Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel J. Goldhagen. Knopf, New York, 1996 Pp. x, 622.

The first review I read of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel J. Goldhagen was in that bastion of scholarship, People Magazine (next to an article on Demi Moore as a stripper), perhaps that is where it is best received: the realm of pop-sensationalism. After studying some of the foremost scholars in German history ( Peukert, Evans, Craig) reading Goldhagen's Ordinary Germans is an obvious and startling bit of sensationalism thinly labeled (not disguised) as scholarship. The over-obvious emotional bias and reductionism is shocking. It is a shame too, because perhaps there is something important to say, and to be understood. Not necessarily believed, but accepted for its effect. Goldhagen's work was a great oppurtunity, sadly lost.

Ordinary Germans rejects the Holocaust enigma of "how ordinary men could become genocidal killers" deemed unanswerable by Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, and the Final Solution in Poland. Goldhagen propounds that the answer lies in the Germans themselves, who, as a collective body have some sort of national predilection for hating and killing Jews. It is quickly obvious that Goldhagen has bought into Nazi propaganda himself. He believes what Goebbels wrote in his diary ("All Germans are against the Jews") but perhaps many Germans did not. Goldhagen now applies the same collective condemnation brought upon the Jews to the Germans as a whole.

Daniel J. Goldhagen is Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University and an Associate of Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Ordinary Germans was drawn from his doctoral dissertation which was supervised by Stanley Hoffman, Peter Hall, and Sidney Verbal and received the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. There are no previous publications to consider or compare. One would have to review Goldhagen's academic work to show evidence of any presupposed emotional bias. He is the son of a Jewish scholar who survived the Holocaust, and quotes his father, Erich Goldhagen, numerous times in events, opinions, and convictions.

Most controversial works are called "intellectually provocative" by contemporaries, not Ordinary Germans. To say it received sharp criticism, is an understatement. Ordinary Germans is widely attacked in academia, mostly for rejecting or ignoring previous scholarship, but also for theoretical conclusions, and a repetitive, melodramatic delivery. Goldhagen's work attempts to analyze and chronicle what he called a pre-holocaust national anti-semitism. This, according to Goldhagen, "created the necessary enabling conditions for the eliminationist program to unfold, of which they [the Germans as a whole], with sadly few exceptions, approved in principle if not wholeheartedly. "

Ordinary Germans was well received by the popular media, (and those with an agenda to support) for it's 'fresh stance," "impeccable scholarship," and "absolute integrity." Not surprisingly, these oft touted reviews come from journalists, or from Goldhagen's own fold, most recognizably his Ph. D. advisor, Stanley Hoffman. Goldhagen's work is criticized whole heartedly as less-than-academic in delivery. (His descriptive accounts are colorful and emotional but not wholly relevant, or conclusive.) He is over dismissive of Browning's conclusions, and of Browning's refusal to conclude based on the evidence.

Although he has some primary sources giving revelation to one specific Holocaust atrocity (the Helmbrechts Camp death-march) he draws much from this archival research on this account while the main crux of his position is based on scant primary research. The most revealing source is that of Chaim Kaplan, a vehement "German hater" who Goldhagen calls a "brilliant diarist of the Warsaw ghetto." Kaplan's revulsion for the Germans as a people is embodied in his account: "The [German] masses have absorbed this sort of qualitative hatred. . . they have absorbed their master's teachings in concrete corporal form." Goldhagen has echoed Kaplan, and his father who survived the Holocaust with a hatred for the Germans rather than for murder itself.

This sensationalist, reductionist approach is very unfortunate. The work is timely, and there is a market for dampening the current trend of giving social and psychological excuses for murder. There is merit in saying: "It couldn't have only been just a few crazy Nazis." or "They weren't all forced to kill." Perhaps it is the sensationalism that makes it both targetable, and functionable in calling attention to the subject.

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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
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