On Hitler's Willing Executioners

Well, there is a lot to say about this book, but I won’t go in too deep—I think you can find similar thoughts to mine on plenty of other reviews of this book. Essentially, Goldhagen argues that the Holocaust was not a result of silly things like “psychology” or “human nature.” Instead, perpetrators of the Holocaust were not necessarily “ordinary men” but “ordinary Germans,” who were evidently different than most of the human race during the Third Reich. This difference is rooted in the widespread acceptance of eliminationist anti-Semitism, allowing six million European (and North African) Jews to be killed in just three years.

In principle, I agree with Goldhagen. Treatments of the Holocaust frequently do not give enough space to contextualizing German society during the Third Reich. It is indeed true that eliminationist anti-Semitism became more powerful than at any other point in human history. However, Goldhagen’s work has two significant—and intertwined—problems. The first is that eliminationist anti-Semitism does not appear to simply be a German phenomenon. This swept through (primarily eastern, but to lesser extent western) Europe in the half-century between 1890 and 1945. The second problem is that Goldhagen fails to articulate how “eliminationism” became “elimination.” He does excellent work in showing us how eliminationism swept across Germany and how there was support for wiping out the Jewish people, but he does not—and methodologically cannot—explain to us the exact processes taking place in the minds of the perpetrators at the instant that they made the choice to pull the figurative and literal trigger. This aspect of the Holocaust needs to be explained to make his case. He tells us that after the first shootings in Reserve Police Order 101 that perpetrators felt depressed, got drunk, and did it again multiple times in the future, but he cannot explain to us the processes that took place to make this happen.

With this comes the question: “Why didn’t Germany choose to exterminate Jews before 1942?” The answer that Goldhagen leaves us is that eliminationist rhetoric had to be strong enough to allow it to happen. Maybe, but this evades analysis of the massive significance that Germany’s World War II fortunes had on the execution of the Holocaust. It also forces us to ask why other countries where eliminationist anti-Semitism was widespread did not begin to participate in the Holocaust until either (a) they were occupied by Germany, or (b) wanted to be seen positively by Germany. Certainly Poland, Hungary, and Romania had rampant anti-Semitism, but the Holocaust did not happen in those places before the coming of the Second World War.

I do disagree with the reviewers who say that this is a turgid piece that was clearly a dissertation turned into a book. Undoubtedly, Goldhagen takes some shots at other historians, but I thought that it was quite well written and easy to digest.