Of all Holocaust questions there are few that rile as much opinion than apportioning the blame (other than morons asking if it happened).
Goldberg’s hypothesis is that Germany possessed a unique “eliminationist antisemitism”, of which the Holocaust was the result and that the vast majority of ordinary Germans wanted Jews eliminated from society.
In his own words,
Do you agree?
I think there’s something to this, but I don’t believe it was unique to Germany, and there were many Germans who would not fit into this categorization. From what I understand, there was similar brutality and almost gleeful attitudes towards murdering the Jews from various Nazi-allied paramilitary groups in other Axis countries in eastern Europe.
My understanding is that Europe’s anti-semitism was not monolothic, ranging from relatively passive ‘don’t bring your boyfriend home’ anti-semitism to the eliminationist strain, and that this sort of eliminationist anti-semitism was more common in Germany and certain other parts of eastern Europe then the rest of Europe.
In the above article, New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik reviews a couple of books on Churchill which cover his ascendance and performance during WW2. In that article, Gopnik offers the following quote:
Do with that what you will. I do not feel qualified to comment on the OP - I care deeply about anti-Semitism, but don’t believe that painting a People with such a broad brush works in anything but speeches. But that statement “They are carnivorous sheep” has stuck with me. Clearly, Hitler and his colleagues were able to mobilize enough of the German people that all of the evil we know played out.
With the sheer number of non-Holocaust deaths, esp in the USSR, I find it hard to believe that only fanatical Nazis took part in the atrocities:
3,300,000 Soviet POWs died, a rate of 57%, most in the span of 6 months.
Estimated that Belarus SSR lost 25% of its population
No.
The US locks up a greater proportion of its populace than any other country. Its military budget is greater than any other countries by a huge amount. Its history is littered with meddling in the elections of other democratic countries. …I don’t see any huge protests going on about these things, nor will I any time soon. So are we all willing accomplices to this, or are we all just people trying to live our lives as best we can?
I think it’s fair to say that, yes, Germans were willing executioners. Even most of the civilians were happy to duck their heads and do their part. Plenty of German Jews even helped Hitler in their various ways.
But I’m not really sure how useful that statement is. It’s like saying “Americans invaded Iraq” - of course it’s undeniably true at a certain level. However, it’s probably worth understanding the issue at a deeper level until we can recognize that only a few hundred thousand troops actually went, and that many of the supporters of the war were unhappy with its execution and that many American opposed it entirely.
So looking at Germans… not all Germans were Nazis. Not all Germans served in the army, and some who did were drafted. Not all Nazi government/military personnel were aware of the Holocaust and even fewer participated. Many of the people killed by the Germans were German themselves (and not just Jews, but the handicapped, homosexual, Communist, etc.) As I stated at the beginning, I think most of them share levels of guilt in what happened, but a blanket statement of guilt is far less useful than understanding who participated, how, and for what reasons.
Ultimately, then, I’m only willing to label Germans as willing executioners if it’s the opening to a deeper investigation… not if it’s a blanket accusation that’s going to be left alone without any nuances.
I’ve got to say I agree wholeheartly, Ukrainians played a particularly brutal role and the deportation of Jews from occupied countries couldn’t have been accomplished without the collaboration of local authorities, Germany didn’t have the manpower to do it alone. Italy, Norway and Denmark were among the ones who to their credit resisted mass deportations to the gas chambers.
In other words, that’s why I disagree with the idea that it was something unique to German history and the Prussian tradition, had the Ukrainians or Poles, or even the French who had a nasty anti-Semitic streak had their own Hitler in the circumstances Germany found itself in…would things have been any different?
This is part of what demolished the idea that the Wehrmacht were innocent (there’s a term for this notion I’ve forgotten, ‘clean Wehrmacht’ or similar?) and were just soldiers while the SS were the real shits.
Kershaw said of their conduct on the Eastern Front:
“The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from central and eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans … Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians … Only a minority of officers and men were Nazi members”
Well, in defence of the Republic those locked up generally receive a fair trial and are considered criminals for their actions, rather than being gunned down for being the wrong race. So I don’t think there’s much of an equivalence between the American indifference on prison stats and German indifference on the use of Zyklon-B. Of course you could say they didn’t know, which was what they told Allied troops when they were brought to the concentration camps. Hitler’s secretary implies that it was possible for them to find out, if they cared enough;
*
“Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews … I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl … at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.”*
Do you mind…elaborating? The only ‘help’ I know of Jews giving to Hitler was on pain of death. Clipped the rest of your quote for space, but the “willing executioner” statement goes further than just the Army, those who were drafted, etc., but that the vast majority of contemporary Germans were pretty happy that Jews were vanishing.
It’s not as good as his one about prime numbers and even numbers.
It’s too complex for a yes or no answer.
I highly recommend reading this book, written for the general public:
Quest for the Nazi Personality
Here is a Q/A with the author, posted on his web site.
First off, his name is Goldhagen, not Goldberg.*
Secondly, and at the risk of oversimplifying Mr. Goldhagen’s ideas: As others have taken exception at the idea that Germany’s anti-Semitism was somehow unique, I take exception at the idea that it was necessarily eliminationist. Even within the Nazi party itself (let alone among the German people as a whole) there seems to have been many who would have been happy to “simply” expel the Jews, as opposed to slaughtering them en masse. The eliminationist side won out, yes, but in my understanding this was due more to internal Nazi state politics (as most “structuralists” argue) than to any supposed historical Sonderweg (as at least some “intentionalists” argue).
So: It could have happened differently, and it could have happened elsewhere.
*) ETA: Just noticed you got his name right in both the thread title and the poll.
Hans Mommsen - who, in Sir Ian Kershaw’s telling, “destroyed” Goldhagen during their public debates back in the day - has pointed out [WARNING: .PDF] that
The plan of complete eradication only popped up fairly late in the game - sometime between March 1941 and April 1942, according to Mommsen. Had Germany’s anti-Semitism been downright eliminationist from the first, one assumes they would’ve cut to the chase long before that, rather than spending so much time and energy dabbling in plans of enforced mass emigration.
I voted “other” - some were, some weren’t.
But a lot of them were, and then later denied it or covered up their complicity - see, for instance, the movie Das schreckliche Mädchen loosely based on the true story of Anna Rosmus
I think it’s garbage.
Genocide doesn’t require deep hatred - people are obedient.
Smapti, where for art thou? It’s like a thread made for the guy.
(Per the actual poll, I’m still thinking)
I’ve read some of Goldhagen’s book and he makes a very strong case. There was definitely a lot of anti-semitism in Germany, including the idea of exterminating the Jews, before Hitler even joined the Nazi party, not so much in the cities, but most virulently in the rural areas (where there were very few Jews). He also shows examples early in the war when German troops (not SS or Nazis, per se) were set up as extermination squads solely to kill Jews in Poland.
The idea of extermination was on the fringes before WWI (that’s not a typo), but the hatred was real: to many, the very existence of Jews insulted Jesus. The thinking was that Jesus was the messiah, and if Jews did not accept him as such they were calling into question everything that Christians believed.
So the idea of extermination was acceptable by many Germans, even if Hitler didn’t try it immediately (probably constrained by international opinion and the possibility it would lead to a war before he was ready). Some – not just nazis – were in favor of it (though more in an academic sense) and were perfectly willing to take part when given the chance.
And clearly, Hitler did it because he knew no one would oppose to it. Late in the war, a group of German wives of Jewish men staged a protest in Berlin against sending their husbands to extermination camps. The Nazis gave in to them, which is remarkable considering the time and place and the Nazis. So it’s likely that if there were any serious protests by Germans against the antisemitic laws and other practices by the Nazis, Hitler would have backed off, at least to some degree. But there were no protests. That’s a telling point.
I would argue that American indifference is worse because they can reasonably protest without worrying that their families will be executed.
But we’ll move to a closer analogy then. When Japanese-Americans were carted off to camps, did the American people rise up in protest or did they meekly roll over in the interest of ‘National Security’?
We need to understand that this fact isn’t because the United States hates minorities or something. Certainly there might be some element of racism in our criminal justice system, but its by no means the primary factor. First of all, plenty of countries are likely lying about their prison population. I wouldn’t trust China or Russia at their word when they talk about how many people they have incarcerated. Next, high prison populations are a function of highly competent police and reasonably fair courts. Now, are there bad cops and corrupt judges out there? Certainly, but the US legal system is far better than what you see in most other places. The powerful or connected can’t just bribe there way out of a trial (perhaps there are exceptions, but they’re rare compared to the rest of the world). Whole swaths of the world are either unable or unwilling to try criminals, and anyone who has been to places like Africa or south America would tell you that America absolutely has less crime. Finally, other countries have low incarceration rates simply because they don’t incarcerate people they don’t like. I’m sure Nazi Germany would have a much higher incarceration rate if they weren’t, you know, killing the Jews. Ditto for the Soviet Union and other similar places. And as mentioned above, people who are incarcerated have been adjudicated by a fair court of law as being guilty of a crime. That’s not even remotely comparable to genocide.
As for the military, that’s not per se morally bad. It’s all in how the military is used, and I think most Americans would in fact have some misgivings about our recent adventurism. I’m not really sure what you mean by “meddling in the affairs of other democratic countries”, but you seem to be implying that we invade them or commit some form of electoral fraud. Wikipedia says the last war we fought with another democracy was the Philippine–American War in 1899, so that’s out. And the idea that we commit electoral fraud seems to be equally unsubstantiated.
This.
Can’t remember the source, but I read something a long time ago that said there were places where, when the Nazis arrived, the locals had already started rounding up jews and killing them and looked to the Germans to help them be more efficient.
I’m deeply disturbed that my brain let me do that, that was from memory while I looked up his quote. Maybe I was confusing him with the wrestler, Bill Goldberg, I’m always mixing up Holocaust authors with WWE fighters.
A fair point and a shameful period in the Republic’s history, but I think we can reasonably have expected Americans to balk if ordered to put a bullet in the heads of Japanese-Americans then kick them into a pit. I hope we could, at least.