If eliminationist anti-Semitism made Germany pregnant with murder long before Hitler stepped onto the public stage, pregnant at least since the nineteenth century, then Hitler is relegated to little more than a midwife role, there to assist the delivery, perhaps (to stretch the metaphor) to induce labor. But he’s a facilitator of an irresistible force rather than a charismatic instigator and father of the murder being brought to birth. Germans did not need Hitler to prompt them to kill Jews. As one critic has characterized Goldhagen’s thesis, Germans were already “little Hitlers.” As another, Columbia’s Fritz Stern (who attacked Hitler’s Willing Executioners as “pretentious . . . shrill and simplistic”), put it, “For Goldhagen, as for the National Socialists, Hitler was Germany.”
The “pregnant with murder” metaphor challenges a number of influential Hitler and Holocaust explanations. It challenges Hyam Maccoby’s view that eighteen centuries of Christian anti-Semitism were more crucial than nineteenth-century German anti-Semitism. It challenges the view of Hannah Arendt and her epigones that Germans were for the most part indifferent bureaucratic accomplices to a Hitler/Nazi Party project. It challenges the fashionable contemporary academic attempt to look for the origin of the Holocaust in a deep-rooted Western racism of which German, Nazi anti-Semitism was merely a particularly virulent variety.
More significant, Goldhagen’s pregnant-with-murder metaphor implicitly challenges Milton Himmelfarb’s influential “No Hitler, No Holocaust” formulation—an argument that the Holocaust didn’t have to happen because of abstract historical forces, Christian anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism, German character, and the like. It would not have happened, it wasn’t inevitable, Himmelfarb insists, had not one man—Hitler—wanted it to happen.
The fact that Hitler wanted it is less important to Goldhagen than another causal element: ordinary Germans wanted it. Hitler didn’t have to talk them into killing Jews, he gave them the license they were longing for. The best, most original sections of Goldhagen’s book are those devoted to a painstaking and painful to read account of the lesser-known modes of murder in the concentration-camp universe—the obscenely euphemistic “work battalions”—instruments of murder whose operation displayed the joy the killers took in turning the killing process into merciless slow torture. And the horrific death marches of late 1944 and ’45, when some of the concentration-camp guards packed up and took flight (with their prisoners) from advancing Russian troops and—despite the fact that the war was lost—zealously turned the retreat into a moving column of mass murder. His research does much to demolish the glib resort to sophisticated-sounding clichés about the banality of evil. The German killers—whose number (the number actively engaged in the execution process) Goldhagen places at over half a million—were devoted and dedicated, far from the indifferent bureaucrats Arendt depicts.
And yet it might seem puzzling at first—it was to me—that a book that argues that Germans hated Jews, really, really hated them and wanted to kill them, should be controversial to scholars, particularly Jewish scholars.
In part, it was the packaging. A number of Goldhagen’s attackers that evening referred to the book’s boast to have solved a problem that had baffled previous scholars. In part, it was the book’s implicit claim to have ended the debate over explanation. In fact, however, if the Holocaust can be traced to German “eliminationist antisemitic literature,” to the nineteenth-century books and pamphlets that impregnated the nation with murder, then the process of explanation is not ended but begun: Why were German people, why was German culture, so receptive to the seeds of genocide?
In addition, like all explanations that narrow their focus too sharply to a single point, the eliminationist anti-Semitism hypothesis inadvertently but implicitly tends to exculpate those factors it eliminates from primacy: Christian anti-Semitism, European cultural hostility to the Jews, the Nazi Party (which becomes in this view less the evil inciter and instigator of German hatred than the obedient servant of the evil wishes of an evilly conditioned German people). Even Hitler is, to an extent, exculpated. If Germany was pregnant with murder, that pregnancy was not his monstrous conception; he just brought the hot towels and boiling water to assist in its delivery.
And yet, one was forced to wonder, when hearing the extreme—and at times extremely personal—attacks on Goldhagen that evening, whether it was not so much the Germanness of Goldhagen’s theory but its Goldhagenness that caused the furor. Because a persistent subtext of the attacks on his thesis were jabs at his lack of deference paid or credit given to previous scholars, at his claim to have refuted decades of misconceptions, to have overturned received wisdom—at the packaging of unremarkable ideas into mainstream marketability as some dazzling, breakthrough reconception of the past. There were expressions of resentment at his book’s instant bestsellerdom and the mainstream-media coverage. There was resentment at a mere postdoctoral scholar suddenly thrusting himself into the center of a difficult conversation they’d been engaged in for decades. As if the youngest child at the Passover ceremony had decided not just to ask the traditional Four Questions (such as, Why is this night different from all other nights?) but to deliver the answers as if they’d never been answered correctly before.
And so the strangling remark, while shocking when first uttered, was just a pale portent of what was to come. A slap compared to the thunderbolt hurled at Goldhagen from on high by the next speaker. The way the symposium was structured, Goldhagen spoke first, following which he returned to his seat and attempted to maintain his composure (with relative success) as the blows began to fall from other panelists. Beginning with the charge of “worthlessness,” an epithet all the more shocking to the packed auditorium because of its source: one of the demigods in the pantheon of Holocaust scholarship, Raul Hilberg. One who did not appear in person to pronounce Goldhagen’s book worthless but who relayed his angry condemnation through a panelist who proclaimed it by waving aloft a letter from Hilberg, brandishing the interdiction in “I have a list” fashion.
The flamboyant, red-faced, angry bearer of the bad tidings for Goldhagen was an Australian Holocaust scholar, resident fellow at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Konrad Kweit. Kweit, of course, did not neglect to make his own heated attack on Goldhagen. An attack that could be summed up by the well-known barb: “What’s true isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true.”
First of all, Kweit argued, the effort to find the deep root, the ur-explanation of Hitler and the Holocaust in some intrinsic pathology of German culture was something German intellectuals themselves had been seeking for decades since the war. One version of what might be called “German exceptionalism” was the notion of the “sonderweg”—the special path German history and culture had taken in the centuries since the Reformation. In its more pointed, more self-lacerating form, this became the postwar “Schuldfrage” controversy—the blame question, in which some German thinkers contended there was something not merely exceptional but deeply darkly wrong in German culture. That the violent extremism of thought to be found in Nietzche and Wagner made Hitler possible if not inevitable.
Goldhagen seems to go further, as if to say that Hitler was virtually irrelevant to a Germany pregnant with murder. Any midwife would do. But Kweit goes further, too, in accusing Goldhagen not merely of ignoring previous explorations of the Germanness of the Nazi genocide but of resurrecting “naïve and discredited notions of German national character” and packaging it as a revolutionary new thesis. It was the packaging, Kweit declared, that was the most offensive aspect of the Goldhagen thesis: “Only those who offer extreme views can make a name for themselves,” he said.
It was at this point Kweit pulled out the missive from Raul Hilberg and told the crowd, “I have a letter here” from the Vermont-dwelling sage, a letter in which “Hilberg says ‘I take exception to Goldhagen’s thesis, which is worthless, all the hype from [his publisher] Knopf notwithstanding.’”
“Worthless” is fairly strong, virtually a scholarly anathe
ma. It’s true that, in his book, Goldhagen did take more than “exception” to an essential component of Hilberg’s lifework, his three-volume history of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, virtually declaring it worthless, or at least founded on worthless misconceptions of the evidence. So it could be said that Hilberg’s anathema was not without a personal agenda.
But the battle between them is a crucial one. The issue transcends the ad hominem element, and it’s worth taking a look at the source of their division: the attempt to explain both the alacrity and efficiency with which the German perpetrators accomplished the task of mass murder.
It is similar to the question of excessive virulence that is at the heart of the explanatory perplexity over Hitler: Why was this anti-Semite different from all other anti-Semites? Goldhagen poses this question about the German perpetrators of the Holocaust, not the paper-shuffling middlemen but the actual executioners of the genocide: What made them not just cold-blooded killers but ones who reveled in cruelty, torture, and the degradation of their victims?
Goldhagen dismisses what he calls “the five conventional explanations” for this phenomenon: that they were coerced on pain of execution to participate; that they were blindly following orders because they were “unwavering servants of authority”; that peer pressure and conformity made them do it; that they were “like petty bureaucrats pursuing careerist self-interest”; and finally that they were not aware that their individual actions were part of a monstrous design for mass murder.
All these conventional explanations are wrong, Goldhagen says, because they assume that German citizens would otherwise be opposed to the mass killing of Jews, that they had to be numbed, coerced, or made unaware of the magnitude of the crimes they were participating in. No, he says, it’s false to believe that Germans needed special inducements of institutionalized self-deception or peer pressure to join in the killing. As Milton Himmelfarb says of Hitler, Goldhagen says of ordinary Germans—They wanted to.
And then Goldhagen holds up Raul Hilberg as “an exemplar of this sort of [false conventional] thinking” because Hilberg asks: “Just how did the German bureaucracy overcome its moral scruples?”
[Hilberg] assumes that “the German bureaucracy” naturally had “moral scruples” regarding the treatment of Jews which with difficulty had to be surmounted. . . . Explanations proceeding in this manner [Goldhagen insists] cannot account for Germans taking initiative, doing more than they had to, or volunteering for killing duty when no such volunteering was necessary. . . . Such explanations cannot account for the instances in which Germans killed Jews in violation of orders not to do so. . . . [They] cannot account for the overall, indeed incredible, smoothness that characterized the execution of this far-flung program which was dependent upon so many people, people who, either through sabotage or foot-dragging, could have produced innumerable mishaps and poorly executed tasks.
In other words, Goldhagen was saying that Hilberg’s explanatory work of a lifetime was not merely worthless, it was trying to answer the wrong question entirely, trying to find reasons why Germans were transformed into killers by Hitler and his party when, Goldhagen believed, they needed little transformation at all.
But I think something more was going on beneath the surface charges of worthlessness traded by Goldhagen and Hilberg. I think the submerged issue can be found in the word “smoothness”—the “incredible smoothness” of the execution process and how to account for it. Hilberg’s massive account of the vast, continentwide, German-organized mobilization of troops, trains, guards, and resources that went into engineering the Holocaust has been criticized because Hilberg described a Jewish contribution to this smoothness. He argued that the cooperation, even complicity, of the Judenräte—the so-called Jewish councils in the ghettos—in rounding up and making available Jews for transshipment to death camps made the work of the German killers easier. Hilberg’s argument on that point could be a bit unfairly caricatured by saying he saw reluctant executioners and willing victims. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, Goldhagen’s animus against Hilberg might be attributed to a desire to restore the onus for the “smoothness” of the mass murder to the eager alacrity of the perpetrators—to blame the smoothness on Germans rather than Jews.
But if this submerged battle was the hidden agenda beneath Hilberg’s “worthless” charge, it didn’t diminish the impact of the critic’s accusation, particularly on an audience most of whom had come to salute Goldhagen, seek his autograph. There were stirrings of indignation and unease. And then things got worse. The following speaker—an even more lofty member of the Holocaust-scholar pantheon than Hilberg—launched an attack that was even more harsh and sweeping.
The following speaker was none other than Yehuda Bauer, widely regarded as perhaps the most scrupulous and clear-sighted historian of the Holocaust in the world. He’d been spending the year as a fellow of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Still wiry, vigorous, and energetic at seventy, Bauer leaped up and seized the microphone, radiating intensity and passion as he paced the stage. It came as a surprise to me since the Bauer I’d seen in Jerusalem had been so deliberate and reserved, but tonight he was like a man possessed, a man with a mission.
After offering some dutiful praise for the less controversial aspects of Goldhagen’s work—the chapters on the work battalions and the death marches—Bauer moved swiftly to the attack, beginning with the packaging of Goldhagen’s thesis, particularly in its claim to newness, the notion that no one had previously dared point the finger at the true source of genocide, which he, Goldhagen alone, was bold enough to name: nineteenth-century German eliminationist anti-Semitism.
Bauer expressed astonishment that Goldhagen had made his assertions about the special genocidal virulence of German anti-Semitism without placing it in the context of other national versions of anti-Semitism in Europe at that time: What about Russia, Romania, Poland? he asked. “What about France?” and he went on to substantiate George Steiner’s contention to me that French anti-Semitism was far worse, far more virulent, deep-rooted, and bitter than Germany’s in the pre–World War I period. Bauer cited the highly regarded historian George Mosse, who had done comparative studies and had said that “if someone had come to me in 1914 and told me that one country in Europe would attempt to exterminate the Jews, I would have said then, ‘No one can be surprised at the depths to which the French could sink.’”
Bauer’s point was that if there was something intrinsically German about the Holocaust, it is inherent not in the rhetoric or ideology of nineteenth-century German writing, which could be matched in violence and virulence by the products of other European nations. But rather, Bauer suggested, if there’s an intrinsic Germanness to the killing, it might better be sought for in the susceptibility of Germans to the extreme authoritarian character of the Nazi Party, of the Hitler state.
But Bauer didn’t stop there. Pacing the stage of the Meyerhoff auditorium (with Goldhagen sitting at a table behind him), Bauer went beyond denouncing the thesis to denouncing the person behind it. Not Goldhagen; he didn’t even accord Goldhagen adult responsibility for it.
“It’s not Goldhagen’s fault,” he told the audience. “It’s his Harvard tutor’s fault.” It was the Harvard tutorial system that failed Goldhagen, he said, since his book grew out of a Harvard Ph.D. thesis.
“It’s the tutor’s fault! You don’t permit a study like this without comparatives, with a complete disregard for German history, which ignores the opposition—no Social Democrats, no communists. You can read Goldhagen and it seems like Hitler gained power by vote! In the last free election the Nazis had thirty-three percent of the vote! Sixty-seven percent did not vote Nazi. They came to power because they lost votes in that last election, because they no longer seemed dangerous to the conservative camarilla around the senile president Hindenburg.”
Having reduced Goldhagen to a wayward student failed by his tutors, Bauer returned to the attack, this time chastising Goldhagen personally,
without the pretense of blaming it on his tutor. Bauer spoke of the need for humility in the face of the Holocaust and added, “When you open your book by saying ‘I am the first, I am the only, all others are wrong’ . . . when you start off with media hype, you run the risk of ending up like Arno Mayer” (the Princeton professor whose book argued that the Holocaust was less about hatred of Jews than of Bolsheviks). “It’s gone,” Bauer said of Mayer’s book, after its initial media hype, “and rightly so. It was the wrong way to start. You have to have humility, you don’t start with p.r.”
After this intellectual equivalent of a horsewhipping, Professor Langer returned to the microphone to offer Goldhagen the cold comfort that what he’d received from Yehuda Bauer was not a “death sentence” but a “life sentence” for which he should presumably feel grateful and relieved. Again, the imagery of violence and retribution (an execution!) mercifully suspended; Goldhagen was given the grim scholarly equivalent of life imprisonment.
The worst was over; yes, there were further attacks on Goldhagen’s thesis: Christopher Browning, Goldhagen’s archrival and frequent target, had a chance to confront him face-to-face. But Browning’s remarks focused on the issue between them, not on Goldhagen’s motives, the packaging of his book, or the hype surrounding it. It was almost as if the succeeding speakers had been shaken by the thunderbolt from Hilberg, the lightning strike from Bauer.
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