existence of smaller craftsmen, retailers, and peasants, disturbing the balance of their small-scale lives. These factors, along with the heightened visibility of the Jews, fueled antisemitism (not only in Germany), and permitted politicians to use antisemitism to rally support. However, the antisemitic parties which arose in the 1870S and persisted into the early 20th century remained weak. The integrative force of antisemitism -- by which it joined anti-republicanism, anti-socialism, and a populist nationalism -- did not fully mature until after World War I, largely as the result of defeat and profound crisis.

Prior to the Nazi regime, outbursts of antisemitism were usually suppressed by the police or, where needed, the military. The courts did not countenance the violation of the persons or property of Jews, or the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and sanctuaries. (Niewyk) The "populist" antisemitic disturbances during the 1848 upheavals, serious as they were, were virtually dismissed by Zunz; like other "mischief," they would leave no trace, and "freedom would endure." He was similarly "unconcerned" about the emergence of political antisemitism in the 1870s; in 1881, he thought that world literature and the press were more powerful than the "blockheads" who sought to imitate the middle ages. Zunz's firm belief in social progress was unshaken.

Heinrich A. Winkler, the outstanding historian of the Weimar republic, doubted that the world economic crisis that so severely affected Weimar gave rise to "spontaneous" antisemitic outbursts. A number of antisemitic disturbances occurred between 1930 and 1932, but all of them were organized by the Nazis; calls for boycotting Jewish businesses went unheeded prior to 1933. Eva Reichmann, a onetime high official of the largest association of German Jews, held that the success of the Nazis with the German electorate reflected the desperate search for a way out of the crisis; and that it was the Nazis who gave impetus to antisemitism, not the other way around.

Ernest Hamburger, in his magisterial essay, "One Hundred Years of Emancipation" (Yearbook XIV, 1969, Leo Baeck Institute), writes that in 1932, as in the earlier years of the Weimar Republic, "the incidents of which the Jews were victims, often of a grave nature, did not become the norm ... (N)umerous non-Jews also, whether active in public life or not, were exposed to violence ... In 1932, the Jewish press continued to appear. Jewish associations operated freely, their members could meet and defend their rights ... and fight for their ideas and interests. Jewish firms were threatened only in exceptional cases ... and newspapers whose publishers or editors were well-known Jews had more readers and subscribers than the Voelkischer Beobachter and its provincial derivatives." (The Voelkischer Beobachter was the mass circulation newspaper of the Nazi Party.)

"Anti-Semitism was essentially absent from the labor movement," Hamburger writes. True, a strain of antisemitism has been traced among German workers. But, while the German Communist Party often made opportunistic use of antisemitism, hardly ever ran a Jew as candidate for the Reichstag, and among its 100 Reichstag delegates in 1932-33 did not count a single Jew, the Social Democrats never compromised their stand in upholding the civil equality of the Jews. According to Robert S. Wistrich, writing in his authoritative Socialism and the Jews, the Social Democrats "even put up Jewish candidates in areas where antisemitism was well-entrenched. Thus, Paul Singer was nominated in Berlin (1884) at the height of the Stoecker movement, as a deliberate gesture of defiance," as were Jewish candidates in Breslau and Dresden -- "centres of the German antisemitic movement. Forty-three out of the 417 Reichstag deputies between 181 and 1914 were Jews -- a figure representing ten times their proportion of the population as a whole." The Social Democrats' electoral practice -- which continued during the Weimar era -- starkly contrasted with the fecklessness of the German Liberal and Progressive parties which, although programmatically in support of equal civil rights for the Jews, would not run Jewish candidates after the 1880s for fear of losing votes.

The Social Democrats, in the late 19th-century pronouncements of some of its leaders, held that antisemitism represented a species of anti-capitalism, i.e., that it was a phase of populist thinking that would in time lead to the realization that the true "enemy" was the bourgeoisie, Jewish or non-Jewish. Such views, never accepted by thinkers like Kautsky or Bernstein, or such leaders as Bebel or Liebknecht, lost validity when the Russian pogroms occurred in 1906, and the realization dawned that a vast Jewish proletariat existed and struggled in Eastern Europe. The Weimar constitution, guaranteeing "full freedom of faith and conscience," and "admission to official posts ... independent of religious creed" was, in its time, unanimously accepted by the parties of the Socialist and Liberal Left (the Communist Party did not yet exist then) and the (Catholic) Center. The Social Democrats had become aware that the struggle for civil rights was unceasing; the full attainment of these rights could not wait for the advent of a socialist society.

Hamburger writes that "under the center, left-center and center-right governments which ruled the Reich and most of the Laender (provinces) until 1932, the provisions of the Constitution were, in general observed ... Jews were admitted to public office without any restrictions: to the Executive, all branches of the administration and the courts, a noteworthy accomplishment since ... the majority enjoyed by the parties of the Weimar coalition in the National Assembly was not reaffirmed" after the 1920 elections. Thus, the record of German Social Democracy as far as upholding the German Jews' civil rights is concerned, must be judged to have been unblemished.

Nevertheless, the often but reluctant acceptance, and cool rejection of the Jews by their fellow citizens was a melancholy experience for them. It fed self-doubt and ambivalence. It also spurred achievement in nearly all fields of culture and in physics and chemistry. Fritz Sternberg has written that German-Jewish scientists --- and it applies to Jewish men and women in other fields as well --- "thought Germany their only and best home, despite the antisemitism that crawled all around them. They may have loved not wisely but too well, and yet their sentiments are perhaps not so much an indictment of themselves, as a tribute to the appeals of Germany."

IT IS DIFFICULT TO COUNTERPOSE THE "ELIMINATIONIST" CHARACTER OF ANTISEMITISM postulated by Goldhagen to the findings sketched in the preceding passages. Nor did the "illusions" supposedly held by German Jews, blind them to the dangers of antisemitism. They desired, as a leader of their association stated, "an open, and liberal society" in order to attain "the full and final achievement of social emancipation" -- a promise which the Weimar republic held, and a vision shared by large sectors of non-Jewish Germany. The Holocaust darkened this vision. It did not extinguish it.

Goldhagen, however, views the victimization of the Jews as a permanent condition, notwithstanding the fundamental changes over the post-World War II period in the situation of world Jewry, as well as in the attitudes of non-Jews or at least of public institutions. Antisemitism, he says may fluctuate in intensity but is not eradicable.

A major substantive notion about antisemitism informs this study. . . . Over a period of years, antisemitism -- composed of a set of beliefs and cognitive models with a stable source metaphor and understanding of the nature of the Jews' putative perniciousness -- does not appear, disappear, then reappear in a given society. Always present, antisemitism becomes more or less manifest. Its cognitive salience, emotional intensity, and expression increases or decreases. The vagaries of politics and social conditions account for these swings.

In effect, Goldhagen thus retrojects the situation of the Jews, particularly of the German Jews, from 1945 back, as if all the strands of that history led to the Holocaust. It is inevitable perhaps that the Holocaust thus casts its shadow. Yet, this approach, which is not unique to Goldhagen, stamps the history of the Jews as a history of victims and victimization. It deprives the past of its integrity. If it were true that the Jews were forever victimized, their survival, the survival and vigor of Judaism, their acculturation in the most diverse political and cultural circumstances without surrendering the core of their teachings -- none of this could be understood. They would have disappeared long ago. Goldhagen's insistence upon the "ubiquity" of "eliminationist" antisemitism in Germany prior to the Nazi regime, and on his more general thesis of the fluctuation of antisemitism between latency and recrudescence are of no help in understanding the history of the Jews and the causes of the Holocaust.

As noted, Goldhagen infers a genocidal antisemitism to the perpetrators whom he investigated. But he has little if anything to say about the commanding forces which legitimated the murder of the Jews (i.e., made it state policy). Such legitimation was sustained by ideological indoctrination within a monopolized framework of information, which portrayed the Jews as subhuman. Deviation from views of the Jews as racially inferior were considered traitorous by the Nazis and subject to severe punishment (see below). It is hard to believe, given these social-psychological pressures, that the perpetrators preserved autonomy in their thought or action, as Goldhagen argues. Omer Bartov has shown such impairment of autonomy in his analysis of the behavior of German troops in Eastern Europe and Russia in World War II toward unarmed civilians, as has Christopher Browning in researching the same police battalion as Goldhagen.

Again as noted, Goldhagen projects the perpetrators' antisemitism and willingness to kill Jews onto all Germans -- an argument he bases on his conception of antisemitism in Germany rather than on factual evidence. As one piece of such evidence, Goldhagen adduces the behavior of Germans during the Kristallnacht assaults on Jews, Jewish-owned businesses, and the burning of synagogues. He writes that "Kristallnacht was ... but the crowning moment in the wild domestic terror that Germans perpetrated upon the Jews." But it was almost entirely the Storm Troopers (S.A.) who perpetrated Kristallnacht. The Germans according to him, did not, in principle, oppose what was done to the Jews but merely opposed the destruction of property or feared revenge by the Jews. "The criticism of Kristallnacht's ... violence and ... destruction ... should be understood as the limited criticism of an eliminationist path that the overwhelming majority of Germans considered to be fundamentally sound." But principled opposition to the Nazis' antisemitic policies was at best dangerous to voice. Goldhagen remains virtually silent about this fact.

According to Sarah Gordon whose research was in large measure based on Gestapo files, and other Nazi sources, The Propaganda Ministry tried to create an abstract image of the Jews as demons, while the Gestapo and S.S. instilled terror among actual and potential opponents of persecution by interrogation, arrest, imprisonment, torture, concentration camps, and murder. In a sense, both Goebbels's extensive censorship and police terror were a measure of his failure to achieve a consensus on racial policy. Had the German people accepted Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, terror would have been unnecessary. Gordon presents details supporting these conclusions which cannot be repeated here. Goldhagen's discussion of the Kristallnacht is shaped to bolster his general argument of the virtually generic antisemitism shared by all Germans; and their consequent accord with the Nazis' "eliminationist" goals.

Goldhagen's view presents two mysteries which his argument cannot resolve -- one, the history of the German Jews prior to Hitler's ascent to power, noted earlier; and two, the resurgence of social democracy and the successor parties to the former center, and the restoration of German democracy after World War II along with the end of all antisemitic policy (and even constitutionally anchored laws prohibiting antisemitic statements and Holocaust denial).

It is possible, as Goldhagen implies in the passage quoted above, that antisemitism will reassert itself. There is, however, no dearth of experience which teaches that antisemitism cannot threaten the civic rights of Jews (or other minorities) where democracy governs. After much searching for an answer to the question of why the Holocaust occurred, Zygmunt Bauman concludes, "If we ask now what the original sin was which allowed this to happen, the collapse (or non-emergence) of democracy seems to be the most convincing answer." Goldhagen ignores the forces that might have safeguarded democracy in Germany but failed to, and that might have made so monstrous an event as the Holocaust impossible. Those forces, however, have been reasserting, themselves on a world scale. They alone are capable of rendering anti- semitism politically irrelevant.

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* Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 622 pp. return

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For a copy of the sources used for this article please send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Horst Brand, New Politics, 155 West 72nd St., Room 402, New York, NY 10023.

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