Reflections on Goldhagen

Editor’s Note: Professor Kren will be writing a full review of Goldhagen for the American Historical Review, the official publication of the American Historical Association. Here he is providing a few comments about the book and the issues it raises.

Daniel Goldhagen’s work has engendered a major controversy. Accounts suggest that the symposium on it at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, was quite acrimonious. Numerous reviews and commentaries have been published. (I would single out Christopher R. Browning’s essay in a recent issue of History and Memory.)

Goldhagen’s concern is not with the origin of the Final Solution, or who gave the orders to engage in mass murder, or even when and how the decision to engage in mass murder was made. These issues led to a polarization between “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” (For an excellent critical summary of this controversy, see Christopher R. Browning, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered,” The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992]). Rather, Goldhagen’s focus is on the individuals who did the actual killing and on their motives.

His basic thesis is that German culture was imbued with an intense “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, and that this accounts for the fact that members of military police units had few difficulties in killing Jews. Goldhagen is convinced that all, or almost all, Germans viewed Jews as not part of the human community, and that this view is what made killing them so easy.

The evidence is now very clear that many more Germans than we had at first supposed participated in the killing. Browning’s work on Police Battalion 101 had examined the attitude towards killings of a unit made up of older men who were not fanatical Nazis. Goldhagen shows how other military police units played a very active role in the killings. Clearly, the older view that held that only dedicated SS Einsatzgruppen participated in mass killings stands in need of revision. However, there are two propositions in Goldhagen which are untenable.

Goldhagen singles out German anti-Semitism and suggests that it was more demonic, more virulent than that prevalent in any other nation. The historical evidence in no way supports this. Austrians, who after the Anschluß made up eight percent of Großdeutschland [Greater Germany], made up forty percent of the staff of the death camps. The anti-Semitism in Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, Hungary, and even in France showed an intensity probably greater than that found in Germany. Poles killed Jews even after the war!

Above all, the argument that Germans’ hatred of Jews explains the ease with which they could participate in mass killings is dubious. Germans have left behind a bloody record of killing non-Jews, from Germans who suffered mental or physical handicaps to those who deviated ideologically from the party line (members of the Sturm-Abteilung in 1934) to Communists as well as an untold number of Poles, Russians, and others.

Neither Goldhagen nor his critics cite psychohistorical literature. Indeed, there is almost no literature on the psychological dimension of killers who do so in the service of the state. (Although Faris R. Kirkland, “Psychological Purposes Served by War: Three Perspectives,” The Journal of Psychohistory Volume 24 (1) Summer 1996, pages 53-63, reviews some works which deal with this from a very different perspective.) The reason for this lack of literature is, I believe, that neither psychologists nor psychiatrists view killings for the state as either psychologically or ethically problematic. In contrast, a view of human nature stemming from Rousseau and the Enlightenment has held that individuals have a strong reluctance

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to kill.

However, the evidence would suggest that when authorized by a legitimate authority and supported by a peer group most individuals have no great resistance to killing. There is a remarkable scene in the film Dead Man Walking where a nurse, after wiping a condemned man’s arm with alcohol, injects him with a lethal substance and views this as doing her job. The men of the German military police battalions had no difficulties killing non-Jews when called upon to do so. The evidence is compelling that if almost any military unit of whatever nationality is asked to kill any other group, few would have any problem participating. And the psychiatrists in all the armies would single out for therapy those few who did not participate.

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