Jason McCullough
01-22-2003, 09:12 PM
I can't find the old thread about the book, but I said I'd post more when I finished reading, so here goes.
This book is sheer torture to get through. There's only so many descriptions of people picking children up by their hair and shooting them in the back of the head that you can take without hurling the book out of sight. Be forewarned if you buy this; it's not a pleasant endeavor.
It's worth it, however. Goldhagen's argument, basically:
Eliminationist anti-semitism was one of the central defining features of Weimar German culture. He provides an absolute mountain of evidence that it was unobjectional conventional wisdom at the time. The statement that "the average Weimar German wasn't an an anti-semite" is ludicrous on its face when contrasted with the cultural documents of the time period. The not-even-remotely-constrained public discussions of whether the Jews should simply be relocated outside of Germany, or actually murdered, long before the Nazi party was created, is particularly damning.
Building on this, the existing explanations for why individual Germans killed Jews are wrong. They try to blame "the Nazi system" in some manner for what happened, instead of focusing on the beliefs and actions of the individual perpetrators. He uses the stories of the Police Battalions, which were tasked with a), maintaining order in the occupied territories, and b), eradicating Jews, to point out how none of the common exculpatory theories match the evidence.
For example, there's the "just obeying orders," "only extreme elements did it," and the "heat of combat" theories. These are falsified by the evidence.
Many police battalion commanders made it quite clear, on repeated occasions, that anyone who did not feel up to the task was not required to engage in the killing operations. Only a miniscule number of members took this option, and contrary to the insistence of defendants at Nuremburg, no one has been able to find a *single case* that holds up where someone was significantly punished for refusing to kill a Jew.
The police battalions killed something like a million Jews, at a minimum. They weren't composed of "extreme, crackpot, Jew-hating elements" as the conventional wisdom goes; they were a virtual cross-section of the non-military eligible male population. The equivalent of guys from the suburbs, with kids, offered no objection to carrying out their orders to not only murder Jews, but to systematically eliminate Jewish women, children, infants, the elderly, and the infirm.
Killing actions were not carried out in "chaos of combat" situations. The police battalions had reguarl social events; commanders had their significant others visit them; at the end of a full day of genocide they'd go back to their regular barrack; and they didn't even consider an occasion of genocide all that noteworthy. All that happened was a bigger alcohol ration. Occasionally a commander would provide a justification that they were killing them because "they supported partisan activity" or somesuch, so I suppose the case can be made (oh, and it has) that killing the Jewish men was somehow less bad. However, they systematically shot infants and the elderly, so rebellion suppression explanation simply cannot stand.
As further support for the German view of Jewry, he spends a few chapters documenting how Germany didn't put Jews to work for their production value: they didn't even attempt to get useful economic value out of them. They implemented the logical consequence of the statement "Jews do not do honest, real work, and they hate it": they forced the Jews to work simply because their considered it so inimical to their "nature" that it was punishment.
Similarly, the Jewish death marches that occured towards the end of the war served no purpose other than punishment by torture. They were in some cases explicitly ordered not to kill the Jews enroute; however, their destinations were pointless (in the middle of forest, for example), the Soviet army was right behind them, and their weren't treated in a manner were useful economic production could be extracted from them in the future. The marches were done simply to torture the Jews to death.
Basically, he argues that the "average German" in this period was apparently perfectly fine with killing Jews, and not just killing individuals, but engaging in the genocidal act of murdering all members of the race. Nazi eliminationism wasn't something Hitler tricked the nation into doing; it was the logical outgrowth of the virulent anti-semitism in Germany during the Weimar period.
My summary of the book:
Those who had a hand in the genocide are fully culpable (desk murderers, individual killers, those who identified Jews knowing full well the consequences, etc.) Goldhagen specifically states that he rejects the notion of collective guilt; metaphorically standing there and watching doesn't make you guilty of genocide, even if you think the Jews do need to be killed. For those that engaged in the killing, however, or were directly involved in the killing operations, there are no excuses. They quite clearly believed the conventional wisdom of the time that Jews were a direct threat to Germany, and the world, and that the good of humanity required their destruction.
From the epilogue:
This study of the Holocaust and its perpetrators assigns to their beliefs paramount importance. It reverse the Marxian dictum, in holding that consciousness determined being. Its conclusion that the eliminationist antisemitic German political culture, the genesis of which must be and is explicable historically, was the prime mover of both the Nazi leadership and ordinary Germans in the persecution and extermination of the Jews, and therefore was the Holocaust's principal cause, may at once be hard to believe for many and commonsensical to others. The evidence that so many ordinary people did maintain at the center of their worldview palpably absurd beliefs about Jews like those that Hitler articulated in Mein Kampf is overwhelming. And the evidence has been available for years, indeed available to any observer in Germany during the 1930s. But because the beliefs have seemed to use so ridiculous, indeed worthy of the ravings of madmen, the truth that they were the common property of the German people has been and will likely continue to be hard to accept by many who are beholden to our common-sense view of the world, or who find the implications of the truth too disquieting.
Germany during the Nazi Period was inhabited by people animated by beliefs about Jews that made them willing to become consenting mass executioners. The study of the perpetrators, especially of police battalions, who were a representative cross section of German men - and therefore are indicative of what ordinary Germans were like regarding Jews - compels us, precisely because there were representative of Germans, to draw this conclusion about the German people. Being ordinary in the Germany that gave itself to Nazism was to have been a member of an extraordinary, lethal political culture. That German political culture was producing such voluntaristic killers suggests, in turn, that perhaps this was a society that had undergone other important and fundamental changes, perhaps cognitive and moral ones. The study of the Holocaust's perpetrators thus provies a window through which German society can be viewed and examined in a new light. It demands that important features of the society be concieved anew. It suggests further that the Nazis were the most profound revolutionaries of modern times and that the revolution that they wrought during their but brief suzerainty in Germany was the most extreme and thoroughgoing in the annals of western civilization. It was, above all, a cognitive-moral revolution which reversed processes that had been shaping Europe for centuries. This book is ultimately not only about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Germany's representative citizens, this book is about Germany during the Nazi period and before, its people and its culture.
This book is sheer torture to get through. There's only so many descriptions of people picking children up by their hair and shooting them in the back of the head that you can take without hurling the book out of sight. Be forewarned if you buy this; it's not a pleasant endeavor.
It's worth it, however. Goldhagen's argument, basically:
Eliminationist anti-semitism was one of the central defining features of Weimar German culture. He provides an absolute mountain of evidence that it was unobjectional conventional wisdom at the time. The statement that "the average Weimar German wasn't an an anti-semite" is ludicrous on its face when contrasted with the cultural documents of the time period. The not-even-remotely-constrained public discussions of whether the Jews should simply be relocated outside of Germany, or actually murdered, long before the Nazi party was created, is particularly damning.
Building on this, the existing explanations for why individual Germans killed Jews are wrong. They try to blame "the Nazi system" in some manner for what happened, instead of focusing on the beliefs and actions of the individual perpetrators. He uses the stories of the Police Battalions, which were tasked with a), maintaining order in the occupied territories, and b), eradicating Jews, to point out how none of the common exculpatory theories match the evidence.
For example, there's the "just obeying orders," "only extreme elements did it," and the "heat of combat" theories. These are falsified by the evidence.
Many police battalion commanders made it quite clear, on repeated occasions, that anyone who did not feel up to the task was not required to engage in the killing operations. Only a miniscule number of members took this option, and contrary to the insistence of defendants at Nuremburg, no one has been able to find a *single case* that holds up where someone was significantly punished for refusing to kill a Jew.
The police battalions killed something like a million Jews, at a minimum. They weren't composed of "extreme, crackpot, Jew-hating elements" as the conventional wisdom goes; they were a virtual cross-section of the non-military eligible male population. The equivalent of guys from the suburbs, with kids, offered no objection to carrying out their orders to not only murder Jews, but to systematically eliminate Jewish women, children, infants, the elderly, and the infirm.
Killing actions were not carried out in "chaos of combat" situations. The police battalions had reguarl social events; commanders had their significant others visit them; at the end of a full day of genocide they'd go back to their regular barrack; and they didn't even consider an occasion of genocide all that noteworthy. All that happened was a bigger alcohol ration. Occasionally a commander would provide a justification that they were killing them because "they supported partisan activity" or somesuch, so I suppose the case can be made (oh, and it has) that killing the Jewish men was somehow less bad. However, they systematically shot infants and the elderly, so rebellion suppression explanation simply cannot stand.
As further support for the German view of Jewry, he spends a few chapters documenting how Germany didn't put Jews to work for their production value: they didn't even attempt to get useful economic value out of them. They implemented the logical consequence of the statement "Jews do not do honest, real work, and they hate it": they forced the Jews to work simply because their considered it so inimical to their "nature" that it was punishment.
Similarly, the Jewish death marches that occured towards the end of the war served no purpose other than punishment by torture. They were in some cases explicitly ordered not to kill the Jews enroute; however, their destinations were pointless (in the middle of forest, for example), the Soviet army was right behind them, and their weren't treated in a manner were useful economic production could be extracted from them in the future. The marches were done simply to torture the Jews to death.
Basically, he argues that the "average German" in this period was apparently perfectly fine with killing Jews, and not just killing individuals, but engaging in the genocidal act of murdering all members of the race. Nazi eliminationism wasn't something Hitler tricked the nation into doing; it was the logical outgrowth of the virulent anti-semitism in Germany during the Weimar period.
My summary of the book:
Those who had a hand in the genocide are fully culpable (desk murderers, individual killers, those who identified Jews knowing full well the consequences, etc.) Goldhagen specifically states that he rejects the notion of collective guilt; metaphorically standing there and watching doesn't make you guilty of genocide, even if you think the Jews do need to be killed. For those that engaged in the killing, however, or were directly involved in the killing operations, there are no excuses. They quite clearly believed the conventional wisdom of the time that Jews were a direct threat to Germany, and the world, and that the good of humanity required their destruction.
From the epilogue:
This study of the Holocaust and its perpetrators assigns to their beliefs paramount importance. It reverse the Marxian dictum, in holding that consciousness determined being. Its conclusion that the eliminationist antisemitic German political culture, the genesis of which must be and is explicable historically, was the prime mover of both the Nazi leadership and ordinary Germans in the persecution and extermination of the Jews, and therefore was the Holocaust's principal cause, may at once be hard to believe for many and commonsensical to others. The evidence that so many ordinary people did maintain at the center of their worldview palpably absurd beliefs about Jews like those that Hitler articulated in Mein Kampf is overwhelming. And the evidence has been available for years, indeed available to any observer in Germany during the 1930s. But because the beliefs have seemed to use so ridiculous, indeed worthy of the ravings of madmen, the truth that they were the common property of the German people has been and will likely continue to be hard to accept by many who are beholden to our common-sense view of the world, or who find the implications of the truth too disquieting.
Germany during the Nazi Period was inhabited by people animated by beliefs about Jews that made them willing to become consenting mass executioners. The study of the perpetrators, especially of police battalions, who were a representative cross section of German men - and therefore are indicative of what ordinary Germans were like regarding Jews - compels us, precisely because there were representative of Germans, to draw this conclusion about the German people. Being ordinary in the Germany that gave itself to Nazism was to have been a member of an extraordinary, lethal political culture. That German political culture was producing such voluntaristic killers suggests, in turn, that perhaps this was a society that had undergone other important and fundamental changes, perhaps cognitive and moral ones. The study of the Holocaust's perpetrators thus provies a window through which German society can be viewed and examined in a new light. It demands that important features of the society be concieved anew. It suggests further that the Nazis were the most profound revolutionaries of modern times and that the revolution that they wrought during their but brief suzerainty in Germany was the most extreme and thoroughgoing in the annals of western civilization. It was, above all, a cognitive-moral revolution which reversed processes that had been shaping Europe for centuries. This book is ultimately not only about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Germany's representative citizens, this book is about Germany during the Nazi period and before, its people and its culture.