Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Still, Goldhagen’s passion—whether you say it’s for justice, revenge, or enlightenment—was something I respected. Clearly, he felt it, and to deny it in his prose would have been less than honest. Which made it all the more disappointing when I learned of the changes made in the German translation of his book. A second cover story in Der Spiegel some three months after the first (tied to the release of the German edition of Goldhagen’s book and his German publicity tour), a friendlier story this time, included another curious sidebar. This one described certain crucial changes in the German translation of Goldhagen’s book, dramatic softenings of key phrases, beginning with the very title. Instead of Hitler’s Willing Executioners (usually, Scharfrichter) in the German translation it is closer to Hitler’s Willing Executors (Vollstrecker), as in the custodians of a legacy, a will.

  “Executors” is certainly a less inflammatory, less bloody vision of the role of ordinary Germans than “executioners.” It’s a different notion of “will” they’re carrying out. “Executors” makes them sound like neutral functionaries: An executor is closer to Arendt’s banal bureaucrats following orders than to Goldhagen’s depiction of the perpetrators as bloodthirsty enthusiasts for torture and murder.

  Consider some other changes among the many spotlighted by Der Spiegel: The “German conception of the Jews in the twentieth century” in the English original has become “the typical twentieth-century conception.” The expulsion of the half-million Jews from Germany (the entire Jewish population) is, in the English edition, “the most radical act in centuries of Western European history.” In the German edition, it’s “the most radical act in decades of Western European history,” which says something entirely different.

  In addition, the English version tells us “the entire German elite wholeheartedly accepted eliminationist anti-Semitic measures.” In the German version the German elites were merely “obliging” in their acceptance. Of the accounts I’ve seen of the subsequent popularity of Goldhagen’s book—and Goldhagen himself—among “ordinary Germans” only Fritz Stern in Foreign Affairs has suggested these fairly dramatic softenings of his rhetoric may have played as much of a role as Goldhagen’s widely noted personal charm with German audiences.

  Was Goldhagen having second thoughts about the displaced revenge in his book? Was it vengeful in the first place? I called Berel Lang to ask him if he thought Goldhagen’s thesis could be considered a kind of “displaced revenge.”

  “Yes,” he said simply. He’d just reviewed the book for the Jewish publication Moment. He felt the exaggerated nature of its claim to have “discovered the necessary and sufficient” cause for explaining the Holocaust and Hitler in the ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism “is so excessive—nobody can claim necessary and sufficient cause for the simplest act in history, much less one so complex”—that it suggests that something more is at work than objective historical analysis. Something that fits Lang’s description of a displaced, unacknowledged revenge impulse.

  Lang finds further support for his belief in what he calls Goldhagen’s “extremely inconsistent” account of just how many perpetrators, how many “executioners,” there were among the German people: “He says there are one hundred thousand who participated in the killing process and sometimes five hundred thousand, but he also seems to argue that the rest of the sixty million German people were as much active participants as the one hundred thousand. He ignores the opposition, and if it [genocide] was the overriding goal always, why did it not happen before it did? Why as late as 1941 was the policy still enforced expulsion but not extermination?”

  Curiously, just a day after I spoke to Lang, revenge returned with a vengeance as a Holocaust issue. The front page of the lively Jewish weekly, The Forward, featured a story about Elie Wiesel and the impulse toward revenge, a story headlined, “The Rage That Elie Wiesel Edited Out of Night.”

  In it, Naomi Seidman, a young Jewish scholar at the Berkeley Theological Seminary, was quoted on her comparative study of the original Yiddish manuscript of Night (Wiesel’s first impassioned book about his concentration-camp experiences) and the French translation published in 1956—the one that led to his worldwide acclaim, the one from which all English versions are derived.

  Seidman argued that in the Yiddish version the young Wiesel focused his rage specifically against Germans and Germany, that he “railed against a world that was rehabilitating Germany, where the bestial sadist Ilse Koch (the Beast of Buchenwald) is happily raising her children.” In the Yiddish version, Wiesel spoke of his disappointment after the war that camp survivors did not take vengeance on their captors and the captor nations: “The historical commandment to revenge was not fulfilled,” Wiesel wrote.

  But, she says, Wiesel excised these references to revenge against Germans in the French version of his book under the tutelage of the French Catholic writer François Mauriac, his patron, who brought his manuscript to the attention of the world, got him a French publisher, and wrote glowing introductions to the French and English editions.

  Seidman suggests further that in revising his Yiddish manuscript for translation, Wiesel redirected his rage from Germans to an existential quarrel with God, a rage against the bleak meaninglessness of the universe. She claims Wiesel did so in order to make his memoir less offensive to Christian Europe, to existential European intellectuals. She argues his revisions of the Yiddish manuscript recast the Holocaust in the post-Christian rhetoric of “death of God” theology: that Wiesel made the tragedy as much about the death of God, of belief, as the death of Jews at the hands of Germans.

  Seidman seems to imply a kind of bad faith on Wiesel’s part as an explanation for the excision of thoughts about anti-German revenge; that he was attempting to make his persona more palatable to the Christian West, to curry favor. Not so, the scholars Eli Pfeffercorn and David Hirsch contend: “The quarrel with God is clearly established in the Yiddish book.” And Wiesel himself denied to The Forward there had been any conscious agenda behind his revisions; he claimed he was merely trying to shorten his manuscript for the French edition.

  This does not completely rule out a third explanation for the revisions that neither Wiesel nor Seidman advanced: that Wiesel might have had genuine second thoughts about the revenge impulse that leaped out of his pen when he first set down his feelings in memoir form. That his thinking might genuinely have changed between the Yiddish version and the French revision.

  Perhaps the same thing could be said about Goldhagen’s shift from the English to the German version of his thesis, from calling ordinary Germans “executioners” to calling them “executors” and the like. From blaming something specifically German to blaming history, the more abstract “twentieth century” rather than twentieth-century Germans, for the tragedy.

  In any case, both Lang’s reflections on revenge and the controversies over Goldhagen’s and Wiesel’s revisions prompted me to look a little more closely at the possible presence of a displaced revenge impulse in my own work, in the character of my preoccupation with Hitler and Hitler explanations. I looked at the nature of my own dissatisfaction with Goldhagen’s thesis in that light. It was a dissatisfaction not so much with the extremity with which it pilloried Germans as with the way in which it, implicitly at least, could serve to exculpate Hitler.

  If the German people were so relentlessly and inexorably driven by their eliminationist anti-Semitic ideology, then they had no choice but to act the way they did, and having no choice, they have no responsibility, any more than a schizophrenic who hears delusory voices in his head urging him to kill, voices he has no power to resist, has responsibility. By insisting on the overwhelming, irresistible power of his “central model,” the abstract force he calls “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” Goldhagen performs an eliminationist act himself: He eliminates from consideration, from history, those individuals and groups who did resist: the Munich Post journalists who attempted to expose Hitler, the Social Democratic Party activists whose failure does not d
iminish the importance of their struggle, the Germans who voted against Hitler (as the majority of Germans in every free election did).

  In a very real sense, Goldhagen’s fixation on the all-powerful determinism of his “central model” has the inadvertent effect of exculpating even the guilty among the German people, making them seem helpless pawns of that inexorable force, powerless to resist, powerless to choose otherwise. Perhaps this helps explain, perhaps this is the real reason for, the extraordinary popularity of his book (the German version anyway) with the German public.

  Perhaps there was, then, “displaced revenge” at work in my reaction to Goldhagen’s thesis about the German people: I did not wish to absolve them by shifting responsibility from individuals to a “central model,” by blaming an abstract German character rather than the individual German characters who chose to act as they did.

  And I suppose my dissatisfaction with some of Goldhagen’s critics could be said to have sprung from the same source—displaced revenge. It might explain my reaction to Christopher Browning’s critical explanation of Goldhagen’s explanation.

  Browning is Goldhagen’s archrival among the younger generation of Holocaust scholars. Goldhagen denounced Browning’s 1992 book, Ordinary Men (about a killing squad of German policemen), in a scathing New Republic review in which he accused Browning of being duped by the apologetic postwar testimony of these accused mass murderers, duped into believing that they had trouble making the transition from “ordinary men” to killers. The very subtitle of Goldhagen’s book, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, is a deliberate shot at Browning’s Ordinary Men title. It was the Germanness of these killers, not their ordinariness, that was most decisive, Goldhagen insisted.

  I visited Browning a couple of days after the wild Holocaust Memorial pillorying of Goldhagen. Browning had been a speaker there, too, that evening, but he avoided personal attack, delivering his critique in a respectful, serious manner. However deep his disagreements, however much he’d felt injured by Goldhagen’s previous attacks on him, he did not question Goldhagen’s motives or good faith. In his office in the Holocaust Memorial research division, Browning, a scruffily youthful-looking scholar whose bowl-cut hair evokes both Beatle and monkish associations, filled me in—before we got to the Goldhagen question—on the current line of research he’s pursuing.

  He’s one of the international group of scholars who’ve been focusing on the decision question: the controversy over just when (and why then) Hitler made the irrevocable decision to proceed with the Final Solution. It’s a fascinating dispute (to which I’ll devote much of the next chapter) because theories about exactly when Hitler made the decision involve more than just quibbles about days and months. Almost inevitably, they turn out to be theories about the nature of Hitler’s mind, about the place of Jew-hatred in his heart (the “sincerity” or opportunism of his anti-Semitism—in a way a recapitulation of the Bullock–Trevor-Roper debate), about the map of his psyche—about who Hitler really was. Almost always, a scholar’s position on when Hitler made the decision is a reflection of his position on these larger questions.

  In general, the earlier a scholar or historian locates what he or she believes was Hitler’s irrevocable decision to physically exterminate the Jews, the more they see a Hitler whose obsession with Jews eclipses anything else in his consciousness. The later a scholar locates the decision, the more he or she sees a Hitler with other, sometimes conflicting, concerns—lebensraum, his war aims, the practical realities of troop and train deployments—a somewhat more pragmatic, conflicted, or indecisive Hitler.

  Thus, the late, much-respected historian Lucy Dawidowicz argued that Hitler had decided to devote his life to the extermination of the Jews as early as 1918. She cites a letter Hitler wrote in 1919 to a doctor in Munich declaring that the Jews must be eliminated to save Germany, not as some abstract prescription but as a literal goal. A goal that everything Hitler did after that, including launch a world war, was devoted to fulfilling. Which is why Dawidowicz titled her book on Hitler The War Against the Jews. World War Two, she insists, was not a war against Poland, France, England, and Russia so much as it was a war against the Jews, waged to give Hitler the power to execute the decision he’d made two decades earlier.

  Goldhagen emphasizes the moment just a bit later than Dawidowicz—a speech Hitler delivered in 1920, the difference between them being that, in Goldhagen’s thesis, Hitler’s decision, his will, plays a far less important role than the already determined, already gestating murder that nineteenth-century hate literature had impregnated Germans with.

  Between the Dawidowicz/Goldhagen 1918–1920 pole and the extreme “functionalist” position, which argues that Hitler never really made the key extermination decision itself (he passively acceded to something which gathered momentum from the exigencies of harried bureaucrats who had more captive Jews on their hands than they knew what to do with), there are a number of distinct gradations of decision theory on the spectrum from “moderate intentionalist” to “moderate functionalist,” as the converging positions of contemporary scholars have been called.

  There are those intentionalists who believe Hitler had the wish and the fantasy to exterminate the Jews foremost in his mind before 1939 and was waiting only till the outbreak of the war to make the fantasy reality. There are those who point out that even after the events of 1939 put millions of Polish Jews under Hitler’s control, planning still continued in a desultory way to evacuate Jews to Madagascar or to relocate them in southern Poland. They argue that it wasn’t until 1941, when Hitler conceived and executed the invasion of Russia, that he made up his mind about what to do with the Jews.

  But even within 1941, current scholarship is embroiled in debates over which month, which week, which weekend the decision was made and why it was made then. Yehuda Bauer argues for March 1941. The moderate intentionalists, led by Richard Breitman, place the decision in May 1941, shortly before the Russian invasion, which makes the capture of the millions of Jews in Soviet territory an exterminationist objective of the surprise attack on Russia. Other intentionalists place the decision somewhat later—in the early euphoric days of the Russian campaign, in late June or July 1941, when, they assert, Hitler, intoxicated by victory, finally allowed his long-deferred wish-dream of extermination to emerge. And to be funded: He finally allocated the troops and trains necessary to make mass murder a massive industry.

  The moderate functionalists tend to place the decision two or three months later, when the first euphoria of the Russian campaign bogged down, when Hitler had his first apprehension that victory in the east wouldn’t be as swift, as complete, and as certain as it first seemed and the administrators of the captured territories pressed for a way to dispose of captive Jews. In this view, the decision for genocide was Hitler’s revenge or consolation prize for a lost victory.

  This had been Browning’s position, although when I spoke to him he seemed to be shifting in the light of a new study by German scholar Peter Witte that seemed to narrow the moment of decision down, not to a month, but to a single weekend in mid-September 1941, the weekend of September 16–17, 1941. Witte argues that until September 1941, three months into the Russian campaign, Hitler had placed a higher priority on the anti-Soviet rather than the anti-Jewish aspects of the war on the eastern front: “For a period of six months in the spring and summer of 1941, Hitler’s guidelines remained in effect, i.e., that no Jews were to be deported from the Reich and the [Polish] Protectorate before there was a successful conclusion to the Russian campaign. Hitler personally stressed this point on a number of occasions.”

  While this may have been a tactical decision, dictated by military considerations, Witte seems to argue that Hitler had not yet decided whether to transform the sporadic “special action” killing of Jews into a comprehensive program of extermination. “Hitler’s decision to deport the Jews from the territory of Greater Germany while the fighting was still taking place [the decision to commence full-scale extermin
ation] occurred quite suddenly in the middle of September 1941,” Witte argues.

  He cites certain decisions Hitler made on that weekend—decisions to approve allocation of trains and troops to evacuate jews from Germany and France to the east—as the orders that broke the logjam of indecision and began the uninterrupted flow of evacuees to the death factories. Interestingly, Witte’s analysis places the decision after the initial euphoria of the Russian campaign and after the first disappointment that followed. He locates it in a brief moment after the disappointment, a blip in time in which the news on the eastern front turned temporarily good again—which makes the decision a product of both bitterness and triumph. (A recent claim by a German historian, Christian Gerlach, that the order came not until December 18, 1941, appears to be a misinterpretation of notes Himmler made about how Hitler wanted him to “spin” the leaks about the killing process already under way: The Jews were being killed because of their activities as “guerrilla partisans.”)

  I’ll go deeper into the decision question in the next chapter, but here I’m concerned with a different aspect of Browning’s thinking: with his explanation of the remarkable mainstream popularity of Goldhagen’s thesis. In particular, his explanation of the disparity between its almost universal acclaim in the mainstream media and its more frequent disparagement among fellow scholars.

  Browning’s explanation, an unusual venture into media/cultural analysis for a scholar, focuses on what he believes is a popular reaction against some recent deeper trends in scholarship about Hitler and the Holocaust. Browning sees an impulse in the scholarly literature to look for ever-broader, allegedly deeper explanations for Hitler’s crimes: deeper than Jew-hatred, deeper than Nazism, deeper than Germanism. To look for the kind of explanation that sees all of these as mere products of some more profound and universal flawed disposition in Western civilization. To see Nazism, Hitlerism, not as an aberration of Western civilization but as a culmination of certain of its tendencies—usually racism, eugenicism, or a racial-biological-based supremacist aesthetic. Or, as the now-fashionable academic buzzword has it: “biopolitics.” Biopolitics is a vision of the World War II–era killing that includes and explains the killings of Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slavs, the euthanasia of the physical and mental “defectives” and other “inferior types,” in the same inclusive racial-eugenicist drive that targeted Jews. It’s an explanatory vision that sees not Jewishness but a generalized otherness as the target (thus denying Jewishness its special relevance). In addition, instead of seeing Hitler as some monstrous enemy of “civilized Western values,” Hitler becomes a kind of perverse embodiment of the worst impulses buried in, intrinsic to, Western culture, to the Western “project,” as the postmodernists like to call it.