DATE: Monday, May 19, 1997                  TAG: 9705190047

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   51 lines

AUTHOR: ORDINARY PEOPLE MADE HOLOCAUST HAPPEN

Ordinary Germans of the 1930s and 1940s wanted to kill European Jews and were not simply brainwashed by Adolf Hitler, the author of a groundbreaking book on the Holocaust said Sunday.

``Why would a very large number of ordinary Germans choose to kill Jews?'' asked Daniel Goldhagen, 37, author of ``Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' at the Tidewater Jewish Forum in Temple Israel.

That was the question he asked himself several years ago, he said, after hearing a debate among Holocaust scholars.

``They all seemed to assume that when Hitler gave the order to exterminate European Jewry, it would be automatically carried out,'' whether or not Germans consented, he said. But he wondered why Hitler's order was carried out.

In answering the question, he wrote a doctoral thesis at Harvard University, where he is now an associate professor of government.

Goldhagen went on to expand his thesis into a book that has climbed the bestseller lists not only in the United States, but Germany as well. It has challenged much of the conventional wisdom about how the Holocaust was carried out.

Using testimony from Germans who killed Jews and were tried after World War II, Goldhagen's book put forward this argument: It was not just the SS, or the Nazi party bureaucracy, that murdered 6 million Jews. It was ordinary Germans, probably by the hundreds of thousands, who believed Jews were evil and a danger.

In episode after episode, his book showed, Germans volunteered to murder Jews and even celebrated it.

``They were zealots,'' he said Sunday. ``There was energy behind what they were doing. They were not being dragged to it.''

Goldhagen's book has been troubling to people because it knocks down previous explanations - that Hitler brainwashed the nation, or that it was the efficient Nazi bureaucracy doing the killing - which made it possible to think ordinary people would not do such a thing.

During a book tour of Germany last fall, however, Goldhagen received standing ovations during nationally televised debates. This, he said, shows Germany today is trying to come to grips with its past.

The roots of the Holocaust, Goldhagen said, go as far back as the 1800s, when Germans began to believe that Jews were fundamentally different and evil.

``There was great hatred for the Jews,'' he said. ``It was revenge.'' And that, he said, explains the torture, degradation and barbarism suffered by Jews.

Goldhagen said a quote from one war criminal summed up what he had found and the Holocaust itself: ``The Jew was not acknowledged by us to be a human being.''

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