Ordinary Men (27 page)

Aside from the differences in the tone that we employ in writing about the Holocaust and in the attitude that we display toward other scholars who have worked in this field of study, Goldhagen and I disagree significantly in two major areas of historical interpretation. The first is our different assessments of the role of anti-Semitism in German history, including the National Socialist era. The second is our different assessments of the motivation(s) of the “ordinary” German men who became Holocaust killers. These are the two topics that I would like to discuss at some length.

In his book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, Daniel Goldhagen asserts that anti-Semitism “more or less governed the ideational life
of civil society” in pre-Nazi Germany,
⁵
and when the Germans “elected” [sic] Hitler to power, the “centrality of antisemitism in the Party’s worldview, program, and rhetoric … mirrored the sentiments of German culture.”
⁶
Because Hitler and the Germans were “of one mind” about the Jews, he had merely to “unshackle” or “unleash” their “pre-existing, pent-up” anti-Semitism to perpetrate the Holocaust.
⁷

To buttress his view that the Nazi regime should be seen merely as allowing or encouraging Germans to do what they wanted to do all along and not basically shaping German attitudes and behavior after 1933, Goldhagen formulates a thesis that he proclaims is “new” to the study of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism “does not appear, disappear, then reappear in a given society. Always present, antisemitism becomes more or less manifest.” Not anti-Semitism itself, but merely its “expression,” either “increases or decreases” according to changing conditions.
⁸

Then in Goldhagen’s account this picture of underlying permanency and superficial fluctuation changes abruptly after 1945. The pervasive and permanent eliminationist German anti-Semitism that was the sole and sufficient motivation of the Holocaust killers suddenly disappeared. Given reeducation, a change in public conversation, a law banning anti-Semitic expression, and the lack of institutional reinforcement, a German culture dominated by anti-Semitism for centuries was suddenly transformed.
⁹
Now, we are told, the Germans are just like us.

That anti-Semitism was a very significant aspect of Germany’s political culture before 1945 and that Germany’s political culture is both profoundly different and dramatically less anti-Semitic today are two propositions that I can easily support. But if Germany’s political culture in general and anti-Semitism in particular could be transformed after 1945 by changes in education, public conversation, law, and institutional reinforcements, as Goldhagen suggests, then it seems to me equally plausible that they could have been equally transformed in the three or four decades preceding 1945 and especially during the twelve years of Nazi rule.

In his introductory chapter Goldhagen provides a useful model
for a three-dimensional analysis of anti-Semitism, even if he does not employ his own model in the subsequent chapters. Anti-Semitism, he argues, varies according to the alleged source or cause (for example, race, religion, culture, or environment) of the Jews’ alleged negative character. It varies in degree of preoccupation or priority, or how important is anti-Semitism to the anti-Semite. And it varies in degree of threat, or how endangered the anti-Semite feels.
¹⁰
That anti-Semitism can vary in its diagnosis of the alleged Jewish threat and along continuums of priority and intensity would suggest not only that anti-Semitism changes over time as any or all of these dimensions change, but that it can exist in infinite variety. Even for a single country like Germany, I think we should speak and think in the plural—of anti-Semitisms rather than anti-Semitism.

The actual concept Goldhagen employs, however, produces the opposite effect; it erases all differentiation and subsumes all manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany under a single rubric. All Germans who perceived Jews as different and viewed this difference as something negative that should disappear—whether through conversion, assimilation, emigration, or extermination—are classed as “eliminationist” anti-Semites, even if by Goldhagen’s prior model they differ as to cause, priority, and intensity. Such differences that do exist are analytically insignificant in any case, for, according to Goldhagen, variations on eliminationist solutions “tend to metastasize” into extermination.
¹¹
By using such an approach, Goldhagen moves seamlessly from a variety of anti-Semitic manifestations in Germany to a single German “eliminationist antisemitism” that, taking on the properties of organic malignancy, naturally metastasized into extermination. Thus all Germany was “of one mind” with Hitler on the justice and necessity of the Final Solution.

If one adopts the analytical model that Goldhagen proposes rather than the concept he actually uses, what then can one say about the changing variety of anti-Semitisms in German political culture and their role in the Holocaust? And where to begin?

Let us begin with nineteenth-century German history, or more
precisely with various interpretations of Germany’s alleged “special path” or
Sonderweg
. According to the traditional social/structural approach, Germany’s failed liberal revolution of 1848 derailed simultaneous political and economic modernization. Thereafter, the precapitalist German elites maintained their privileges in an autocratic political system, while the unnerved middle classes were bought off with the prosperity of rapid economic modernization, gratified by a national unification they had been unable to achieve through their own revolutionary efforts, and ultimately manipulated by an escalating “social imperialism.”
¹²
According to the cultural/ideological approach, the distorted and incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment by some German intellectuals, followed by their despair over an increasingly endangered and dissolving traditional world, led to a continuing rejection of liberal-democratic values and traditions on the one hand, and a selective reconciliation with aspects of modernity (such as modern technology and ends-means rationality) on the other, producing what Jeffrey Herf termed a peculiarly German “reactionary modernism.”
¹³
A third approach, exemplified by John Weiss and Daniel Goldhagen, asserts a German
Sonderweg
in terms of the singular breadth and virulence of anti-Semitism in Germany, though the former paints with a less broad brush than the latter and is careful to identify the late nineteenth-century loci of this German anti-Semitism in populist political movements and among the political and academic elites.
¹⁴

It seems to me that Shulamit Volkov’s interpretation of late nineteenth-century German anti-Semitism as a “cultural code” constitutes an admirable synthesis of major elements of these different, though not totally mutually exclusive, notions of a German
Sonderweg
.
¹⁵
German conservatives, dominating an illiberal political system but feeling their leading role increasingly imperiled by the changes unleashed by modernization, associated anti-Semitism with everything they felt threatened by—liberalism, democracy, socialism, internationalism, capitalism, and cultural experimentation. To be a self-proclaimed anti-Semite was also to be authoritarian, nationalist, imperialist, protectionist, corporative, and culturally
traditional. Volkov concludes, “Antisemitism was by then strongly associated with everything the conservatives stood for. It became increasingly inseparable from their antimodernism….” But insofar as the conservatives co-opted the anti-Semitic issue from populist, single-issue anti-Semitic political parties and enlisted pseudo-scientific and Social Darwinist racial thinking in its support, the conservatives were embracing an issue in defense of reaction that had a peculiarly modern cast to it (not unlike the simultaneous embrace of naval building).

By the turn of the century a German anti-Semitism increasingly racial in nature had become an integral part of the conservative political platform and penetrated deeply into the universities. It had become more politicized and institutionalized than in the western democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. But this does not mean that late nineteenth-century German anti-Semitism dominated either politics or ideational life. The conservatives and single-issue anti-Semitic parties together constituted a minority. While majorities could be found in the Prussian Landtag to pass discriminatory legislation against Catholics in the 1870s and in the Reichstag against socialists in the 1880s, the emancipation of Germany’s Jews, who constituted less than 1 percent of the population and were scarcely capable of defending themselves against a Germany united in hostile obsession against them, was not revoked. If the left did not exhibit a philo-Semitism comparable to the rights anti-Semitism, it was primarily because for the left anti-Semitism was a nonissue that did not fit into its own class analysis, not because of its own anti-Semitism.

Even for the openly anti-Semitic conservatives, the Jewish issue was but one among many. And to suggest that they felt more threatened by the Jews than, for example, by the Triple Entente abroad or Social Democracy at home would be a serious distortion. If anti-Semitism was neither the priority issue nor the greatest threat even for conservatives, how much less was this the case for the rest of German society. As Richard Levy has noted, “One can make a convincing case that [Jews] were of very little interest to most Germans most of the time. Putting them at the center of German history in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a highly unproductive strategy.”
¹⁶

For some Germans, of course, Jews were the top priority and source of greatest fear. The turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism of German conservatives fits well Gavin Langmuir’s notion of “xenophobic” anti-Semitism—a negative stereotype comprised of various assertions that did not describe the real Jewish minority but rather symbolized various threats and menaces that anti-Semites could not and did not want to understand.
¹⁷
Langmuir notes as well that “xenophobic” anti-Semitism provides the fertile soil for the growth of fantastic or “chimeric” anti-Semitism—or what Saul Friedländer has recently dubbed “redemptive” anti-Semitism.
¹⁸
If Germany’s xenophobic anti-Semitism was an important piece of the political platform of an important segment of the political spectrum, the “redemptive” anti-Semites with their chimeric accusations—from Jewish poisoning of Aryan blood to a secret Jewish world conspiracy behind the twin threats of Marxist revolution and plutocratic democracy—were still a fringe phenomenon.

The succession of traumatic experiences in Germany between 1912 and 1929—loss of control of the Reichstag by the right, military defeat, revolution, runaway inflation, and economic collapse—transformed German politics. The right grew at the expense of the center, and within the former the radicals, or New Right, grew at the expense of the traditionalists, or Old Right. Chimeric anti-Semitism grew commensurately from a fringe phenomenon to the core idea of a movement that became Germany’s largest political party in the summer of 1932 and its ruling party six months later.

That fact alone makes the history of Germany and German anti-Semitism different from that of any other country in Europe. But even this must be kept in perspective. The Nazis never gained more than 37 percent of the vote in a free election, less than the combined socialist-communist vote. Daniel Goldhagen is right to remind us “that individuals’ attitudes on single issues cannot be inferred from their votes.”
¹⁹
But it is highly unlikely that he is correct in his related assertion that large numbers of Germans who voted for the Social Democratic Party for economic reasons were
nonetheless of one mind with Hitler and the Nazis about Jews. While I cannot prove it, I strongly suspect far more Germans voted Nazi for reasons other than anti-Semitism than Germans who considered anti-Semitism a priority issue but nonetheless voted for a party other than the Nazis. Neither the election returns nor any plausible spin put on them suggest that in 1932 the vast majority of Germans were “of one mind” with Hitler about the Jews or that the “centrality of antisemitism in the Party’s worldview, program, and rhetoric … mirrored the sentiments of German culture.”
²⁰

Beginning in 1933 all the factors that Goldhagen credits with dismantling German anti-Semitism after 1945—education, public conversation, law, and institutional reinforcement—were operating in the opposite direction to intensify anti-Semitism among the Germans, and indeed in a far more concerted manner than in the postwar period. Can one seriously doubt that this had significant impact, particularly given the rising popularity of Hitler and the regime for its economic and foreign policy successes? As William Sheridan Allen succinctly concluded, even in a highly Nazified town like Northeim, most people “were drawn to anti-Semitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around.”
²¹
Moreover, the 1936 Sopade underground report to which Goldhagen repeatedly refers—“antisemitism has no doubt taken root in wide circles of the population…. The general antisemitic psychosis affects even thoughtful people, our comrades as well”
²²
—is evidence of change in German attitudes following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, not the prior situation.

Even in the post-1933 period, however, it is best to speak in the plural of German anti-Semitisms. Within the party, there was indeed a large core of Germans for whom the Jews were a dire racial threat and central priority. The hardcore “chimeric” or “redemptive” anti-Semites of the Nazi movement differed in style and preferred response, however. At one end of the spectrum were the SA and Streicher types lusting for pogroms; at the other end were the cool and calculating, intellectual anti-Semites described by Ulrich Herbert in his new biography of Werner Best, who advocated a more systematic but dispassionate persecution.
²³