NP Willing Executioners?

[Paul Mackin]

On Sep 23, 2005, at 11:43 PM, Otto wrote:

> jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>
>> It isn't a numbers game at all. Goldhagen is saying is that, had  
>> they known about it, "ordinary" Germans of the time, and he means  
>> all of them, would have applauded and assisted in the persecution  
>> and murder of the Jews, just the same as those who were carrying  
>> out the killings. His overarching thesis is that anti-Semitism was  
>> a "cognitive map" shared by all Germans at the time. He's  
>> proffering a racial explanation, offering a simple and simplistic  
>> cause and effect hypothesis: the Shoah happened because *all*  
>> Germans were racially and culturally predisposed to  
>> exterminationist anti-Semitism.
>>
>> It's not correct.
>>
>> best
>>
>>
> Sorry, I cannot recall having read in the book that "had they known  
> about it, "ordinary" Germans of the time, and he means all of them,  
> would have applauded and assisted in the persecution and murder of  
> the Jews, just the same as those who were carrying out the killings."
>
> If he indeed says so of course he's wrong because this would be  
> nonsense. Nobody would be able to prove such an assertion. But I  
> remember having read in the book that Hitler and the Nazis  
> "activated" the widespread latent anti-Semitism in the German  
> population (which is still there btw, but more in the form of a  
> general ethnophobia) for their purposes, and this isn't wrong  
> historically.
>
> It's an interesting book, it sparked lively discussions when it  
> first came out, especially among those who hadn't read it.
>
> I've found more parts and statements in it to agree to than to  
> disagree. Goldhagen's conclusion that a different group of Germans  
> would have done the same under the same circumstances doesn't mean  
> that *all* Germans, as you've put it, "had they known about it,  
> would have applauded and assisted in the persecution and murder of  
> the Jews, just the same as those who were carrying out the  
> killings." I don't think that he says so and indeed it wouldn't be  
> correct.
>
> Otto
>
>
>

Here's how Gordon Craig summed things up in he New York Review of  
Books on the "numbers" question and the degree question as well:

Goldhagen believes that the prevailing tendency in what he calls  
eliminationist anti-Semitism was toward extermination, that it was  
"pregnant with murder," although he adds that "the only matter that  
cannot be ascertained is, broadly held though this view of Jews was,  
how many Germans subscribed to it in 1900, 1920, 1933, or 1941."

Nor, of course, can it be said with any assurance how firmly those  
who spoke violently about Jews believed in their own rhetoric. How  
many of those who fretted over the numbers of Jews they encountered  
at fashionable social gatherings were, in fact, as ambivalent as the  
novelist Theodor Fontane? In 1881, after an evening at the theater in  
which two thirds of the audience was Jewish, he wrote worriedly,  
"...in time the state and the legislative process will have to help,  
or things will come to a sorry pass,"[1] only to admit, in a letter  
to his daughter in June 1890, that whenever he compared a social  
evening in a cultivated circle that was predominantly Christian to  
one in a similar group that was predominantly Jewish, he could not  
help but note how superior the latter was in cultivation, animation,  
and interest, adding, "With sorrow I grow increasingly out of my  
antisemitism, not because I want to, but because I must."[2] Again,  
how many members of the Conservative Party who voted for the Tivoli  
Program of December 1892—"We combat the widely obtruding and  
decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life"—were thinking of  
anything remotely resembling the extermination of the Jews?