NP Willing Executioners?

[Paul Mackin]

A 1996 article in the NY Review of Books by Josef Joffe mainly  
concerned itself with the paradoxical reception of the Goldhagen book  
in Germany. (the people loved it, the experts hated it)

I'm just quoting a subsidiary section  of the article dealing with  
logical vulnerabilities of the book's conclusions according to Joffe.


It is true that Goldhagen's book is vulnerable in several respects. 
[2] How can an historian indict an entire culture? How do you prove  
that "eliminationist anti-Semitism" is the factor that explains most  
of what happened? What about the many other variables—the unique role  
of Hitler, the overwhelming impact of Nazi totalitarianism, etc.— 
previous scholars have used to construct multicausal explanations?

Goldhagen has argued beyond the bounds of simple logic. Reaching back  
to Martin Luther and his murderous tirades against the Jews,  
Goldhagen then moves forward again, describing a profoundly anti- 
Semitic German culture as the principal explanation of the Holocaust.  
As he travels across the centuries, he collapses a great many  
possible explanations of human history into one huge explanation that  
falls flat even when examined by an intelligent layman. If German  
culture was indeed the all-powerful, all-pervasive force that turned  
perfectly "ordinary Germans" into monsters, where is that force  
today? One might think that so potent and enduring a cultural  
tendency wouldn't just vanish from the face of the German earth.

Yet disappear it did after 1945, and for a reason. The political  
system had changed. Imposed under the guns of the victors, liberal  
democracy sank surprisingly strong roots in West Germany. Today,  
Germany is an ordinary member of the community of nations, with only  
a tiny right-wing party and with as much (or as little) racism as in  
France, Belgium, or Italy. If culture can be so deeply affected by  
changing conditions, anti-Semitism could not plausibly serve as the  
overwhelmingly influential cause of the Holocaust that Goldhagen  
would like it to be. If Truman and McCloy and Adenauer could prevail  
in Germany after 1945, there must be more to German history than  
Luther's poisonous seed.

How can something ("culture") be a prime and deeply rooted cause if  
it is so quickly overwhelmed by other factors? Goldhagen's premise  
crumbles even more when it is examined with respect to the history of  
anti-Semitism in other countries. Anti-Semitism in Russia, let alone  
its Austrian variant, was at times as "eliminationist" in some of its  
expressed forms as it was in Germany. Britain, which tolerated  
murderous pogroms in the Middle Ages, was judenrein for 400 years,  
and so was Spain after 1492. Yet the total physical extermination of  
the Holocaust was a strictly German project, and other factors beyond  
a nationally shared antipathy to the Jews must have been involved in it.

Goldenhagen has also fallen into the oldest social-science trap of  
them all: the confusion of different levels of analysis. Having  
earlier reasoned forward from the attitudes of the Germans to their  
behavior—saying, in effect, "Only because of their anti-Semitism did  
ordinary Germans turn into mass murderers"—he then reasons backward  
from the conduct of the Germans to their culture in a grand circular  
argument.

Exhibit A of this procedure is the story of the Ordnungspolizei, the  
"order police,"which moved in behind the Wehrmacht as it swept east.  
These were not SS beasts, but a microcosm of the German lower and  
lower middle classes, including laborers, skilled workers, and petty  
officials (a point that Goldhagen supports with impressive  
statistics). And yet they killed with sadistic abandon, overfilling  
their "quotas," even bringing their vacationing wives to watch the  
butchery.

But what do these harrowing accounts prove? We cannot conclude from  
one level of analysis (of individuals) that people on another level  
(the group) are responsible for a crime—any more than we can say that  
the national "culture" determines the behavior of both. From the fact  
that "the killers were ordinary Germans" you cannot conclude that, on  
the whole, "ordinary Germans were killers."

Driven by prosecutorial passion, Goldhagen ignores that one cannot  
reason backward from the behavior of the members of a sample to the  
culture as a whole, even if their social traits match those of the  
rest. One of the oldest propositions of social analysis, established  
by the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, is that groups tend  
to obey their own rules. Groups in extreme situations act in extreme  
ways. Soldiers kill willingly when ordered to do so; but that does  
not prove that their class or their nation is inherently murderous.  
As to the "order police," how much responsibility for their actions  
should be attributed to the Nazi system in which these "willing  
executioners" did their killing? What of the Nazi system of  
indoctrination and training? What of the express Nazi belief in, and  
advocacy of, physical terror, bereft of all civilizing restraints and  
values?