Ordinary Men (36 page)

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen began his research in the records of the
STAATSANWALTSCHAFT
in Hamburg several months after I finished my work there in May 1989. He became aware of my work on the topic of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the fall of 1989 at the latest.

I in turn have criticized Goldhagen’s work: Christopher R. Browning, “Daniel Goldhagen’s
Willing Executioners,” History & Memory
8/no. 1 (1996), 88-108; and “Human Nature, Culture, and the Holocaust,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
(Oct. 18, 1996), A72. We also had an exchange of views at the opening academic symposium of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in December 1993, though these papers have not yet been published.

2.
At least two anthologies of responses to
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
have already appeared: Julius H. Schoeps, ed.,
Ein Yolk von Mördern?
(Hamburg, 1996), and Franklin H. Littel, ed..
Hyping The Holocaust: Scholars answer the
Holocaust
(Merion Station, Pa., 1997). More are apparently on the way. The two most detailed and sustained critiques of
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
are: Ruth Bettina Birn, “Revising the Holocaust,”
Historical Journal
40/no. 1 (1997), 195-215; and Norman Finkelstein, “Daniel Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’ Thesis: A Critique of
Hitler’s Willing Executioners” New Left Review
224 (1997): 39-87. Another very detailed assessment is: Dieter Pohl. “Die Holocaust—Forschung und Goldhagen’s Thesen,”
Vierteljahrshef Für Zeitgeschichte
45/1 (1997), 1-48.

3.
Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
, cited from the revised and expanded edition (New York, 1985), 1011, 994.

4.
Herbert Jäger,
Verbrechen unter Totalitärer Herrschaft
(Frankfurt/M., 1982), 81-82, 95-122, 158-60.

5.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 106

6.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 85.

7.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 399, 443.

8.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 39, 43.

9.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 582, fn 38; 593-94, fn 53.

10.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 35-36.

11.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 444.

12.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
The German Empire
(Leamington Spa, 1985). James Retallack, “Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H-U Wehler’s ‘Das Kaiserreich,’”
German Studies Review
, 7/no. 3 (1984), 423-50. Roger Fletcher, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics,”
German Studies Review
7/no. 3 (1984), 451-80.

13.
George Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology
(New York, 1964); Fritz Stem.
The Politics of Cultural Despair
(Berkeley, 1961); Jeffrey Herf,
Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
(Cambridge, 1984), and “Reactionary Modernism Reconsidered: Modernity, the West and the Nazis,” forthcoming.

14.
John Weiss,
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany
(Chicago, 1996).

15.
Shulamit Volkov, “Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code,”
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
, 23 (1978), 25-46. See also: Peter Pulzer,
The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
(London, 1964).

16.
History of Anti-Semitism List, 5.15.96.

17.
Gavin Langmuir, “Prolegomena to Any Present Analysis of Hostility Against the Jews,” reprinted in
The Nazi Holocaust
, vol. 2, ed. by Michael Marrus (Westport, Conn., 1989), 133-171, esp. 150-154; and “From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism.”
History, Religion, and Antisemitism
(Berkeley, 1990), 27,5-305, esp. 289-97.

18.
Saul Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
(New York, 1997), 73-112.

19. Goldhagen, ‘Reply to My Critics,” 41.

20.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 399, 85.

21.
William Sheridan Allen.
The Nazi Seizure of Power
(Revised Edition: New York. 1984), 84.

22.
Goldhagen, “Reply to My Critics.” 41.

23.
Ulrich Herbert,
Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus. Weltanschauung unci Vernunft 1903-1989
(Bonn, 1996).

24.
Ian Kershaw. “The Persecution of the Jews and German Public Opinion in the Third Reich,’’
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
26 (1981), 261-89;
Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945
(Oxford, 1983);
The Hitler “Myth“: linage and Reality in the Third Reich
(Oxford, 1987); “German Popular Opinion and the ‘Jewish Question,’ 1933-1943: Some Further Reflections.”
Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland: 1933-1943
(Tubingen, 1986), 36.5-85. Otto Dov Kulka, “Public Opinion’ in Nazi Germany and the Jewish
Question,’” Jerusalem Quarterly
25 (1982), 121-44 and 26 (Winter 1982), 34-15: and Otto Dov Kulka and Aaron Rodrigue, “The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends in Research on German Society and the Jewish Question,’”
Yad Vashem Studies
16 (1984), 421-35. David Bankier, “The Germans and the Holocaust: What Did They Know,”
Yad Vashem Studies
20 (1990), 69-98; and
The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism
(Oxford, 1992). See also: Marlis Steinert,
Hitler’s War and the Germans
(Athens. Ohio, 1977); Walter Laqueur, “The German People and the Destruction of the European Jews.”
Central European History
6, no. 2 (1973), 167-91; Sarah Gordon,
Hitler Germans, and the “Jewish Question”
(Princeton, 1984); Robert Gellately.
The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945
(Oxford, 1990). In contrast, see: Michael Kater, “Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany,”
Yad Vashem Studies
(1984), 129-59.

25.
Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
, 298, 327-28.

26.
Bankier,
Germans and the Final Solution
, 151-20.

27.
Kulka and Rodrigue, “German Population and the Jews,” 435.

28.
Kershaw, “Persecution of the Jews,” 288.

29.
Kulka and Rodrigue, “German Population and the Jews,” 430-435.

30.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 439-440, 592.

31.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 279, 185.

32.
Goldhagen, “Reply to My Critics,” 40.

33.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 279.

34.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 241, 231, 451.

35.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 386, 414.

36.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 416, 392.

37.
In addition to his “Reply to My Critics” and “Letter to the Editors” in the
New Republic
, see also his “Letter to the Editors,”
New York Review of Books
, Feb. 6, 1997, 40.

38.
As many critics have noted, one comparison Goldhagen does not make is between German and non-German anti-Semitism. This does not deter him from asserting, “No other country’s antisemitism was at once so widespread as to have been a cultural axiom…. German antisemitism was
sui generis.” Willing Executioners
, 419.

39.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 348-351. In most of the narrative, Goldhagen speaks of the guards as a monolithic group without distinction, often referred to simply as “the Germans.” Yet he himself provides telling details that point to important situational, institutional, and generational distinctions. In contrast to the eight to ten young ethnic Gennan men, the eighteen to twenty older male guards (according to one survivor) “were for the most part good-natured and did not beat or otherwise torment us.” Recruitment of ethnic Germans outside the Reich was, of course, in the hands of the SS. The young women guards—uniformly cruel (though six deserted quickly)—had all sought out their profession as guards.(
{Willing Executioners
, 335, 360).

40.
The statistics are taken from Danuta Czech,
Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Kimzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945
(Hamburg, 1989), especially 126-132, 179; Steven Paskuly, ed.,
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz Rudolph Höss
(New York, 1996), 132-34.

41.
Michael Thad Allen, “Engineers and Modern Managers in the SS: The Business Administration Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt),” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1995.

42.
Yehoshua Büchler, “First in the Vale of Affliction: Slovakian Jewish Women in Auschwitz, 1942,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
10, no. 3 (1996), 309.

43.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 410-11.

44.
Goldhagen,
Witting Executioners
, 398, 410.

45.
Henry Friedlander,
The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(Chapel Hill, 1995), 110, writes: “The staff at Hadamar arranged for a celebration when the number of patients killed there reached 10,000. On the orders of the physicians, the entire staff assembled at the basement crematorium to participate in the burning of the ten thousandth victim. A naked corpse lay on a stretcher, covered with flowers. The supervisor Bünger made a speech, and a staff member dressed up as a cleric performed a ceremony. Even’ staff member received a bottle of beer.”

46.
Friedlander.
Origins of Nazi Genocide
, 389.

47.
Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
, (Vintage edition: New York, 1989), 125-26; Gita Sereny,
Into That Darkness
(London, 1974). 101.

48.
Fred E. Katz,
Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil
(Albany, 1993), 29-31, 83-98.

49. Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 408.

50.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 409.

51.
Subsequently published as: Browning, “Daniel Goldhagen’s
Willing Executioners,”
esp. 94-96.

52.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 463.

53.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 467.

54.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 464.

55.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 601, fn. 11.

56.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 467.

57.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 221.

58.
On a footnote on p. 537 he notes the testimony of Ernst G., G 383. He does not note the testimony in this regard of: George A., HW 421; Alfred L., HW 1351; Bruno P., HW 1915; Heinz B., HW 4415; Henry L., G 225; August Z., G 275; and Hans K., G 363.

59.
Georg A., HW 439; and Erwin N., HW 1685.

60.
Friedrich B., HW 439; Bruno R., HW 1852; Bruno D.. HW 1874; Bruno P., HW 1915; and Bruno G., HW 2019.

61.
Oskar P, HW 1743.

62.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 240.

63.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 241.

64.
Bruno P., HW 1925-26. It should also be noted that the witness to this incident freely offered a great deal of incriminating testimony and is often cited by Goldhagen on these other counts, so his general reliability is not in question.

65.
Needless to say, Goldhagen has deemed my selection and use of evidence tendentious and misleading as well. His points often strike me as nitpicking, but on occasion they are well-taken. For instance, he correctly notes that I should have provided the full quotation and precise attribution of Trapp’s admonition, after he observed “the maltreatment of the Jews.” that the men “had the task to shoot the Jews, but not to beat and torture them.” Goldhagen, “Evil of Banality, “52.

66.
Heinz Buchmann, HW 2439-40.

67.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
. 249-50.

68.
Heinz Buchmann, HW 2441.

69.
Heinz Buchmann, HW 4416.

70.
Goldhagen.
Willing Executioners
, 248.

71.
Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 235-36; Hermann B., HW 3066-67, 3214. 3515.

72.
Bruno D., HW 1874.

73.
Wilhelm E., HW 2239.

74.
Goldhagen, “Reply to My Critics,” 38.

75. Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 381-82.

76.
These are the factors Goldhagen credits with dismantling anti-Semitism in postwar German culture. Goldhagen,
Willing Executioners
, 582, 59.3-4.

77.
Goldhagen, “Reply to My Critics,” 40.

78.
Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton,
Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility
(New Haven, 1989).

79.
The Nazis occasionally understood that preserving such a distinction was necessary for the mindset of the majority of the perpetrators. While there were no trials of men who refused to shoot Jews, there were investigations (and in one case a murder trial) for the “unauthorized” killing of Jews even in the bloodiest year of the Holocaust—1942. For example: Military Archiv Prague, Varia SS, 124: Feldurteil in der Strafsache geger Johann Meisslein, Gerricht der kdtr. des Bereiches Proskurow (FK183), March 12, 1943.

80.
James Waller, “Perpetrators of the Holocaust: Divided and Unitary Self-Conceptions of Evildoing,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
10, no. l (Spring 1996), 11-33.