On the Group Psychological Implications of the Popularity of Hitler’s Willing Executioners

Whatever the scholarly merits and limitations of Goldhagen’s work (see my forthcoming review essay in The Journal of Psychohistory), another aspect of his book is of interest to psychohistorians: the book’s unusual popularity.

Histories are rarely found on nonfiction best seller lists, a truism equally valid for Third Reich studies despite continuous public interest in Nazis and Hitlerism. Contradictorily, Goldhagen’s book has received wide public attention, being reviewed in many places, and all the right places (New York Times and Washington Post), with Goldhagen appearing on Charlie Rose.

Why this wide popular exposure of a history should be the case is somewhat puzzling. (The group psychohistorical questions are always: Why this? Why now?) Many have noted, like Gordon Craig in the New York Review of Books, that there is nothing particularly new in Goldhagen’s work. The role of “ordinary people” in Germany has been known by specialists in German history and the Holocaust for at least ten years through research of scholars like Christopher Browning, for example, and from the implications of Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority over a generation ago.

Additionally, historian John Weiss (Lehman College and CUNY Graduate Center) has a new book, Ideology of Death (Ingram Publishing), which argues much the same thesis as Goldhagen. Weiss’ book was also widely and positively reviewed (New York Times and Washington Post), was promoted by a book tour, sold out its first printing, and is nuanced, balanced, soundly historical, and well-written. Yet, it attained neither the celebrity nor best seller status of Goldhagen’s. Why?

Perhaps part of the answer is in the power of words: Goldhagen was able to work “Hitler” into his title. But popularity in group psychohistorical terms has more to do, it has always been argued, with unconscious feelings and fantasies. What the feelings and fantasies are in this specific case is hard to assess, but to further discussion and research, one can offer some speculations.

• On one level, there may be some collective health-seeking, since more people may now be able to recognize the impulse for cruelty buried in everyone. Perhaps we are using the German experience to distance ourselves from that reality by acknowledging it in ourselves.
• There is an element of oversimplification in Goldhagen’s work, making it appealing in its simplicity.
• Hitler’s Willing Executioners allows us to avoid dealing with the reality that millions of non-German accomplices helped the Nazis.
• In a post-Cold War world without enemies, it feels good to blame the Germans — once again.
• Goldhagen’s analysis allows people to encounter their own hidden sadism and anti-Semitism while denying them and blaming the Germans.
• Lastly, Goldhagen’s analysis is utterly

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free of psychological/psychoanalytic orientation. He uses traditional notions of “rational man” to comfort his readers, thus allowing his work, not so remarkably, to become a best seller.

The merit to Goldhagen’s study is its importance in popularizing the finding that ordinary people, not a few psychotics, are capable of such atrocities. What further study may reveal about Goldhagen’s audience, however, is also important to our understanding of group fantasies. It may illustrate some of the psychic needs the Nazis fill in Americans.

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