Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

This volume by Professor Daniel Goldhagen has aroused a great deal of scholarly controversy. It has been fiercely attacked by such renowned Holocaust historians as Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer. It has also been widely reviewed with favor in some quarters and with significant disfavor in others (e.g., The New Republic and The New Yorker). We may well ask, what is the fuss all about? Goldhagen has undertaken to study the one group of Holocaust participants that he claims has been understudied by historians--namely, the perpetrators, whom he shows were far more numerous than previously recognized. These murderers, says Goldhagen, were able to perform their hideous deeds not only without compunction but also with a degree of unimaginable enthusiasm. He focuses on the police battalions that did the actual killing (consisting of ordinary personnel as opposed to elite SS units, etc.) and on the gratuitous cruelty with which the slave labor camps and the death marches at the end of the war were carried out. Goldhagen insists that the ultimate explanation for this unexplainable bestiality is the unique brand of anti-Semitism that evolved in Germany through the centuries, which he calls "eliminationist" and which became "exterminationist" under Hitler. It was the power of this evil virus that enabled ordinary Germans to become extraordinary, unhesitating butchers of Jews. The teaching of anti-Semitism in Germany had an his toric popular appeal and was able in Nazi Germany to transform traditional disdain for Jews into a lethal ideology. Clearly, no one can dispute the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi enterprise as a driving demonic psychic force. However, explaining the Holocaust by reducing it to one root element, no matter how relevant, comes close to simplistic reductionism. Goldhagen's critics, in my view, rightly challenge his monochromatic interpretation of a technicolor historic reality as well as the shrill, repetitive hammering of his main theme. Nonetheless, his book does make a contribution by virtue of focusing on the frightening enigma of how decent people who loved their families and who went to church could turn into monsters who acted with barbarism and without shame or embarrassment. Facing up to this history is a sacred challenge for all religious people to confront.
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