German anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust… The conclusion of this book is that anti-Semitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans – and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned – to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not the social psychological, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.

(Goldhagen, 1996:9)

Daniel Goldhagen’s book based on his doctoral research was first published in 1996. The title of the book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” in big prints tells us about his book that the executioners were not only murderers but they were also “willing” to do so. The subtitle of his book “Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” states the second “fact” that the executioners were not only “willing murderers” but also they were also ordinary men who were not specifically selected but randomly recruited from every part of German society. The selection of words that Goldhagen uses for his book has another special and purposeful meaning as well. By using the term “Ordinary Germans” he clearly and intentionally draws an intellectual attack on another scholar “Christopher Browning” who had written a book called “Ordinary Men” which was published 4 years earlier in 1992 than Goldhagen’s work. Browning, in his book, focuses his study particularly on the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, which was made up of people from the Hamburg area, who massacred the Jews in Poland.

This research essay will follow the order of thesis-antithesis-synthesis where in the first section the main thesis will be stated and in the second section, the essay will argue against the thesis and finally a conclusion will be reached. In the introduction, the essay will introduce the history of the Police Battalion and the series of events and approach of the two books and the thesis of this essay is that “Goldhagen lacked insight in scholar writing and contributed very little if not nothing to the intellectual debate on the motivations of the perpetrators”. The second section will look at the issue from Goldhagen’s perspective and finally a mid-way conclusion will be reached between Goldhagen’s provocative theory and Browning’s scholarly thesis.

In the early morning of July 13th 1942, the “ordinary” members of German Police Battalion 101 found themselves in an extraordinary situation. Under the orders of Battalion commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, they were commanded to round up the 1,800 Jews in the village (Jozefow, Poland), take the ones that are able to, to the work-camp and execute the remaining women, children and the elders. It was the first time that the ordinary policemen were directly ordered to massacre. Trapp, however, who was also not completely happy with the orders decided to excuse the ones who felt that they weren’t up to the task. Around a dozen policemen took advantage of this offer. After driving the Jews out of their homes, shooting those who resisted or were immobile, they selected around 300 able men from 1,800 Jews in the village. The method of execution in Police Battalion 101 was simple and direct but also inhuman. Each policeman in the firing squad would be teamed with a victim and they would walk to a forest path in a wooden area where Jews would be ordered to sit down and the policeman would fire from behind into the skull (Hinton, 1998:9). As Hr. Ernst, one of the perpetrators explains, the bullet sometimes struck the head of the victim with such trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains preyed everywhere and besmirched the shooters (Browning, 1992:64). After these shootings, few more of the German policemen dropped out of the Battalion.

Both Goldhagen’s book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” and Browning’s book “Ordinary Men” examine the same Police Battalion 101 and the motivations of these murderers. Browning’s final chapters examine why despite Trapp’s offer of excuse, many of these German “Ordinary Men” decided to stay and proceed with the order for murders. According to Browning, the reasons for the perpetrators, at least the source of their motivations were: peer pressure, the war, physical revulsion, desensitization, dehumanization, brutalization, self-interest, the nature of authoritarianism, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning concludes that, the Police Battalion 101, who came from middle-lower class background with older age, was made up of nothing more than any “Ordinary Men”. According to Browning, all the motivations listed above would make any other ordinary men to commit such brutal atrocities.

Goldhagen, in his highly controversial book (1996), Hitler’s Willing Executioners, directly attacks Browning’s conclusions about the motivations of the “Ordinary Men”. For Goldhagen, the people who committed the atrocities were not only “Ordinary Men”, they were “Ordinary Germans” and these men were willingly engaged in the genocidal activities because of the level in which their anti-Semitism extents. He shifts the political focus of the subject to the psychology and more than that to anthropological make up of the German society. He states that German society must be approached “… with the critical eye of an anthropologist…”(Goldhagen, 1996:15). Although it is agreed that the Holocaust was a dehumanizing act, he chooses a specific language to explain the acts of the Police Battalion 101:

“…they chose to walk into a hospital, a house of healing, and to shoot the sick, who must have been cowering, begging, and screaming for mercy. They killed babies. None of the Germans has seen fit to recount details of such killings. In all probability, a killer either shot a baby in its mother’s arms, and perhaps the mother for a good measure or as was the habit during these years, held it at arm’s length, shooting it with a pistol. Perhaps the mother looked on in horror. The tiny corpse was then dropped like so much trash and left to rot.

(Goldhagen, 1996:215-216)

The selection of his words tells us that he has a lot of emotions involved and throughout his book, he uses words, such as brutal, inhuman, horror, gruesome, terror etc… His book is a product of moral outrage.

Goldhagen wants to show that these “Ordinary Men” were thinking in the course of such actions, with the same mentality. The fact that the Police Battalion 101 was made up of these ordinary people who were not necessarily indoctrinated by the Nazi Party brings one single conclusion that the German people including the very most ordinary ones must have hated the Jews which has its origins from a long-lasting and at that time on-going anti-Semitism. He argues that the Germans had one unique element which made all the Germans potentially genocidal by their nature which he describes as and “eleminationist ideology” especially against the Jews.

As the thesis, “Goldhagen lacked insight in scholar writing and contributed very little if not nothing to the intellectual debate on the motivations of the perpetrators” suggests this part of the essay will draw criticisms on Goldhagen’s work.

Given that in less than one dozen pages, Goldhagen dismisses decades of research on the Holocaust conducted by the most important scholars such as Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning, Raul Hilberg, it is pretty much more than expected that the book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” has generated a great deal of controversy. While a few Holocaust scholars have responded favorably to Goldhagen’s argument, many have strongly criticized him for saying very little that is new, positioning a monocausal and deterministic argument, critiquing alternative explanations in an erroneous and facile manner, using circular reasoning and a deterministic methodology, being ahistorical and over-simplistic, and making racist arguments against the Germans (Hinton, 1998:12).

Goldhagen overstates the level and the depth of anti-Semitism in his book. At the same time he ignores two points that makes the scholars like Bauer pull his hair which are: Not all the shooters were German and not all the victims were Jewish. Some of the killers of the Holocaust were also drawn from populations who did not necessarily lived within the borders of Germany. Some ethnic Germans, who lived in Ukraine, had killed approximately 30,000 Jews. Also, the guard force in Auschwitz was also made up of ethnic based Germans who lived outside of the country. The executioners were also from Croatia, Romania, Lithuania and other European countries. A senior scholar Hilberg explains this feature with a good example:

“The great Odessa massacre of 1941was Romanian, and it was the Romanian Marshal Ion Antonescu who asked on 16 December 1941, ‘Are we waiting for a decision to be taken in Berlin?’ just before 70,000 Jews were killed by his men in the Golta prefecture. Thousands of these Jews were burned alive. As to the Croats, there are photographs of what went on in that satellite state. Baltic auxiliaries were absolutely essential to the Germans, as in the case of Latvian street and harbor police who participated heavily in the massive shootings of Jews in Riga. Of the Lithuanian police battalion that was pressed into the service, the second is of special interest. In October of that year, it was ordered to go from Kaunas to Byelorussia as a component of the German 11th Police Battalion. The mission was to kill Jews. Facing the victims, a young Lithuanian declared that he could not shoot men, women and children whereupon the company commander, Juozas Kristaponis, invited any of his men with similar objections to move to the side. Some did, most did not. Later, this unit was involved in more killing, and in Slutsk, there were occurrences that prompted a German police officer to call the Lithuanians ‘pigs’”.

(Hilberg, 1997:5)

Goldhagen does not mention one single case of these occurrences that took place outside of Germany. He does however at times differentiate the German perpetrators by saying: Germans were the “prime movers and executers of the Holocaust” (Goldhagen, 1996:476). He does not have one single comparative argument; therefore he can not explain the motivations of other Europeans. Were the atrocities committed by the Latvians also due to the mere fact that Germans were anti-Semitic and of the same mind of Hitler’s? If theses atrocities and ideology was unique to the German society, how can one explain what was going on in the rest of Europe? Omitting this fact, a statement of this magnitude requires a comparative study, Goldhagen fails greatly for discriminating Germans from other Europeans without even looking at the attitudes of others while the innocent Jews were being killed not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe.

The second major failure of Goldhagen is the fact that there were many non-Jewish victims. Raul Hilberg argues: “It would be difficult to ascribe all these man, who had not been a part of German Society, the kind of German anti-Semitism that in Goldhagen’s view harbored an ‘exterminationist potential’. It would be manifestly impossible to connect any anti-Semitism with the origination of killing operations directed at non-Jewish people” (Hilberg, 1997:5). During 1930s and early 1940s German government exterminated more than one forth of its mentally disabled patients with gas. The disabled people in Germany were not a threat to the German society by any means but they were still transferred from the euthanasia centers and gassed just like the Jews. Similarly, Gypsies in Germany were treated in exactly the same manner as the Jews were treated. All the Gypsies were transferred to the ghettos in Poland together with Jews and they were also exterminated. Again, Goldhagen makes a few references to the other victims of these “ordinary willing executioners” however he does not include these references for his conclusion. So while evaluating the German society, what Goldhagen does is, take one type of executioner while there are many others and one type of victim again among all others and draw a hasty generalization that all Germans were anti-Semitic and of the same minds of Hitler’s by their nature. He does however manage to link anti-Semitism to racial purity and this purity would be achieved not only by killing Jews but also others, who are threats to the Aryan German blood.

The next part of this essay will try to look at the issue from Goldhagen’s perspective and in an attempt to contradict the original thesis of this research paper. As Nick Zangwill argues, there are certain cases in which Goldhagen is clearly right and Browning is wrong. Every single leading Nazi member who was executed after the Nuremberg trials went to death with their clear conscience. The common thought among all was that “they had done the right thing”. For example at the Nuremberg trials one of the leading Nazi officers said that: “I will absolutely and gladly take responsibility for even the most serious things which I have done…” (Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. IX: 368). Goring also says: “The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, its freedom, its happiness and its life” (Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. XXII, 564). There is no plausibility in the idea that Goring was someone who was attracted to evil qua evil. None of the leading Nazis in the trials showed any weakness because they did what they believed in. It is absolutely agreeable that the top Nazi officers’, starting with Himmler’s, biggest motivation was anti-Semitism and potentially eleminationist anti-Semitism. (Zangwill, 2003:4)

One major criticism of Goldhagen’s work is that, it is “monocausal”. However this criticism is not entirely true. Goldhagen, in most part of his thesis shows that the Holocaust had more than one cause. However, he does argue that anti-Semitism alone was the only motivational factor which led to genocide. Goldhagen recognizes that other factors were necessary for the killings but he insists that anti-Semitism, as a real psychological factor in the mind of the majority of the killers, was an important necessary condition (Goldhagen, 1996: 140-141). Browning denies the fact that the eleminationist anti-Semitic ideology was a motivational factor for the killings. It is agreeable that Goldhagen is not wrong for his observation in explaining the motivational factors. Although Browning lists many factors he omits the anti-Semitic, eleminationist motivations for the cause of the killings.

Coming back to the specific case of Police Battalion 101, Goldhagen argues that the “Ordinary Men” was in fact proud and unlike Browning suggests they were not acting under the peer pressure. For his hypothesis, he relies on many photographs taken by the members of the Battalion as his evidence of this pride (Goldhagen, 1996: 245-247, 405-406). According to Goldhagen, these men showed pride, no shame or weakness which makes him come to a conclusion, if the “Ordinary Men” in those pictures are happy and proud, they must think that what they are doing is worth and right. Although, I have to admit that this is pretty weak evidence, I can try to see the conclusion he draws looking at the evidence he has. These pictures may as well be exceptions and selected in a biased manner and it can create illusions when drawing a conclusion about the psychology of these men.

In conclusion, I would like to contradict my own thesis. Although Goldhagen had major shortcomings in proving his theories, he did, in fact add quite a lot to the intellectual debate on the issue. At least, he raised a very important question that remains open and still important more than ever. He sparked the fire in the intellectual arena. What were the motivations of these ordinary men when committing such brutal atrocities? Unlike he claims, his research is a product of moral outrage rather than an anthropological, sociological and psychological theory analysis paper. His analysis would have been so much more powerful if he argued that the “eleminationist anti-Semitist ideology” was highly motivating for many “Ordinary Men” in explaining their behavior. It is more than true that for quite a number of executioners “eleminationist ideology” was more than enough as a motivating factor whereas for many others, there were many more factors that contributed to the decision-making of these men. Eleminationist anti-Semitism was an important, maybe one of the most important one but it isn’t the sufficient cause of the Holocaust. By doing so, he could have benefited in two ways. First of all, he would not look like a young ambitious professor trying to over-throw decades of research done by the most prominent scholars in the area. The arrogance of his style even by using a provocative title “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” made him a target for open-fire from its cover to conclusion, because his intention was to attack a senior scholar like Christopher Browning. Secondly, if he argued that “eleminationist ideology” was one of the factors, he would have made a valuable contribution to the intellectual debate researching the causes of the Holocaust and many of those senior scholars would be applauding rather than criticizing Goldhagen. Although he asks an important question, he does not address several other key issues in particular, how an advanced society would have carried out the Holocaust. Gellately says that: “Goldhagen had forcefully presented some challenging insights, offered new and important evidence, and certainly given us good reason to revise some of our perceptions and understandings” (Gellately. 1997:191). He does however fails dramatically in giving us a complete review of the Holocaust that he argues the purpose of his book is (Goldhagen, 1996:9). The study of Holocaust requires a better research, at least a comparative study, complex methodology which Goldhagen does not apply and present. Overall one issue remains which is going to be discussed for several other decades: “What exactly then motivated the “Ordinary Men” just like the five hundred of those in the Police Battalion 101 to commit such brutal atrocities?” The answer may be: “either/or”, maybe even “neither” and the real answer will be reached, only with the contributions of young and brave scholars like: “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen”.

Huseyin Akturk (Cape Town, 2006)

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