Goldhagen's German supporters

By Harry Redner

No book on the Holocaust has created quite such a furore in Germany as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The appearance of all such previous works had scarcely been noticed by the general public and sometimes not even by academics active in the field. Raul Hilberg’s classic, The Destruction of the European Jews, originally published in English in 1961, was only translated into German in 1982; issued by a nondescript press, it did not attract any public attention till it was republished by the more prestigious Fischer Verlag in 1991. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was the only other work to cause any public stir when it first appeared in 1963, it upset Jews in something like the way that Goldhagen is now upsetting Germans. But Arendt’s book was more of a journalistic coup without much pretension to original scholarly research, which it mostly unabashedly derived from Hilberg without any detailed acknowledgment. Goldhagen’s book presents itself as an original scholarly work that establishes a new paradigm of research. In effect, it claims to reverse the main trend of scholarly endeavour in this field, that which followed on from Hilberg and concentrated almost exclusively on the objective processes of the implementation of the Final Solution.

Hilberg and the German historians who followed, such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jackel and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, documented and exposed the secret world of the bureaucratic machinations by means of which the Jews were liquidated. Working largely from German documentary evidence and with a detailed knowledge of the German governmental decision-making machinery, they revealed just how such a gigantic but coordinated process could have been so smoothly carried out over many years in diverse circumstances to a largely successful conclusion, as far as the perpetrators were concerned, namely, the Final Solution for European Jews in German hands was just about attained. But why such enormous numbers of people, whose active and passive participation was required in carrying out such a huge task, were so obsessed with accomplishing it, that was not so well explained. In other words, the whole subjective dimension was missing. Nothing in the official documents from the war years, nor in those of the criminal proceedings from immediately after the war yielded much to illuminate that side of things. So this question of "why" still lingered, even when the question of "how" had been largely answered.

Goldhagen claims to have gone further than others in explaining why it all happened, why those who did it did what they did. He utilises the kind of evidentiary materials that others had not noticed or dismissed as irrelevant even if they came upon them, such things as the photographs and the accompanying letters that the killers proudly sent home, for these provide detailed accounts of their daily life in the occupied territories where killing was a regular, routine job and reveal the spirit in which they acted and dealt with their victims. The victim’s point of view is, therefore, also of crucial importance, for only the testimonies of survivors can show how they were treated and so expose the motivation and mentality of their persecutors. The tales of survivors or any other such eye-witness reports were not of much interest to Hilberg and the German historians for that was not the stuff of objective documentary evidence on which they mainly relied. For Goldhagen it is essential, for it answers some of the questions about the "why" of things.

Of far greater importance is the curious split that has occurred between the experts and the more general public interested in such matters. Almost to a man or woman the Holocaust historians and much of the relevant academic community have spoken out strongly against Goldhagen, sometimes with an extraordinary degree of vehemence and abuse. Some even puzzled in print how such an apparently erroneous and poorly researched work could have merited a PhD at Harvard. The German conservative press, in its criticisms of Goldhagen, went even further and speculated about the "Jewish politics" behind it all. In short, it seemed that Goldhagen’s book was not worthy of the attention it aroused.

However, by contrast to this summary rejection by the experts, the general reading public, particularly the younger cohort of those born after the Second World War, showed great interest in and appreciation of Goldhagen’s book. So much so that it became a best seller. Goldhagen became something of a celebrity, he was invited to lecture and wherever he went his presentations attracted capacity audiences, he appeared on radio and TV to a mass public. Presumably this indicates that there was considerable sympathy for his case. In the cultural life of Germany and in German self awareness it was a decisive historical moment: it indicated the lifting of an unspoken taboo on exposing in public the specific and graphic details of how some of the older, now aged, generation had behaved during the war and what most others knew about it at the time. The post-war children, now become adults, did want the unvarnished truth about their parents or grandparents. Is this merely a media phenomenon, as Ruth Bettina Birn, a German Holocaust historian now active in Canada, denounces it, or is there much more to it than that? Other German academics, including a few historians, see it in a very different light. These are the ones who have rallied to Goldhagen’s defence. Among the earliest in this controversy was Helmut Dahmer, a senior, long established and prominent, professor of sociology in Darmstadt. His intervention arose out of the commission of a paper for a book issued by the Zentrum fur Antisemitismus forschung in Berlin under the direction of Wolfgang Benz and the editorship of Johannes Heil, and primarily intended as an attack on Goldhagen. Much to the consternation of these scholars of anti-Semitism, Dahmer presented them with a paper in defence of Goldhagen, attacking his critics instead. His contribution was promptly rejected, for contrary views were not wanted in such circles. (It is one of the lesser ironies of German academic scholarship that a centre devoted to the research of anti-Semitism should apparently not believe in its historical importance, as insisted on by Goldhagen.) However, Dahmer’s paper has since appeared in the leftist Journal Die Brucke: Forum fur antirassistisch Politik und Kultur (Jan/Feb 1998).

Dahmer undertakes a point by point rebuttal of the hasty critiques with which the German historians and reviewers lumbered Goldhagen’s book when it first appeared. To the charge that Goldhagen engages in sensationalist depictions of gruesome events Dahmer replies that only such detailed descriptions of actions can reveal the personal motivation of the killers, which is hidden and disguised by the historians’ abstract talk of "implementing" the final Solution and of the "process of destruction". To the charge that this merely takes account of subjective feelings and attitudes which cannot be objectively established Dahmer replies that in all historical explanation it is the point of view of the subjects that is crucial for only that determines the meaning of the actions involved; and he goes onto draw a parallel with Weber’s explanation of capitalism by reference to the subjective beliefs and attitudes of Protestants: for just so Goldhagen explains the Holocaust by invoking the anti-Semitic animosities of Germans. To the charge that invoking anti-Semitism leads to a monocausal explanation Dahmer replies that discounting it, as German historians are prone to do, leaves out the main motivating cause, which, of course, is not the sole cause of the Holocaust, anymore than Protestantism is of capitalism.

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Goldhagen ... is at pains to make it very evident that those who murdered the innocent knew what they were doing and had an easy choice to avoid doing so.

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What he sees at work is a defensive psychological reaction intended to ward off criticism of the unadmitted exculpatory process in which they had been engaged almost since the end of the war. By distancing and objectifying the events of the Holocaust they strove to remove the odium of direct personal responsibility and guilt from the shoulders of all but the few top Nazis, who could be left to the courts for their just deserts.

Dahmer’s thesis has been developed and expounded in a book length essay by Fred Kautz Holocaust-Forschung im Sperrfeuer der Flakhelfer. Kautz is a freelance historical researcher also resident in Darmstadt, though a Canadian of German origin. His book was published in 1998 by the left-wing Argument Verlag. Like Dahmer, he directs himself primarily against the doyens of German Holocaust historiography, Mommsen, Jackel and Wehler, but he also concludes with a separate critique of their devoted disciple, Ruth Bettina Birn, who is now active in Canada as a leading researcher and adviser for the War Crimes Unit, a statutory body set up by the Canadian government to prosecute war criminals

Kautz begins his critique of Goldhagen’s critics by taking them to task over their indignation at the detailed explicitness with which Goldhagen depicts the horrors of the Holocaust. To them it amounts to a lack of tact, even of decency, a kind of moral obscenity; and, besides, this style of writing they find aesthetically displeasing, for they prefer an unemotional and neutralising tone of presentation. What is at stake in this apparent matter of stylistic fastidiousness, as Kautz makes clear, is the reluctance to condone a breach of the taboo on picturing the exact nature of the crimes and of the active involvement of their perpetrators in them, a taboo surrep-titiously invoked in Germany since the end of the war. Their own stylistic practices serve this purpose, for they are designed to obfuscate the full extent of the guilt of some of their elders and relations behind abstract sounding phrases like "implementing the Final Solution" or "the process of destruction", whereas what was actually involved was the cold-blooded slaughter at point-blank range of helpless women and children.

Goldhagen, by contrast, writes as the son of a Holocaust survivor. He is intent on making the crime as explicit as possible and sheeting home the guilt to those who took part in it. He is at pains to make it very evident that those who murdered the innocent knew what they were doing and had an easy choice to avoid doing so. Nobody was punished or even in any way seriously disadvantaged for refusing to kill Jews. Those who did do it, did it out of a conviction that they were justified in doing so, and mostly they were proud of their deed. The very fact that they openly displayed and sent home to their families the photographic evidence of their exploits points strongly to this conclusion Goldhagen’s resort to such amply available photographic material has also aroused the objection of German historians who consider it unseemly to publicly display pictures of such atrocities. Goldhagen, who was perhaps the first to rely on photographs as historical evidence in respect of the Holocaust, is defended by Kautz as doing no more than what any other historian would do with events where such documentation is available.

According to Goldhagen, most Germans knew something of what was going on in the East. The Holocaust, in other words, was an open secret. The prior Euthanasia program, which involved the murder of tens of thousands of the mentally impaired, did arouse strong protests and opposition, from the churches in particular, to which the regime quickly gave way The murder of millions of Jews did not provoke any such comparable response.

There was a general consensus that the Jews constituted a problem that had to be solved in one way or another. As Eichmann was to put it, the Jews had to disappear or they would be made to disappear. Most ordinary Germans would have preferred it if the Jews disappeared of their own volition, but if that did not take place then they were quite understanding of other measures the regime had to take to make them disappear, such as resettlement to the East which became no more than an euphemism for extermination. The logic behind such thinking was that of a deep-seated and widely prevalent anti-Semitism, which Goldhagen dubs "eliminatory", a set of attitudes and feelings against the very existence of Jews in the same social or physical space as Germans. Kautz supports Goldhagen’s contention with researches of his own into the anti-Semitic orientations to be found among pastors of the Evangelical (Lutheran) church as revealed in their sermons and publications both before and during the Nazi. The ascription of anti-Semitism as the main cause of the Holocaust has aroused a spirited rejoinder from the German historians. They argue that anti-Semitism was not unduly widespread among Germans in general, certainly not more so than among Poles, Hungarians or Romanians; and as in those countries it did not lead to any moves towards a Holocaust, so why should it have in Germany? Even many of those directly involved in the process, such as the desk-bound bureaucrats, "were not haters", as Hilberg puts it. Goldhagen’s critics point to some countervailing evidence against the thesis that anti-Semitism was ubiquitous in Germany; they quote from Richard Levy’s book The Downfall of Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (1975) to argue that anti-Semitic political agitation had waned before 1914, and they further contend that it only played a subsidiary role in the Nazi rise to political power. Finally, they ask, if anti-Semitism was so severe why were the Jews in Germany not unduly frightened before 1933?

Kautz seeks to counter these objections to Goldhagen’s anti-Semitic case by quoting from Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1964) to show that anti-Semitic propaganda was successful in the sphere of public discourse in that it became accepted as a respectable point of view. Those who voted for the Nazis in such ever increasing numbers after 1928 were certainly not opposed to their anti-Semitic pronouncements and the policies they implemented after 1933. Without such general popular feeling against Jews it would have been impossible to recruit the large numbers of active participants in the killing process once that began in 1941.

Goldhagen finds himself in something of a quandary in arguing for the prevalence of anti-Semitism till 1945, but its rapid disappearance soon after. If it was as deep-rooted before 1945, as he contends, could it have dissipated as quickly under the foreign imposed process of re-education and democrati-sation after 1945? Perhaps they were not quite such anti-Semites before 1933, and perhaps they are not quite such good liberal democrats now as Goldhagen makes out. Kautz is critical of Goldhagen’s contention that Germany has undergone a total transformation in this respect. He goes so far as to accuse Goldhagen, who absolves the young of any responsibility, of robbing them of their past and preventing them from properly coming to terms with it. The nature and scope of anti-Semitism in Germany both before and after 1933, and even after 1945, still remains an unresolved issue that Goldhagen has perhaps too simplistically addressed. Anti-Semitism is not a constant factor that is either expressed or latent, as Goldhagen holds; rather, it is a complex syndrome of variegated and not necessarily coherent beliefs, biases, emotions and attitudes that historically transform themselves in relation to the social and cultural context in which each of them appears or disappears. Some of them are of extremely long duration and persistence, others are relatively evanescent. Thus the same person can evince some of these anti-Semitic traits but not others, or some of them in some circumstances in relation to some Jews and others in other circumstance or not at all. Some had a passionate hatred of Jews, others bore no such intense emotions but instead were motivated by an even more effective, because rationally controlled, intellectual hatred, for "intellectual hatred is the worst", as the poet Yeats puts it.

Apart from all such serious concerns there is also a more comic academic side to the Goldhagen controversy that Kautz satirises with cutting humour. The German historians, as established academic god-fathers, evince cons-ternation that such a "poor" scholarly work could have slipped through the system of controls and gained a PhD at Harvard. In Germany there would have been a swift "academic death" for any such students as Goldhagen. After all, how unscholarly can he be when he does not take into account the "confirmed" results in his field of study; that its to say, he does not defer the to the opinions or bow in homage to the views of the established authorities, who are none other than his critics themselves. Thus Jackel complains that Goldhagen did not incorporate into his book any of the sage advice he gave him when he was consulted. These slights to their "amour propre" the German historians try to dress up as methodological quibbles. Thus Mommsen criticises Goldhagen for not taking due scholarly care in dating the photographs he uses. Kautz has no trouble in showing just how fatuous are all these pettifogging objections, and, besides, they are mostly self-serving. He exposes just how restrictive and punitive the German academic system is of anyone who adopts an approach not favoured by those in authority, and how many ex-Nazis there were until recently amongst these.

Goldhagen’s own rejoinder to his critics has been to argue that he does not follow routine academic procedures because he is effecting a paradigm revolution in the field. However, Kautz contends that the real difference separating Goldhagen and the German historians is not a matter of methodology at all. Something deeper, more basic even than methodology puts the German historians at odds with Goldhagen. The real nub of the issue goes beyond the widely shared positivistic attitude to historical research as value-neutral science which both Goldhagen and his critics agree in accepting.

Kautz believes that Goldhagen is not true to himself and his own achievement when he espouses a view of history as applied social science. Kautz sees historical writing as more of an art rather than science. Hence the identity of the historian is crucial for that determines his relation to what he writes about, and ultimately the quality of that writing itself.

On this view it does matter that Goldhagen is the son of a Holocaust survivor and that his German critics belong to the Hitler Jugend and Flakhelfer generation, those who had their early upbringing in Nazi Germany and took part in the final stages of the war. The way in which members of this generation turned their backs on these formative experiences, and dutifully subjected themselves to the imposed re-educative process in democracy, liberalism and also value-free science, determined how they would relate to their own Nazi past. On the whole, they tended to repress those memories and deny that which brought them so much grief. This led them to try to cover over the guilt of their elders and teachers. Kautz points out that all the major German Holocaust historians were trained by the earlier generation of historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, Theodor Schiede and Werner Conze, all of whom were in one way or another involved with the Nazi regime. This marked and marred their own historical writing. They were inclined to view the Nazi era as an aberration of German history and even the Holocaust as an unfortunate accident that resulted from a conjunction of incidental factors. To Kautz it is clear that the German historians of the Flakhelfer generation reacted to Goldhagen’s work more as Germans than as historians.

Goldhagen brings to the historical task a different kind of engagement and a commitment to see the Holocaust in a completely different way. It leads him to focus on the subjective side or things and seek for evidence among the court-case testimonies and other recorded memories of perpetrators and survivors and in such casual documentary materials as photographs, rather than in the official documents of bureaucratic agencies. His intent is to make what happened as subjectively personal as possible, to show that the perpetrators did what they did of their own free will and that they were not coerced or intimidated. Thus Goldhagen sees things that his German critics had turned their eyes away from as too shameful and revealing to notice.

It is for these reasons of greater personal engagement and openness to the truth, Kautz believes, that Goldhagen’s historical writing is superior to those of his German critics. For Kautz is no epistemological relativist, he does hold that some histories are better able to convey the truth than others. A historian whose involvement in what he is writing is self-protective and academic will tend to produce a much more superficial history than one who is passionately devoted to a full understanding of the very same events.

Goldhagen, who is also a young academic seeking to make a career at Harvard, will very likely not appreciate Kautz’s defence of him along these lines. He is wedded to a positivistic approach to history as Wissenschaft and is intent on convincing his German critics on grounds of scholarship according to their orthodox canons of research. However, it is doubtful if they will ever be persuaded. A new generation of young German historians, such as Kautz himself, Wolfgand Wippermann and Gotz Aly, supported by such maverick older academics as Dahmer, will have to arise and carry the battle to the German academic establishment before Goldhagen’s work will be properly appreciated and absorbed as a guide for further research.

Harry Redner is a former Reader in Political Science at Monash University and Visiting Professor of Political Science at Haifa and Darmstadt Universities.