Was Slaughter of Jews Embraced by Germans?

[TomCADem]

Here is a book review of the book, Hitler's Willing Executions: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Today, even on this board, there appears to be an assumption that the vast majority of people are repulsed by the hatred, sexism and racism of Donald Trump. However, perhaps we are living in a bubble, and actually a sizable and highly motivated 40 percent segment of the population strongly embraces Trump's views.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html

A basic question posed by students of the Holocaust has to do with the psychology of the ordinary perpetrators of the genocide against the Jews. How, some scholars have asked, did those who carried out the slaughter overcome the moral scruples it would be normal to feel when faced with the annihilation of an entire people, a far-flung people, moreover, that posed no threat to the German homeland.

That is the wrong question, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues in this masterly, powerfully argued book. ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' is an attempt to demolish the standard views about Germans and the Holocaust by arguing that when it came to the Jews, average Germans had no moral scruples to overcome in the first place.

The perpetrators of the anti-Jewish slaughter, Mr. Goldhagen contends, did not kill Jews because of threats or some German propensity for obeying authority. They participated in the slaughter because they were steeped in a historical culture of anti-Semitism. They tortured and massacred Jews, starved them, toyed with them, punished them for their birth, and they did so voluntarily, even eagerly, with unsurpassable malice and cruelty.

''The German perpetrators,'' Mr. Goldhagen wrties, ''were assenting mass executioners, men and women who, true to their own eliminationist anti-Semitic beliefs, faithful to their cultural anti-Semitic credo, considered the slaughter to be just.''

[FreepFryer]

1. I assume you know Goldhagen's book is deeply controversial among Holocaust historians?

Why no mention of that, or Browning? This is not an easily settled debate among historians, so not sure why you didn't conextualize the book properly.

"The book is a deliberate provocation -- I consider this a neutral judgment. Provocations can shock people out of their settled, comfortable views; they can also be self-promoting attacks on earlier work and professional standards. Goldhagen's title is provocative and delivers his thesis: the executioners of Jews were willing murderers, who willingly chose to torment and kill their victims; they were ordinary Germans, not Nazi monsters, not specially trained or indoctrinated by party membership or ideology, but simply acting out of what Goldhagen calls the common German "eliminationist mind-set." And being "ordinary" Germans responding to a common "cognitive model" about Jews, their places could have been taken by millions of other ordinary Germans.

Goldhagen's book comes in two related parts: the explanatory model, or "the analytical framework," as he also calls it, and the empirical evidence. The parts are joined by a single intent: the indictment of a people. The duality of presentation marks the style as well. Goldhagen depicts horror and renders judgment in evocative and compelling phrases. He bolsters polemical certainty with concepts drawn from the social sciences, relying on the vaporous, dreary jargon of the worst of academic "discourse." Unintelligible diagrams distract, even as horrendous photographs confirm. "The book's intent is primarily explanatory and theoretical," he notes. Theory explains and, as there is a persistent mismatch between the powerful, unsparing description of Holocaust bestiality and simplistic theoretical explanation, theory triumphs."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1996-11-01/goldhagen-controversy-one-nation-one-people-one-theory

[Voltaire2]

2. All Germans? No. Many? Yes.

[Loki Liesmith]

3. This book is widely rejected

by scholars of the holocaust.

[TomCADem]

6. Not Really. Also, Mostly Just A Matter of Degree.

For example, Browning offers a view contrary to Goldhagen, but even he discusses how Hitler's decisionmaking evolved toward the holocaust, rather than being the end goal from the beginning.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/23/historybooks.features1

At least Browning went some way to open up one of the two great questions left by the Holocaust: 'How could they have?' The other question is whether the Nazis always meant to kill the Jews, or whether they drifted into murder when other 'final solutions' became impossible. Now Browning has tried to answer that puzzle too.

The main argument between 'intentionalists' and 'structuralists' is pretty much over. Few historians now think Hitler, insane Jew-hater as he was, planned the gas chambers before he even came to power. But neither do they think that struggles inside the Nazi structure led to Auschwitz almost without conscious human agency. Browning shows how the decision for total extermination was crystallised by changing circumstances, but against the background of a driving impetus to radicalise racial policy which derived ultimately from Hitler. The centre almost never issued direct orders. But local commanders, whether SS officers or administrators in occupied territory, always sensed that more extreme action on the ground would find approval above them.

* * *
Up to 1939, Hitler's 'destruction of Jewry' meant driving the Reich's Jews into emigration. The conquest of Poland that September changed the picture. The atrocities there were aimed at Poles as much as at Jews, and the scene was soon dominated by Himmler's gigantic ethnic cleansings as he sought to empty western Poland and replace Poles by Germans from the Baltic and Ukraine. The Jews were simply to 'disappear', by emigration to Madagascar or by being shoved into Soviet-held territory. Himmler observed, no doubt sincerely in 1940, that 'the Bolshevik method of physical extermination... is un-German'.

Slowly a Final Solution by emigration shifted towards solutions by expulsion. By early 1941, with war against Russia being prepared, some Nazis were playing with ideas of deporting Polish and perhaps German/Austrian Jews into the Ural steppes where they would be worked and starved to extinction (the concept of 'expulsion' was always linked with 'decimation'). But the brutality of the 'Barbarossa' plan made this irrelevant. Behind the Wehrmacht, the Nazi slaughter-squads were assembled for a 'total war of destruction' against Soviet society. Millions had to die and in this programme the Jews - who in Poland had been perceived as 'vermin' - now became Satanic, central to the 'Judaeo-Bolshevik' hate image.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. It's my understanding that most Germans either didn't know about it, or were in denial about it. nt

[TomCADem]

7. NY Times - The Jew Who Fought to Stay German (During Nazi Germany)

Think of Kushner, Cohn, Carson and other racial and religious minorities who continue to support the Trump administration. Likewise, the question is why so many Jews did not leave Germany when Hitler came to power.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/elon-klemperer.html

Even after Hitler's victory in the elections of 1933, Klemperer continued to consider himself a German patriot, referring often to his Deutschtum, or German-ness. ("I am forever German, a German 'nationalist,' " he wrote in July 1935. "The Nazis are un-German.&quot A year after being compelled, to his utter horror, to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he wrote: "I am now fighting the hardest battle for my Deutschtum. I must hold on to it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not."

Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote in 1934. "Shame for Germany."

Convincing themselves somehow that Nazism would not last, Victor and Eva Klemperer did not emigrate, as his brothers and cousin did. He and his wife even decided in 1935 to build themselves a little house in the village of Dolzschen in the hills above Dresden. At this time they already had to comply with a new Nazi ordinance that all country houses must have a tilted "Germanic" gable (flat roofs were verboten as alien, or "decadent" Bauhaus). The house, though small, had one room large enough to accommodate Eva's grand piano. Klemperer must have been one of the very few people of Jewish origin in Nazi Germany who invested most of their savings in German real estate at a time when others were running for their lives. He deluded himself that converts and war veterans like himself would be spared. Much later he would write: "I escaped, I dug myself into my profession. I held my lectures and obsessively overlooked the fact that the benches before me grew emptier and emptier."

Summarily dismissed from his post as a professor at the university, he filled his free time with getting a driver's license and buying a car, in which he and his wife toured the lovely countryside of Thuringen and Sachsen. In 1937, still proud of the Distinguished Service Medal he had won in World War I, he confessed: "I myself have had too much nationalism in me and I am now being punished for it." In 1938 he felt chastised by the recent Nuremberg racial laws and yet, after driving with his wife through the lovely hill country southeast of Dresden, he noted, "How beautiful this Germany might have been if one could still feel German and be proud of being one." In 1942, already a slave worker relegated to a kind of ghetto on the outskirts of Dresden, he assured one of his fellow inmates that "fanaticism" was "un-German" by definition.

[haele]

5. Most probably didn't care much because it didn't directly affect them.

Sort of like driving on the freeway and going past a nasty accident or the police approaching someone they had pulled over before car went past.
They're going about their own business, stressed about nasty traffic delays, and are glad it isn't them there at the side of the road as they pass.

Not actively evil, but detached from the well being or fate of fellow citizens who are not like them....

Haele

[heaven05]

8. doesn't matter whether

average germans embraced the nazi liquidation of jewish people, it happened so it didn't make a goddamn bit of difference whether they did or didn't, now did it? Hell with a still sizable majority of americans anti-nazi-klan, would that make a difference if the potus nazi in charge now started his 'final solution' for new immigrants, jewish people(charlottsville should have put them on notice) and american POC, African-americans especially. NO!!!!!!!!!

[Vinnie From Indy]

9. Title is wrong

The word is executioners

[TomCADem]

12. That Is The Title of the NY Times Article, Not The Book

nt

[radius777]

10. I agree completely, and think Germans got off lightly,

which, IMO, allowed alt-rightism to so easily reemerge.

Hitler's Nazi views were simply more extreme versions of what most Germans (right and left alike) already felt.

"The Good German" has always been the explanation for why ordinary Germans went along, but this is bullshit, as there was a long and deep history of anti-semitism in Germany (Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite and basically a terrorist) and Europe, similar to the long history of slavery/racism in America that allowed so many 'Good Whites' to line up and vote for Herr Drumpf.

[Wolf Frankula]

11. I know Germans who lived through it.

The sentiment was 'Don't talk about it.' 'You don't want to know.' 'Keep your mouth shut or you will join them.'

Wolf