Excerpted from his book:
Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
For what developments would a comprehensive explanation of the Holocaust
have to account? For the extermination of the Jews to occur, four principal
things were necessary:
1. The Nazis - that is, the leadership, specifically Hitler - had
to decide to undertake the extermination.
2. They had to gain control over the Jews, namely over the territory
in which they resided.
3. They had to organize the extermination and devote to it sufficient
resources.
4. They had to induce a large number of people to carry out the killings.
The vast literature on Nazism and the Holocaust treats in great depth the
first three elements, as well as others, such as the origins and character
of Hitler's genocidal beliefs, and the Nazis' ascendancy to power. Yet, as
I have already indicated, it has treated the last element, the focus of this
book, perfunctorily and mainly by assumption. It is therefore important to
discuss here some analytical and interpretive issues that are central to studying
the perpetrators.
Owing to the neglect of the perpetrators in the study of the Holocaust, it
is no surprise that the existing interpretations of them have been generally
produced in a near empirical vacuum. Until recently, virtually no research
has been done on the perpetrators, save on the leaders of the Nazi regime.
In the last few years, some publications have appeared that treat one group
or another, yet the state of our knowledge about the perpetrators remains
deficient. We know little about many of the institutions of killing, little
about many aspects of the perpetration of the genocide, and still less about
the perpetrators themselves. As a consequence, popular and scholarly myths
and misconceptions about the perpetrators abound, including the following.
It is commonly believed that the Germans slaughtered Jews by and large in
the gas chambers, and that without gas chambers, modern means of transportation,
and efficient bureaucracies, the Germans would have been unable to kill millions
of Jews. The belief persists that somehow only technology made horror on this
scale possible. "Assembly-line killing" is one of the stock phrases
in discussions of the event. It is generally believed that gas chambers, because
of their efficiency (which is itself greatly overstated), were a necessary
instrument for the genocidal slaughter, and that the Germans chose to construct
the gas chambers in the first place because they needed more efficient means
of killing the Jews. It has been generally believed by scholars (at least
until very recently) and non-scholars alike that the perpetrators were primarily,
overwhelmingly SS men, the most devoted and brutal Nazis. It has been an unquestioned
truism (again until recently) that had a German refused to kill Jews, then
he himself would have been killed, sent to a concentration camp, or severely
punished. All of these views, views that fundamentally shape people's understanding
of the Holocaust, have been held unquestioningly as though they were self-evident
truths. They have been virtual articles of faith (derived from sources other
than historical inquiry), have substituted for knowledge, and have distorted
the way in which this period is understood.
The
absence of attention devoted to the perpetrators is surprising for a host
of reasons, only one of which is the existence of a now over-ten-year-long
debate about the genesis of the initiation of the Holocaust, which
has come to be called by the misnomer the "intentionalist-functionalist"
debate. For better or worse, this debate has become the organizing debate
for much of the scholarship on the Holocaust. Although it has improved our
understanding of the exact chronology of the Germans' persecution and mass
murder of the Jews, it has also, because of the terms in which it has been
cast, confused the analysis of the causes of the Germans' policies (this is
taken up in Chapter 4), and it has done next to nothing to increase our knowledge
of the perpetrators. Of those who defined this debate and made its central
early contributions, only one saw fit to ask the question, Why, once the killing
began (however it did), did those receiving the orders to kill do so? It appears
that for one reason or another, all the participants in the debate assumed
that executing such orders was unproblematic for the actors, and unproblematic
for historians and social scientists. The limited character of our knowledge,
and therefore our understanding, of this period is highlighted by the simple
fact that (however the category of "perpetrator" is defined) the
number of people who were perpetrators is unknown. No good estimate, virtually
no estimate of any kind, exists of the number of people who knowingly contributed
to the genocidal killing in some intimate way. Scholars who discuss them,
inexplicably, neither attempt such an estimate nor point out that this, a
topic of such great significance, is an important gap in our knowledge.
If ten thousand Germans were perpetrators, then the perpetration of the Holocaust,
perhaps the Holocaust itself, is a phenomenon of one kind, perhaps the deed
of a select, unrepresentative group. If five hundred thousand or one million
Germans were perpetrators, then it is a phenomenon of another kind, perhaps
best conceived as a German national project. Depending on the number and identity
of the Germans who contributed to the genocidal slaughter, different sorts
of questions, inquiries, and bodies of theory might be appropriate or necessary
in order to explain it.
This dearth of knowledge, not only about the perpetrators but also about
the functioning of their host institutions has not stopped some interpreters
from making assertions about them - although the most striking fact remains
how few even bother to address the subject, let alone take it up at length.
Still, from the literature a number of conjectured explanations can be distilled,
even if they are not always clearly specified or elaborated upon in a sustained
manner. (In fact, strands of different explanations are frequently intermingled
without great coherence.) Some of them have been proposed to explain the actions
of the German people generally and, by extension, they would apply to the
perpetrators as well. Rather than laying out what each interpreter has posited
about the perpetrators, an analytical account is provided here of the major
arguments, with references to leading exemplars of each one. The most important
of them can be classified into five categories:
One
explanation argues for external compulsion: the perpetrators were coerced.
They were left, by the threat of punishment, with no choice but to follow
orders. After all, they were part of military or police-like institutions,
institutions with a strict chain of command, demanding subordinate compliance
to orders, which should have punished insubordination severely, perhaps with
death. Put a gun to anyone's head, so goes the thinking, and he will shoot
others to save himself.
A second explanation conceives of the perpetrators as having been blind followers
of orders. A number of proposals have been made for the source or sources
of this alleged propensity to obey: Hitler's charisma (the perpetrators were,
so to speak, caught in his spell), a general human tendency to obey authority,
a peculiarly German reverence for and propensity to obey authority, or a totalitarian
society's blunting of the individual's moral sense and its conditioning of
him or her to accept all tasks as necessary. So a common proposition exists,
namely that people obey authority, with a variety of accounts of why this
is so. Obviously, the notion that authority, particularly state authority,
tends to elicit obedience merits consideration.
A third explanation holds the perpetrators to have been subject to tremendous
social psychological pressure, placed upon each one by his comrades
and/or by the expectations that accompany the institutional roles that individuals
occupy. It is, so goes the argument, extremely difficult for individuals to
resist pressures to conform, pressures which can lead individuals to participate
in acts which they on their own would not do, indeed would abhor. And
a variety of psychological mechanisms are available for such people to rationalize
their actions.
A fourth explanation sees the perpetrators as having been petty bureaucrats,
or soulless technocrats, who pursued their self-interest or their technocratic
goals and tasks with callous disregard for the victims. It can hold for administrators
in Berlin as well as for concentration camp personnel. They all had careers
to make, and because of the psychological propensity among those who are but
cogs in a machine to attribute responsibility to others for overall policy,
they could callously pursue their own careers or their own institutional or
material interests. The deadening effects of institutions upon the sense of
individual responsibility, on the one hand, and the frequent willingness of
people to put their interests before those of others, on the other, need hardly
be belabored.
A fifth explanation asserts that because tasks were so fragmented, the perpetrators
could not understand what the real nature of their actions was; they could
not comprehend that their small assignments were actually part of a global
extermination program. To the extent that they could, this line of thinking
continues, the fragmentation of tasks allowed them to deny the importance
of their own contributions and to displace responsibility for them onto others.
When engaged in unpleasant or morally dubious tasks, it is well known that
people have a tendency to shift blame to others.
The
explanations can be reconceptualized in terms of their accounts of the actors'
capacity for volition: The first explanation (namely coercion) says that the
killers could not say "no." The second explanation (obedience) and
the third (situational pressure) maintain that Germans were psychologically
incapable of saying "no." The fourth explanation (self-interest)
contends that Germans had sufficient personal incentives to kill in order
not to want to say "no." The fifth explanation (bureaucratic myopia)
claims that it never even occurred to the perpetrators that they were engaged
in an activity that might make them responsible for saying "no."
Each of these conventional explanations may sound plausible, and some of
them obviously contain some truth, so what is wrong with them? While each
suffers from particular defects, which are treated at length in Chapter 15,
they share a number of dubious common assumptions and features worth
mentioning here.
The conventional explanations assume a neutral or condemnatory attitude
on the part of the perpetrators towards their actions. They therefore premise
their interpretations on the assumption that it must be shown how people can
be brought to commit acts to which they would not inwardly assent, acts which
they would not agree are necessary or just. They either ignore, deny, or radically
minimize the importance of Nazi and perhaps the perpetrators' ideology, moral
values, and conception of the victims, for engendering the perpetrators' willingness
to kill. Some of these conventional explanations also caricature the perpetrators,
and Germans in general. The explanations treat them as if they had been people
lacking a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances.
They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills,
but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant
psychological propensities, such as the slavish following of narrow "self-interest."
The conventional explanations suffer from two other major conceptual failings.
They do not sufficiently recognize the extraordinary nature of the deed: the
mass killing of people. They assume and imply that inducing people
to kill human beings is fundamentally no different from getting them to do
any other unwanted or distasteful task. Also, none of the conventional explanations
deems the identity of the victims to have mattered. The conventional
explanations imply that the perpetrators would have treated any other group
of intended victims in exactly the same way. That the victims were Jews -
according to the logic of these explanations - is irrelevant.
I maintain that any explanation that fails to acknowledge the actors' capacity
to know and to judge, namely to understand and to have views about the significance
and the morality of their actions, that fails to hold the actors' beliefs
and values as central, that fails to emphasize the autonomous motivating force
of Nazi ideology, particularly its central component of antisemitism, cannot
possibly succeed in telling us much about why the perpetrators acted as they
did. Any explanation that ignores either the particular nature of the perpetrators'
actions - the systematic, large-scale killing and brutalizing of people -
or the identity of the victims is inadequate for a host of reasons. All explanations
that adopt these positions, as do the conventional explanations, suffer a
mirrored, double failure of recognition of the human aspect of the Holocaust:
the humanity of the perpetrators, namely their capacity to judge and to choose
to act inhumanely, and the humanity of the victims, that what the perpetrators
did, they did to these people with their specific identities, and not to animals
or things.
My explanation - which is new to the scholarly literature on the perpetrators
- is that the perpetrators, "ordinary Germans," were animated by
antisemitism by a particular type of antisemitism that led them
to conclude that the Jews ought to die. The perpetrators' beliefs,
their particular brand of antisemitism, though obviously not the sole source,
was, I maintain, a most significant and indispensable source of the perpetrators'
actions and must be at the center of any explanation of them. Simply put,
the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and
having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to
say "no."
Copyright © 1996 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
All Rights Reserved
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is Assistant Professor
of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University and an Associate of
Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. His doctoral dissertation,
which is the basis for his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust," was awarded the American Political Science
Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the
field of comparative politics.