SHOAH page 3
umph is that it returns the Holo-
caust to the people who suffered
most: ordinary Jews.
Today, Hitler's Willing Execu-
tioners is on 12 bestseller lists
throughout the world. Over a half-
million copies are in print in 14
different languages. In Germany,
where Dr. Goldhagen recently re-
ceived the prestigious Democracy
Prize, 170,000 copies are on the
shelves — at $40 apiece. During
a 10-day book tour there last Sep-
tember, thousands of cheering
people turned up for each of six
panel discussions in which he was
a participant. Hitler's Willing Ex-
ecutioners has also spawned some-
thing of a cottage industry in
Europe: Two books, one French,
the other German, examine the
phenomenal success of Dr. Gold-
hagen's book and the responses it
has engendered.
Hitler's Willing Executioners, a
revision of Dr. Goldhagen's doc-
toral dissertation, is based on the
assertion that approximately
100,000 Germans — many of
them unaffiliated with the Nazi
Party — gleefully brutalized and
killed Jews, even without orders
to do so, because of a profound, in-
tractable anti-Semitism that had
been alive since the Middle Ages.
In looking to the perpetrators
who made it possible for the Nazis
to exterminate so many millions,
Dr. Goldhagen has turned previ-
ous Holocaust scholarship on its
head. Germans, he shows, had
choices to kill or not to kill. The
state was not a terrorist entity.
Dissent against the regime was
tolerated. Nobody was punished
for refusing to take part in the
bloodbath.
Scholars have failed to ade-
quately explain the most horrific
event of the 20th century because
they have ignored, by and large,
survivor testimony.
"I know of no other historical Daniel Jonah Goldhagen:
event where people say the vic- Individual choice.
tims of oppression, brutality or vi-
"I think one reason it is not used
olence have nothing to tell us
about the people who oppressed, much is that what survivors have
brutalized and victimized them. to say just falsifies the theories
Imagine if an historian of slavery that have prevailed in the field,
said the testimony of slaves about which hold that the perpetrators
the slaveholders had little value. essentially did not want to do
This has been the practice and has what they did, that they didn't
even been said explicitly by schol- hate Jews, that they did what they
did because they were coerced or
ars of the Holocaust.
pressured or were merely follow-
ing orders," Dr. Goldhagen said.
5 Two-thirds of Germanys Jew-
o ish population converted to
r,'", Christianity in the 19th century
}<>-. because that was the only way
they could find acceptance by the
larger society. But it took state-
sanctioned anti-Semitism for the
simmering hatred of Jews to come
to a boil, he explained.
"What [Jews] believed in the
first part of the 20th century was
that however much anti-Semitism
there was, this state would not al-
low them to be attacked. They
were right about the regimes in
place until the Nazis came to pow-
er. For Jews, it seemed things
were getting better.
"The principle issue for Jews
has always been, 'Are we in phys-
ical danger?' not, 'Is there anti-
Semitism?' because there always
was. That's why Germany seemed
like quite a hospitable place," he
said.
And while the Federal Repub-
lic of Germany has been trans-
formed into a democracy in which
public anti-Semitism is outlawed,
Hitler's Willing Executioners gen-
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SHOAH page 29
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erated defensive and personal at-
tacks on Dr. Goldhagen — before
it was even published there.
"One of the principles is that
the book was charging Germans
with collective guilt, which
couldn't be farther from the truth.
The first story in (the national
newsmagazine) Speigel was on
collective guilt. This was said rou-
tinely. They said it was about
some enduring German charac-
ter, which it is not. It is about the
political culture of Germany at
the time."
Some critics in Germany ac-
cused him of "getting revenge" on
Germans for the harm suffered by
his father, Dr. Erich Goldhagen,
who survived the war in a Ro-
manian ghetto. The accusation
rankles him, probably more than
any other.
"I wrote this book as a scholar,
and everything in the book is dri- ,
ven by the desire to analyze and
understand what happened, and
every sentence in the book is there
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