Willing Executioners?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/crazygoldie/BIRN.html

[...] Goldhagen's book is not a revision of everything that has been 
written in fifty years on the Holocaust. A solidly researched work on 
any of the topics he touches -- for instance, on the involvement of the 
Order Police in the Holocaust -- would have been most welcome. As it 
stands, this book only caters to those who want simplistic answers to 
difficult questions, to those who seek the security of prejudices.

Why then review the book at such length? It was promoted aggressively 
in the mass media, well before it was published and any historian had 
had a chance to read it. There is no limit to what a professional 
American marketing strategy can achieve, but to date, hardly any 
inroads into academia have been made by this book. Its marketing 
presents a challenge to the scholarly community. When the historical 
agenda can be dictated by advertising and marketing, professional 
historians must respond.

The discourse among scholars, as it has evolved over the centuries, 
respects certain rules: arguments count, not the people pushing them. 
One discusses the factual value of arguments and does not defame their 
authors. These rules are well worth defending. One can learn from a 
time when Einstein's theories, for example, were rejected, not because 
of the arguments themselves but because their proponent represented 
'Jewish physics'. So far, all of the experts in the area of the 
Holocaust, regardless of their personal background, have been unanimous 
in severely criticizing Goldhagen's book. That this is the case, fifty 
years after the fact, and on such a highly emotional and complex 
subject, is a very hopeful sign.

RUTH BETTINA BIRN
Chief Historian, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section, 
Department of Justice, Canada


http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/goldhagen/wagner.html

[...] In order to understand the book's popularity with the lay 
audience, it is essential to recognize Goldhagen's mindset and the 
mentality to which he appeals. The book obviously taps into a deep vein 
of anti-Germanism in this country, reflecting an unresolved ambivalency 
about our former enemy that has been exacerbated by German 
Reunification. At a somewhat less obvious level, the book also reflects 
the growing national mood demanding that perpetrators be held morally 
accountable for their actions, and that extenuating circumstances 
should not absolve them of guilt. Goldhagen's book has been aptly 
described as "angry." He writes like a lawyer rather than like an 
historian. To extend this analogy even further, the reader often has 
the impression that Goldhagen is writing in the style that Mark Klaas 
might adopt if he were to produce a social study about the murder of 
his daughter, Polly, and if he were to adopt the pretense of being an 
objective social scientist. Goldhagen's primary concern in this book is 
with moral accountability for the Holocaust, and he is unwilling to 
accept any verdict less than a pall of collective guilt, blanketing the 
entire German nation. He marshals facts in a selective fashion, and 
seemingly throws objectivity to the winds in his quest for a collective 
indictment. He summarily dismisses all standard social science 
explanations for the Holocaust as mere "moral alibis" (p. 383). [...]

Roland M. Wagner Ph.D., San Jose State University

best

Meanwhile, on 24/09/2005 jbor wrote:

> And, what of Pynchon's depictions of "ordinary" Germans and human 
> psychology in _GR_ w/r/t Goldhagen's "cognitive model" theory?
>