A Guest Book Review of
"Hitler's Willing Executioners"

By HAROLD M. GREEN

Rarely does an academic dissertation achieve the status of an international best seller, as was the case with "Hitler's Willing, Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" (Knopf, 1996) by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a political scientist professor at Harvard University. Eighty thousand copies of the book sold in Germany just four weeks after it was published there in August, 1996.

The controversy generated by this book was further heightened by its author's youthful "telegenic presence" and charisma, which often endeared Goldhagen to an initially hostile audience. Such was especially the case during his trip to Germany shortly before the book was published there.

Goldhagen's reception in Germany is of particular interest because of the range of opinions expressed in the media. For example on May 20, 1996 "Der Spiegel" ran a headline reading "Ein Volk yon Daemonen" ("A People of the Devil,") characterizing the study as "an assault on the German National character." Then there was the more sympathetic account carried by the liberal paper "Die Zeit," which covered the raucous debates between Goldhagen and other historians which took place at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Indeed, Goldhagen himself has pointed out that German reviews of the book were generally favorable and finding a publisher for it was never a problem.

In the U.S., however, reviews tended to be critical of the study. Among the most significant negative assessments were those of CNN gadfly Christopher Hitchens and the eminent Columbia historian Fritz Stern. While Stern criticized the book for its simplistic theoretical explanations of Holocaust bestiality, confining his appraisal to substantive issues, Hitchens declared the book to be a "non-book," and in his article "History for Fools" (The Nation, June 9,1997,) intimated that Goldhagen's historical material was merely a recapitulation of Peter Pulzer's classic study, "The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria."

There are four aspects of Goldhagen's book that may legitimately be cited when considering its provocative and controversial nature:

1) Goldhagen claims that all previous views of the Holocaust must be rethought, and that only he has succeeded in doing this; his view is the only correct one. He attacks the "traditional views" of such scholars as Hannah Arendt ("banality of evil" thesis), and rejects out of hand the "obedience to authority" explanation most commonly associated with experimental data gathered by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence to refute the "Milgram factor" is Goldhagen's assertion that police records show "No one was ever executed or sent to a concentration camp for refusing to kill Jews (379)." In Goldhagen's opinion, like other people, Germans follow authority only if they regard it as legitimate. (Viewed historically, this argument is supported by the observation that "millions of Germans were in open rebellion against the authority of Weimar Germany.")

2) Many of his conclusions are arrived at by bending or omitting historical facts to suit a preconceived theory-the classic "petitio principii." One of the best examples of this is his argument that "non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the genocide... no Germans, no Holocaust." Stern has pointed out that Goldhagen doesn't take into account that, while Austrians made up ten percent of Hitler's Germany, they were implicated in 50 percent of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

3) Despite his claim that he was misinterpreted, Goldhagen clearly implies that German "national character" was the cause of the Holocaust, a view which has been called "simplistic" and "unoriginal" by some scholars. We may further note that Goldhagen's invocation of the "Sonderweg thesis"-the view that Germany "developed along a singular path, setting it apart from other Western countries"-is by no means a new concept, evident in works dating back to Veblen's 1917 study on Imperial Germany as well as more recent authors (Franz L. Newmann and A.J.P. Taylor).

4) Finally, Goldhagen's penchant for sociological theorizing about the Holocaust does not explain how the perpetration of such horrors could come about. Indeed, Stern has aptly called attention to the "persistent mismatch between the powerful, unsparing descriptions of Holocaust [brutality] and simplistic theoretical explanation."

In spite of flaws in "Hitler's Willing Executioners," the data on Holocaust atrocities, taken mostly from the Central Agency for the State Administrations of Justice in Ludwigsberg, illuminates in a poignant and disturbing manner " the dark corners of German society," to paraphrase sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf. The heartfelt indignation in Goldhagen's exposition is reminiscent of a powerful speech given in 1890 by philosopher Heinrich Rickert who, following Goethe, lamented "the two souls dwelling within [the German] breast."