Ordinary Men (31 page)

Goldhagen claims that the social-psychological interpretation is “ahistorical” and that its adherents “imply that any group of people, regardless of their socialization and their beliefs, could be parachuted into the same circumstances and would act in exactly the same way toward any arbitrarily selected group of victims.”
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This is a serious mischaracterization that confuses the experimental setting with scholars’ subsequent application of the insights derived. For example, the point of the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments was to isolate the variables of deference to authority and role adaptation precisely so that the dynamic of these factors in human behavior could be examined and better understood. To have run
either of these experiments pitting Serbs against Bosnian Muslims or Hutus against Tutsis would have been ludicrous, for the very reason that the historically specific ethnic animosities would have introduced a second powerful variable, totally skewing the results.

It was precisely because the experiments were kept ahistorieal that the insights from them have validity, and that scholars now know that deference to authority and role adaptation are powerful factors shaping human behavior. For scholars studying motivation in concrete historical situations, in which variables cannot be isolated and historical actors are not themselves fully conscious of the complex interaction of factors that shape their behavior, such insights can in my opinion be invaluable for sifting through problematic evidence.

Goldhagen has repeatedly claimed that his interpretation alone correctly assumes that the perpetrators believed that the slaughter of Jews was necessary and just, while the “conventional explanations” suffer from the false assumption that the killers believed that what they were doing was wrong and had to be induced to kill against their will. This both mischaracterizes the position of others and poses the issue as a false dichotomy. Employing a social-psychological approach in investigating the historically specific instance of “crimes of obedience” in Vietnam, Kelman and Hamilton have noted a spectrum of response to authority. Between those who acted out of conviction because they shared the values of the regime and its policies on the one hand, and nominal compilers who acted against their will under supervision but did not obey orders when not being watched, there were other possibilities. Many accepted and internalized the role expectation that soldiers must be tough and obedient and carry out state policies regardless of the content of specific orders.
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Soldiers and police can willingly obey orders and implement policy that they do not identify as commensurate with their own personal values, even when not supervised, in the same way that soldiers and police often willingly follow orders and are killed in the line of duty, though they do not want to die. They can commit acts in their capacity of soldiers and police that they would deem wrong if done of their own volition, but which they do not consider wrong if sanctioned by the state.
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And
people can change their values, adopting new ones that do not conflict with their actions, thus becoming killers out of conviction as the killing becomes routine. The relationship between authority, belief, and action is not only complex, but it is also unstable and can change over time.
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The social-psychological approach does not assume, as Goldhagen claims, that the perpetrators’ ideology, moral values, and conception of the victims do not matter.
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But the approach is certainly not congenial to the simplistic reduction of the perpetrators’ ideology, moral values, and conception of the victim to a single factor, such as anti-Semitism. I agree with Goldhagen when he states that” crimes of obedience’ … depend upon the existence of a propitious social and political context.”
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But the social and political context invariably introduces a plurality of factors beyond the cognition of the perpetrators and identity of the victims, and it produces a complex and changing spectrum or range of response.

In short, Goldhagen has not come even close to accurately explicating and then “irrefutably” disproving several of the key “conventional explanations,”
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neither of which is claimed to be a total explanation in itself. Even if the five conventional explanations noted by Goldhagen had been “irrefutably” disproved, it is not the case that we are left with “no choice but to adopt” Goldhagen’s own interpretation. The search for understanding the motivations of the Holocaust perpetrators is not confined to a limited set. The scholars quest is not a multiple-choice exam. Or at the very least there must always be another choice: “None of the above.”

Throughout the controversy, Goldhagen has claimed that his approach has restored a moral dimension missing from the accounts of previous historians. For instance, in his recent reply to his critics in
THE NEW REPUBLIC
, Goldhagen asserts that he has recognized “the humanity” of the perpetrators. His analysis is “predicated upon the recognition that each individual made choices about how to treat Jews,” which “restores the notion of individual responsibility.” On the other hand, he claims that scholars like myself have “kept the perpetrators at a comfortable arm’s length” and treated them as “automatons or puppets.”
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These claims by Goldhagen are untenable. First, the social-psychological insights he cavalierly dismisses do not treat individuals as mechanically interchangeable parts, nor do they dismiss cultural and ideological factors.
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As noted above, Goldhagen’s assertion that the psycho-sociological approach is “demonstrably false”
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is based on crude caricature. Second, concerning the “humanity” of the perpetrators and not keeping them “at a comfortable arm’s length,” it is Goldhagen himself who admonishes other scholars to rid themselves of the notion that Germans in the Third Reich were “more or less like us” and that “their sensibilities had remotely approximated our own.”
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And his claim to treat perpetrators as “responsible agents who make choices” is difficult to reconcile with his deterministic conclusion: “During the Nazi period, and even long before, most Germans could no more emerge with cognitive models foreign to their society … than they could speak fluent Romanian without ever having been exposed to it.”
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It is my position, in contrast, that psycho-sociological theories—based upon the assumption of inclinations and propensities common to human nature but not excluding cultural influences—provide important insights into the behavior of the perpetrators. I believe that the perpetrators not only had the capacity to choose but exercised that choice in various ways that covered the spectrum from enthusiastic participation, through dutiful, nominal, or regretful compliance, to differing degrees of evasion. Which of our two approaches, I would ask, is predicated upon the humanity and individuality of the perpetrators and allows for a moral dimension in the analysis of their choices?

Goldhagen and I agree that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was representative of “ordinary Germans,” and that “ordinary Germans” randomly conscripted from all walks of life became “willing executioners.” But I do not think that his portrayal of the battalion is representative. He is certainly right that there were numerous enthusiastic killers who sought the opportunity to kill, found gratification in inflicting terrible cruelties, and celebrated their deeds. All too many frightening examples of such behavior can be found in
both this book and his. But Goldhagen minimizes or denies other layers of behavior that are important to understanding the dynamics of genocidal killing units and that cast doubt on his assertion that the battalion was uniformly pervaded by “pride” in and “principled approval” of the mass murder it perpetrated. His portraval is skewed because he mistakes the part for the whole.

This is a flaw that appears repeatedly throughout the book. For instance, I agree that anti-Semitism was a strong ideological current in nineteenth-century Germany, but I do not accept Goldhagen’s assertion that anti-Semitism “more or less governed the ideational life of civil society” in pre-Nazi Germany.
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I agree that by 1933 anti-Semitism had become part of the “common sense” of the German right without thereby concluding that all German society was “of one mind” with Hitler about the Jews, and that the “centrality of antisemitism in the Party’s worldview, program, and rhetoric … mirrored the sentiments of German culture.”
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I agree that anti-Semitism—negative stereotyping, dehumanization, and hatred of the Jews—was widespread among the killers of 1942, but I do not agree that this anti-Semitism is primarily to be seen as a “pre-existing, pent-up” anti-Semitism that Hitler had merely to “unleash” and “unshackle.”
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In short, the fundamental problem is not to explain why ordinary Germans, as members of a people utterly different from us and shaped by a culture that permitted them to think and act in no other way than to want to be genocidal executioners, eagerly killed Jews when the opportunity offered. The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men—shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions—under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history.

Why does it matter which of our portrayals of and conclusions about Reserve Police Battalion 101 are closer to the truth? It would be very comforting if Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population
is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice, and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

TABLE 1 NUMBER OF JEWS SHOT BY RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101

TABLE 2 NUMBER OF JEWS DEPORTED TO TREBLINKA BY RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 10

1.
Raul Hilberg estimates that more than 25 percent of the victims of the Holocaust died in shootings. More than 50 percent perished in the six major death camps equipped with gassing facilities, and the remainder under the terrible conditions of ghettos, labor and concentration camps, death marches, etc.
The Destruction of the European Jews
(New York, 1985), 1219.