Word: goldhagen
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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners [BOOKS, April 1] asks a question that Germans of the younger generation have long wanted to pose to their parents and grandparents: What did they know, and what did they do? One thing is certain: there are no simple answers. The Holocaust plot involved fanaticized henchmen as well as sadistic executioners, opportunistic collaborators and people who heard rumors they would or would not believe in the context of raging war and burning cities. After all, the regime went to extraordinary lengths to disguise what was going on, apparently afraid...
Were the men of Battalion 101 cowed or coerced into taking part? No, insists Goldhagen. One of the battalion's commanders, Trapp by name, offered to excuse the squeamish from killing duty. Only a handful of guards took up the offer. Far from hating their work, the men of Battalion 101 even took pictures of the roundup, which they proudly mailed to wives or girlfriends, who would not have been too surprised by evidence of such brutality. Germany, Goldhagen writes, was "saturated" with prison camps where Jewish inmates were in essence worked to death under conditions scarcely better than those...
...presumably to erase the evidence of war crimes. Instead, camp guards embarked on the notorious death marches, forcing emaciated, sickly Jewish prisoners to walk barefoot, sometimes through snow, for 15 miles a day or more. "Jewish survivors report with virtual unanimity German cruelties and killings until the very end," Goldhagen writes...
...pretty sweeping indictment, one that Goldhagen supports by noting that from medieval until modern times, German culture was suffused with what he calls an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that demonized Jews as the source of all social ills. For instance, the church-inspired vision of Jews as "Christ killers" fueled countless pogroms over the centuries. Thus, in Goldhagen's view, the Final Solution represented the logical fulfillment of ordinary Germans' own long-standing dreams. He quotes one 19th century anti-Semite as predicting that "the German Volk needs only to topple the Jews" in order to become "united and free...
...19th century English writer Lord Acton believed that historians should be hanging judges, exercising their right to condemn the sins of the past. By this stern standard, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has done his job with a pen in one hand, a noose in the other...