How Could They Have Done It?

Daniel Goldhagen studies the perpetrators of the Holocaust

When Daniel Jonah Goldhagen began reworking his prize-winning doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust into a book, he knew he had something important to say about the people who degraded, tortured, and killed 6 million Jews.

But Goldhagen, a newly promoted associate professor of government and social studies, never imagined the controversy it would spark or the commercial success the book would enjoy.

Today, his phone rings off the hook as journalists, colleagues, and others clamor to talk to Goldhagen about his provocative work, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

The book shows that many who took part in the genocide were perfectly ordinary men and women who were driven by a virulent hatred of Jews that he terms "eliminationist anti-Semitism." That hatred, he argues, was widespread in Germany by the end of the 19th century -- well before the Nazis came to power.

Goldhagen believes conventional explanations for the Germans' genocidal behavior, such as coercion, economic hardship, and social pressure to conform, do not explain the cruelty inflicted by the Germans on the Jews, even when they had opportunities to excuse themselves.

"Germans could say 'no' to mass murder," he writes. "They chose to say 'yes.' "

Goldhagen, 36, graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1982 and received his Ph.D. in 1992, the same year he joined the faculty. His doctoral thesis was awarded the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. He teaches courses on the Nazi revolution, political violence, democracy and dictatorship, and postwar West European politics.

His book is a best-seller in the United States, Britain, and Ireland, and it is scheduled for publication in Germany, France, Brazil, Israel, and elsewhere. Although the German edition will not appear until August, the book has sparked an uproar in that country. Goldhagen plans to travel there in September "so there can be a full and frank discussion."

Back from a three-week U.S. book tour, Goldhagen spoke with Gazette reporter Debra Bradley Ruder in his office in the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

You've described your book as a "radical revision" of what has been written about the Holocaust. How so?

I have tried to shift the focus of our scholarly attention back to the people who were the actors. The literature of the Holocaust, by and large, focuses on the Nazi institutions, structures, and leadership, to the general neglect of the perpetrators: the people who staffed the camps, deported Jews, and shot them. So my book is an attempt to put them back at the center of the analysis. And the principal questions are, Why did these people do what they did? What did they think about Jews and about what they were doing?

It also is a radical revision in my argument that ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly because they were anti-Semites. Of course, there are many people who know this. As I've gone around the country presenting the book, many survivors have come up to me and said, 'Thank you for writing the book. We've been waiting for 50 years for a book that finally accords with our own experience.' They know this, but their testimony has not, by and large, been incorporated into the scholarly analysis of the perpetration of the crime.

In maintaining that there was a virulent anti-Semitism which was part of the culture of Germany, and by concluding that the perpetrators were willing executioners because of their anti-Semitism, my book goes against the scholarship in the field. This book is also a radical revision because I contend we have to explain the perpetrators' vast cruelty as much as we have to explain the killing. The conventional explanations cannot account for the cruelty.

Did you expect to provoke as much controversy as you have?

The view I've put forward has been deemed controversial by some, but I actually think it should be the common sense position. When one thinks of other mass slaughters, such as what happened in the former Yugoslavia or in Rwanda, people naturally assume that the killers thought that what they were doing was right. The only genocide where people routinely say the opposite is the Holocaust. I believe the German perpetrators in this sense were like the perpetrators of other mass slaughters: they killed, tortured, mocked, and degraded people because they hated them.

What led you to this topic?

I heard a lecture in 1983 or 1984 about the raging debate in the field at the time: namely, when the systematic killing of Jews was decided upon, who gave the order, and what were the circumstances that produced this decision? What struck me was that scholars were treating what seemed an equally important historical question as unproblematic: When the order was given, why did people actually carry it out? After some investigation, it became clear to me that there was virtually nothing written about these people. I wrote a paper for a graduate seminar on the subject, and I decided to do my doctoral dissertation on it, in part because I knew there was an incredibly rich source in the postwar testimonies of the killers. The Federal Republic of Germany has interrogated tens of thousands of former killers, and these testimonies have been little used. It was a project I couldn't turn down once I knew it was there.

Since then, a few studies have come out on the perpetrators, principally Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men, but still there's so much we don't know.

I finished the dissertation in 1992 and rewrote it for publication to make it more accessible to the general public, but without any sacrifice of analytical rigor or scholarship. I feel so fortunate that [Alfred A.] Knopf was willing to publish such a book.

You dedicate the book to your father, a Holocaust survivor who recently retired as a visiting lecturer in Jewish studies at the Divinity School. How has he influenced your thinking?

This was his field of study. He taught about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany for many years, and we lived in Germany when I was 10 while he was conducting research. My father didn't talk much about his personal experiences. The intellectual attitude that I naturally adopted, being in our home, was that the task was to understand and explain what happened, not merely to tell a tale of woe. This topic was always part of my intellectual landscape.

I understand the testimony gathered by the West German government was full of omissions and lies by the perpetrators. How did you deal with that?

The Germans didn't keep detailed records of what happened on a given day. A record might consist of one line in a report: 5,000 Jews were rounded up and evacuated on such-and-such a day. So, you must rely on testimony of the perpetrators to a great extent. It's a problematic source, but it was an incredibly rich source at the same time. Typically, the perpetrators were more truthful when discussing what their units or others were doing than what they themselves were doing. They routinely denied their own participation. If that could be proven, they routinely said they were coerced or didn't want to do it. They tried to distance themselves physically, emotionally, and mentally. One has to sift through the testimony, use the rules of evidence as best one can, and try to get different people speaking on the same issue.

The investigators also took testimony from many survivors and bystanders, which is invaluable for understanding the mindset and actions of the perpetrators. I also used memoirs and diaries from survivors.

Much of the book is told in the killers' own words. I tried to treat them as three-dimensional people, not in the caricatured way in which they have often been portrayed: as isolated, frightened people who were dragged to their tasks against their will. These people went to movies, plays, bars, and church, they had wives and girlfriends. They were thinking beings who had views about what they were doing, views which governed their willingness to act.

Did light bulbs go off as you sorted through the material?

No. There were moments when I realized how to conceptualize certain issues, but the rest was a slow process. Some things became clear very quickly. The killers' ordinariness, that many of them weren't SS men, becomes obvious in 10 minutes of looking through the material. So does the fact that there were vast numbers involved: the names of 330,000 people who are suspected of having been in institutions of killing are catalogued at the justice center that coordinates the investigation of Nazi crimes. When you look at the number of camps -- there were 10,000 camps and ghettos, and 1,600 of them were reserved for Jews -- this was a vast infrastructure of destruction and domination which was open for every German to see. The notion that Germans didn't know that this regime was, by our standards, one of fundamental criminality is impossible to accept.

Why did you focus on police battalions, "work" camps, and death marches?

I chose these three institutions of killing because there's been little written about them and because they put to the test my hypothesis and help us understand the motivation of the killers. Throughout, I tried to find institutions of killing where there was no coercion.

The police battalions enable us to look at ordinary Germans, many of whom had no particular training for the slaughter, who were not forced to murder and who chose to kill and brutalize Jews. The work camps show the power of anti-Semitism to override economic needs. Even though there were strong imperatives for the Germans to use Jews as laborers, they were essentially incapable of using them in a rational way.

The death marches also reveal the power of anti-Semitism. The war was winding down, and clearly Germany was going to lose. Why would these guards, who often were not being supervised, continue killing, torturing, and starving Jews to the very end, when there were so many reasons to treat them better to gain an alibi?

The Germans also wiped out millions of homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs, disabled people, and others. Did they view them differently from the Jews?

The Nazi regime was the most murderous regime in modern history in the sense that the Nazis' impulse was to solve social problems by killing people. Had they won the war, they would have turned Eastern Europe into a vast slave plantation and killed many more millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and others deemed unnecessary for their colonial needs. Who knows when and if European civilization would have ever emerged from the darkness of the Nazi revolution which denied the principle that all people are created equal, and which preached domination, destruction, and the need to kill one's enemy.

Gays were not targeted for extermination, but many were sent to concentration camps where many did perish. The Nazis killed mentally ill people, though they searched for painless ways to kill them. The Jews and the Roma and Sinti peoples (commonly called Gypsies) were both slated for extermination. The Roma and Sinti were considered racially degraded "asocials" who had to be destroyed. The Jews were viewed as the source of evil in the world, devils in human form. This belief was at the core of Nazi ideology.

Anti-Semitism was prevalent in other European countries at the time, so why didn't the Holocaust happen there?

There has been much anti-Semitism around the world historically, and there have been many hatreds and prejudices. But great hatreds do not issue in systematic killing on their own. At most they might produce episodic killings, pogroms, and riots -- unless they are organized by the state. We had a very unusual occurrence in Germany, where its leadership turned anti-Semitism into the core of a state policy of extermination. And I would argue that Germany was the only country in a strategic position to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews. The Holocaust was produced by Germany because it was only there that all the necessary factors came together. That there was much anti-Semitism around Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, doesn't invalidate the notion that Germans killed Jews because they hated them. In fact, it explains why the Germans were able to find so many willing helpers in other parts of Europe.

Your book is filled with gruesome descriptions and photographs. Why did you feel it was important to include them?

The reason we have so many photographs of the Holocaust is because the Germans took them to memorialize their deeds. The pictures are powerful evidence of the attitudes of the perpetrators. They pose with smiling faces, in lordly positions over the Jews whom they're degrading, about to kill, or have just killed. I include the photographs and descriptions not to horrify people for the sake of horrifying people, but to convey what it must have been like to shoot a person, perhaps a child, at point-blank range, or to see 500 corpses piled up. Only then can one begin to comprehend what might have moved the perpetrators to kill.