THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604190734
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
Explaining the Holocaust, the methodical, cold-blooded genocide that will forever stain the 20th century, has always seemed beyond the ability of the human mind.
Were the Germans too frightened of the Nazis to object to the gruesome slaughter of Jews?
Were Germans unaware of what really went on in the concentration camps, hidden away in Poland far from populated areas? Or were the Germans typical of any nation whose population might also carry out mass murder should the ``right'' conditions develop?
None of those theories adequately explains the Holocaust, says Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard, who unhesitantly writes in his new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, that much of the killing was carried out by ordinary Germans, not by racist indoctrinated Nazi fanatics.
Anti-Semitism - particularly the racist ``eliminatist'' variety that surfaced in the 19th century - had become so imbedded in German political, religious and social life, Goldhagen says, that Hitler had no problem implementing his ``final solution'' with the help of his countrymen.
``The first task,'' Goldhagen writes, ``in restoring the perpetrators to the center of our understanding of the Holocaust is to restore to them their identities . . . and by eschewing convenient, yet often inappropriate and obfuscating labels, like `Nazis' and `SS men,' and calling them what they were, `Germans.'
``. . . They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler.''
The book, in its indictment of the Germans, focuses on three aspects of the Holocaust: the police battalions, who rounded up Jews; the so-called ``work camps''; and the forced marches of captured Jews in the final weeks of World War II.
Goldhagen says the police battalion conscripts ``were not auspicious recruits; most had had no military training, many were marginal physical fodder, and their ages and already established family and professional lives made them less pliable than the youngsters whom military and police organizations typically seek.''
Yet, they willingly tortured and executed the Jews they captured in Poland and the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, even though they were allowed to opt out of this grisly duty with no penalty. These ``ordinary Germans'' even wrote letters home about their activities, sent photographs to their families and occasionally invited their wives to watch.
Germany never had any intention regarding the Jews except extermination, Goldhagen claims. The ``work'' in work camps was repetitive, torturous and useless in aiding the Nazi war effort. The camps' purpose was to kill the Jews slowly through starvation and exposure to the elements.
The book offers more charges that Germans aided and abetted Nazi genocide policies: Hitler's government faced loud protests over euthanizing handicapped Germans, but no reaction to the campaign against the Jews. Slavs, regarded as subhuman by the Nazis, were never exterminated just for existing.
And if other nationalities, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians mostly, aided in the genocide, Germany was the prime mover. Try to imagine, Goldhagen implores his readers, the Danes or Italians mass-killing an ethnic group that lived among them. Or Germans rallying to slaughter Bavarians had Hitler ordered them to do so.
``No other country's anti-Semitism was at once so widespread,'' Goldhagen writes, ``as to have been a cultural axiom, was so firmly wedded to a racism, had as its foundation such a pernicious image of Jews that deemed them to be a mortal threat to the Volk, and so deadly in content, producing, even in the 19th century, such frequent and explicit calls for the extermination of the Jews . . . ''
Hitler's Willing Executioners is a disturbing book but Goldhagen's arguments are difficult to refute. Although other historians have touched on his themes, Goldhagen puts the virulent German anti-Semitism in plain sight, its hideous historical existence daring the world to remain in its state of denial.
The one ray of sunshine in this account is buried deep in the notes toward the book's end. Most of Goldhagen's research was done in Germany and Germans helped him to round up his evidence.
Just two complaints: The narrative is extremely reiterative. Also, the author never effectively deals with the obvious comparison between Hitler's and Stalin's atrocities. MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor.
ILLUSTRATION: FILE PHOTO
by CNB