Revisiting Collective Guilt
David Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners has been a great success with the reading public, a popularity that derives from his sensationalist revival of charges of the collective guilt of the German people in the Holocaust, plus a major publicity push by Knopf/Random House, and the glowing account of the book by Abe Rosenthal of the "New York Times." Nevertheless, the book is seriously flawed, and threatens to overshadow the work of those scholars who have long known that German History and culture were permeated by a powerful and uniquely diffused anti-Semitism but have tried to make the proper scholarly distinctions between group, class and personal culpability. (See my Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1996. Many Of us have also known that German historians of the older generation those often awarded tenure by the very scholars approved or appointed by the Nazis have failed to acknowledge the deep roots of racial hatred in German history and culture.
Certainly Goldhagen has added to our knowledge of the terrible motives of the "ordinary men" who did the killing. But no serious German historian can or has accepted his unsupported accusation that even before 1914: "a near universal acceptance of the central aspects of the Nazi image of Jews characterized the German people." Such statements cannot possibly be demonstrated by a study of 100,000 killers in a few Police Battalions. Nor does he show that they are a representative sample of Germans, as he claims. Indeed, it is obvious from his evidence, and that of Christopher Browning who studied the Battalion before Goldhagen that the Battalion is a reflection of the lower middle class types who tended throughout the interwar period to join anti-Semitic paramilitary militias, and not of the social classes of Germany in general. And at one point Goldhagen tells us that many of the members of his Police Battalion were from Hamburg which, because it had a large number of Communists and Social Democrats, probably means that some of them were members of the Battalion. That is hardly the way one selects representative samples!
In his zeal to accuse nearly all Germans of sharing the Nazi view that the Jews of Germany ought to be "eliminated," a belief he alleges they held throughout the later nineteenth century, Goldhagen ignores the simple facts of German political allegiance. In the nineteenth century the parties supporting anti-Semitism or hoping to harm the Jewish community received their high point of 25% of the vote in the election of 1893; an election in which Goldhagen oddly insists that the anti-Semites gained a majority. Goldhagen also tells us that we have no polls measuring German public opinion in the nineteenth century, which leads one to wonder how he came to his conclusions. But obviously elections provide a rough measure, which is perhaps why he ignores them, and then goes on to say that "No evidence suggests that any but an insignificant scattering of Germans harbored opposition to the eliminationist program....of the anti-Semites." But in 1848, the liberals in nearly all the Germanys received a majority of the vote, and, at the Frankfurt Parliament, they offered a German National Constitution which included, aside from the other liberal demands, religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the complete liberation of the Jews from all civic disabilities. Furthermore, the most popular political party among the Germans in the 1860's and 70's was the Liberal partyknown as the "Jewish Party" by German reactionaries, precisely because it opposed their racism, and because in the elections the Right steadily lost ground to them, and wanted to make them seem "un-German." Nor does Goldhagen seem to know that the separate Progressive Liberal Party did very well in the 1880's, and dominated the elections in Hamburg and Berlin. Moreover, the Social Democrats dominated the electorate from 1890 through 1914, and they, like the Progressives, opposed anti-Semitic measures offered in the Reichstag by the German Conservative Partythe Party of the German elitesand their allies, the small single-issue anti-Semitic parties, parties mainly supported by artisans and peasants. But at no time did the anti-Semitic forces receive a majority of the vote. Indeed, in 1912, the last election before World War I, the Social Democrats gained one-third of the German vote, while the German Conservatives, running since 1892 on an anti-Semitic platform, and their populist, reactionary and racist allies together received about one-sixth of the vote. Hence the Social Democrats, like the Liberals before them, were attacked as the party of the Jews, although 90% of the Jewish vote was liberal, and socialist voters were overwhelmingly Gentile industrial workers. Even so, reactionaries of all sorts, frightened by the upsurge of democratic social reformers, accused the Social Democrats and the Progressive Liberals of having won the election by virtue of Jewish gold! And throughout the war they denounced the "Jewish Reichstag." Moreover, even when Hitler and his Conservative (DNVP) allies reached a high point of 42% of the vote 1n 1932, the vote of the Left (Social Democrat and Communist) rivaled that of the Nazis, some 36%; and other parties that did not advocate harm to the Jews gained a further ten percent. These figures are hardly reassuring, but they clearly do not allow the indictment of a whole people. It is not surprising that Goldhagen avoids any analysis of the attitudes of the different parties toward the "Jewish Question." Nor, as Yehuda Bauer and others have pointed out, does he make any comparisons with anti-Semitism in France or elsewhere in order to make his case that anti-Semitism in Germany was unique and far more virulent. Goldhagen also ignores the anti-Semitism of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and racism among those who, from other nations, collaborated with the killers.
Goldhagen says nothing about the tens of thousands who were tortured, imprisoned or killed during the 1930's for actions taken against the Nazis. When I mentioned these "ordinary Germans" to Goldhagen in a debate on station WGN in Chicago, he replied that they were mostly leftists. I had to remind him that they were also Germans. Goldhagen does not mention that tens of thousands of leaflets protesting Kristallnacht were distributed clandestinely, and there were also hundreds of thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets and even some newspapers distributed throughout the 1930's, mostly in socialist or trade union strongholds. The proletariat never accepted the regime, as studies have shown, and industrialists reported thousands of slowdowns, stoppages or sabotage, actions the security services reported as protests against Nazi rule. Nazi candidates for factory delegates to their Labor Front were overwhelmingly defeated, and Nazi appointed worker's "representatives" were harassed. Youth movements were formed which ambushed and beat Hitler Youth groups and put up anti-Nazi posters. Ignoring previous scholarship, Goldhagen, speakins of the killers, writes that "what these ordinary Germans did also could have been expected of other ordinary Germans." He presents absolutely no evidence for this accusation; indeed, he cannot, for there is none. Sensationalist charges may sell books, and wealthy publishing houses may be able to purchase all sorts of publicity, but this has nothing to do with the truth.
Goldhagen has harmed the careful work of those like Omer Bartov, Martin Gilbert, Ingo Mueller, Christopher Browning, Yehuda Bauer, Dov Sulka, Robert Wistrich, George Mosse and others, scholars who have uncovered the extensive power and class diffusion of anti-Semitism among the Germans, but who have been careful to make the appropriate distinctions between those who supported anti-Semitism and those who did not. For Goldhagen's thesis is so easy to refute that it has made it simple for those German historians who do not want to admit the extent of anti-Semitism in the German past to denounce those who do as superficial and biased. And those Germans, and there are many, who do not want to avoid the dark forces in their history, will be discouraged by a blanket accusation that, unlike all other scholarly works, makes no distinctions between good and evil among the Germans. It would be better for Holocaust studies if Goldhagen had been content to publish his Ph.D. monograph on the Police Battalions, recognized his debt to previous scholars, and had not tacked on, as Peter Gay has said, his "egregious" charges.
John Weiss, Lehman College, CUNY
Hating the Holocaust
Fifty years ago the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg. Previous international agreements had attempted to outlaw slavery and mass murder. (The Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Kellog-Briand Pact, the League of Nations Charter and Locarno Pact.) Nuremberg served as a benchmark in international law by firmly establishing Crimes Against the Peace, Waging An Aggressive War, and Crimes Against Humanity as acts that would not be tolerated by the international community.
An important byproduct of these proceedings was the massive documentation compiled and presented by the prosecution. The Nazi regime's program of racism and genocide was clearly established. The actions of several high-ranking Nazis further substantiated the Final Solution including: Rudolf Hoess, camp commandant at Auschwitz; Hans Frank, General Governor of Poland; and, Dieter Wisliceny, top aid to Adolf Eichmann, instrumental in the destruction of Slovakian, Greek and Hungarian Jewry.
However a cottage industry of Holocaust denial and dilution continues to garner media attention. We live in an era when overstating most outrageous accusations makes one worthy of CNN. Perhaps it should not be surprising that questioning the "reality" of the Holocaust propels one onto "60 Minutes" or Phil Donahue. The irony is striking as David Rieff observed in "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West." Rieff postulated: "Had their been cameras in Auschwitz, the world might very well have done as little as it did in the pre-television age..."
Unfortunately, academics, the media and the public at-large have ceded credibility to Holocaust deniers by referring to them as "revisionists." Revising history based on new information, more concise data, as well as the passing of time allows for more objective and empirical evaluation of historical events. Revising history is an essential component of historiography. Without it, Joseph McCarthy's name would be plastered on public schools and Harry Truman would be grouped with Warren Harding.
Holocaust deniers have successfully adopted the mantle of "revisionism" for the purpose of gross historical distortion. Not surprisingly, the Institute for Historical Review gained widespread media attention when it offered $50,000 for anyone who could prove Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor, sued, submitted proof and was awarded $50,000 and $40,000 for personal suffering. (He established a museum to increase awareness of the Holocaust with the proceeds.) The incident propelled Holocaust "revisionism" into the "main stream."
During the trial of Ernest Zundel in Canada (1988), the foremost Holocaust denier, Fred Leuchter, falsified his credentials as an engineer with an expertise in execution apparatus. He was financed by Zundel to travel to Auschwitz and Majdanek. "The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chamber at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland" asserted no homicidal gassings took place. The judge found Leuchter's methodology "preposterous" and his expertise nonexistent. But the "Revisionist" strategy paid off, and Zundel and Leuchter are frequently featured on media outlets throughout North America.
Far more dangerous than anti-Semites or neo-Nazi masquerading as academics are historical relativists who seek to dilute or diminish the Holocaust by comparing it to "similar" historical events. The most notable practitioner of this theory is prominent German historian Ernst Nolte. In Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? (1986), Nolte argued that genocide is a common human event and the Nazis extermination polices were not unusual. Nolte justified Hitler's extermination measures in light of Chaim Weizmann's statement, "That in this war the Jews of all the world would fight on England's side." (September, 1939).
There is clearly a movement afoot to combine relativism and "revisionism" to normalize the Third Reich and its policies. As Deborah Lipstadt pointed out, "Denial aims to reshape history in order to rehabilitate the perpetrators and demonize the victims."
There is a line between freedom of the press and freedom to inflict pain and suffering. Whether relativist or "revisionist," those who try to destroy the memory and reality of the Holocaust are in fact "paper" Eichmanns. "Indeed, denial may be thought of as the last stage of genocide, one that continues to the present. A kind of double killing takes place: first the physical deed, followed by the destruction of the remembrance of the deed." (Smith, Markusen and Lifton, 1995).
The Holocaust is the most documented crime in history. Those who call into question the murder of 6 million Jews also deny the murder of 3.5 million Soviet POWs, 3 million Polish Catholics, 215,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies),70,000 physically and mentally disabled Germans and countless others persecuted due to their political, social, ethnic or sexual affiliation.
We must confront hatemongers head on. Otherwise we risk realizing Voltaire's axiom: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Eric Joseph Epstein, Penn State, Harrisburg
Slavery and Genocide: Finding a NexusÂ
Slavery is, by definition, a matter of human rights. Through any lens, slavery is an infringement of fundamental freedoms. Human ownership of humans, however benign, automatically reduces a person to a sub-human level. It is a unilateral relationship of total subordination imposed by sheer power, reducing the slave to a dehumanizing status of absolute powerlessness. A slave is the ultimate subject, lacking basic autonomy to determine his or her fate. A slave is robbed of will, of the right to choose, above all of the right to disobey, to oppose, to propose an alternative to what he or she is commanded by the master/mistress against whom there is no legal appeal. In most cases, the slave owner has the power to exercise the power of life or death over his/her human property. That is, slave owners, in many instances, have the right to kill their human property with impunity.
But what has slavery to do with genocide? Clearly, mass slavery is not synonymous with genocide. If anything the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Genocide operates on the premise of the total debasement of the victims who have, therefore, lost all reasons for being kept alive; genocide is the exercise of annihilistic power. Slavery, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that slaves have a specific value as unfree workers and hence must be kept alive if only to justify their investment. As property, they are invested with value, but not intrinsic value, per se, as humans, no matter how much Christianity sought to "sensitize" the slave owners and thereby, "humanize" the wretched conditions of slaves whose souls it hoped to "save."
Nevertheless, despite this seeming polarity separating slavery from genocide, there is a connection, there are instances where they interact, making it necessary to discuss them in tandem. The point of contact is generated by both concepts for somewhat different reasons. Both slavery and genocide are mass events: victims of either program are rounded up en masse. In most cases, victims of slavery, as those of genocide, are selected on the basis of racist and cultural criteria. Genocide always targets a group; slavery all too often does so, as, for example, the trans-Atlantic African slave trade and today that conducted by Muslims of northern Sudan against Christian and animist Blacks in southern Sudan. Entire villages are torched by the northern slave traders; on their raids, they select young women and children, kill the able-bodied men, and leave behind the old and infirm. Thus, entire communities are systematically wiped out, their cultures and their populations. The living are deported, forcibly converted to Islam and sold.
This kind of practice is unambiguously genocidal by any standard definition. Not only is this practice a violation of human rights but it is by its very nature a form of extermination, however limited in scope. It falls without a doubt within the orbit of genocidal concerns, for the act of harvesting slaves destroys the future of the assaulted communities. Though genocide may not be intended, the byproduct is genocidal; The consequence of this kind of slavery is erasure of the community. Seen from another point of view, it is a variety of ethnic cleansing.
In turn, slavery has played a role in genocide. During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews experienced a reprieve from execution by being dragooned into sundry work units (kommandos). For months, some for years, provided forced labor in hundreds of tasks, ranging from factory workers to private servants of S.S. officers. Like slaves, they had no choice; refusal on their part meant instant death or return to incarceration in a ghetto or concentration camp where death awaited them. For all practical purposes, the Jewish forced laborers were quasi slaves; they "belonged" to the SS who had absolute jurisdiction over them and who worked them for as long as there was a use for the Jews. Once the SS determined the utility of the Jews was over, they physically disposed of them. Slave owners generally did not kill their slaves once they lost their effectiveness; however, most slaves were worked so hard that they died prematurely, a death categorically similar to that experienced by Jews during the Holocaust. Whether one worked as a slave in a Roman quarry or as a Jew, undernourished and beaten in an SS factory, is beside the point.
In certain circumstances, slavery and genocide overlap. Both depend on the all-powerful/powerless relationship. Both cheapen the value of human life. Both often rely on group victimization and lethal exploitation. The specifics of their confluence needs to be examined in greater detail by case studies. Such research is not a purely academic venture but a quest for greater understanding of two criminal evils that still take place before our very eyes. Interestingly and significantly, both are often steadfastly denied. For example: The Turkish government studiously denies the Armenian genocide; Louis Farrakhan steadfastly denies slavery in the Sudan, as does the US State Department by refusing to discuss it.
In the face of all this refusal to acknowledge factual reality about slavery and genocide, its seems only correct to become better acquainted with both and where they overlap. Both are criminal abuses of political power and, therefore, need to be studied as related phenomena, products of similar mind-sets often operating in widely different societies and cultures.
Henry R. Huttenbach