UBC #22: Hitler's Willing Executioners
Sep. 17th, 2006 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyGoldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1997
This is a very hard book to read, I give you all fair warning. The photographs, in particular, are hard to look at, hard to force oneself to understand. On page 407, that really is a German soldier posing for the photographer as he takes aim at a Jewish woman and her child. On page 224-25, those really are pictures, taken by a German soldier as mementoes, of Jews waiting to be massacred.
I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.
Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.
That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.
Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.
I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.
This is a very hard book to read, I give you all fair warning. The photographs, in particular, are hard to look at, hard to force oneself to understand. On page 407, that really is a German soldier posing for the photographer as he takes aim at a Jewish woman and her child. On page 224-25, those really are pictures, taken by a German soldier as mementoes, of Jews waiting to be massacred.
I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.
Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.
That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.
Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.
I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 10:54 pm (UTC)If you think people are out to get you, I'm not surprised that you'd want to get them first. I see a lot of this going around right now, actually.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-17 11:09 pm (UTC)Racially, the idea is that the German Volk is the best possible race; all other races (especially Slavs) are inferior, and the Jews are a disease that will infect and destroy the Volk given even the slightest shred of a whisper of opportunity. Jews were constructed, in this ideology, as not even being human--he has this amazing and horrible quote from a perpetrator who was honest in his post-war testimony that says exactly that.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 01:37 am (UTC)But it's too easy to say this is just German culture. It's very human. The same attitude was central to both American slavery and Jim Crow. It's not hard for me to imagine this sort of instititionalized racism, since its traces still haunt America today.
Fortunately, people of good will now rage against racism, and the past few generations in the US and Germany have striven to stamp it out. The pro-torture lobby in the US is one of the few places that I think the argument for others as subhuman still holds sway.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 04:20 am (UTC)How whole cultures (Germany being a prime example) give rise to and institutionalise racism is clearly still a current topic in cultures everywhere from Africa to our own backyard. Wish it weren't so.
On a bit of a tangent, increasing tourism, Internet friendships, and climbing global emigration all share one virtue; they make the Other more accessible. I'd like to think they offer a bulwark to strengthen understanding and reduce racism going forward, but I fear that xenophobia is strengthened as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-19 02:02 am (UTC)I'm sure you know how often the sudden arrival of a new subculture into a neighbourhood previously homogenous tends to stir up the worst of reactions.