The Goldhagen Book |
Hitler's Willing Executioners is
a book by Daniel Goldhagen. This book was published in 1997 and caused a
considerable controversy between established historians or history professors
and Dr. Goldhagen, himself an assistant professor at Harvard at the time of
publication. Since then, Goldhagen attained a higher rank in the academic
hierarchy, but resigned from Harvard this year in order to devote his time to
writing. Goldhagen’s
book is so important because it is the only book concerning the holocaust which
describes those events in a manner familiar to those of us who survived these horrors.
Goldhagen
describes accurately what those present in Germany during Hitler’s
dictatorship experienced. That was the nearly total devotion of the Christian
German population to the persecution and murder of the European Jews. Goldhagen
maintains that the German public was willing to participate in the extermination
of all Jews. Indeed, only a few actually participated in the mass murders.
However, almost all Germans approved of these killings and almost all Germans
used verbal violence and physical violence against
German Jews as soon as Hitler declared in 1935 that Jews were no longer
German citizens, even if born in Germany, and that Jews had no police
protection. This led to Jews being assaulted in the streets either by being
called “Judensau” or “Saujuden” (Jewish swine) or being beaten by mobs
in the streets. The German public also participated in stealing Jewish property
after the GESTAPO (Geheime Staats Polizei or Secret State Police) arrested
Jewish families, including children, and sent them to death camps. Then the
Christian population entered the abandoned Jewish homes and stole money,
furniture, kitchen utensils, children’s toys, clothes, bedding , pictures,
jewelry, rugs, and everything else until the house or apartment was empty. Goldhagen
describes how teachers insulted and berated Jewish children until all Jewish
students from kindergarten through universities, as well as Jewish teachers,
were removed from schools, so that they could no longer “contaminate” the
German or “Aryan race.” In short, Goldhagen succeeded in presenting the
Germans as “eliminationist Jew haters,” willing and enthusiastic in
promoting the slaughter of Jews. As
soon as Hitler’s Willing Executioners
was published in English and German, American
and German historians denounced the
book and its author “ad hominem” by attacking not only the content of the
book but Goldhagen. Some demanded
that his doctorate be revoked while others called him incompetent and a failure.
Now, nothing reveals the weakness of an argument so much as personal insults.
Evidently the history establishment could not tolerate that a recent doctoral
student wrote a dissertation that opposed their rigid, lockstep interpretation
of the holocaust. That interpretation may be summarized as claiming that only
“the Nazis,” not the German people as a whole, were
responsible for the horrors inflicted on the European Jews. Yet, the
phrase “Nazi” is two syllable derivation from the German word “Nazional,”
as in Hitler’s party “Die Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei”
or “ The National Socialist German Labor Party.” Goldhagen shows that even
anti-Nazi Germans, such as those who tried to kill Hitler and failed, were
malicious Jew haters seeking to eliminate Jews from a Germany that they meant to
organize if they had succeeded. Goldhagen also wrote that the famed pastor Niemöller,
who was incarcerated in a “concentration Camp” for objecting to some of
Hitler’s policies, expressed hatred for Jews, as did the Catholic priests who
denounced Nazi attacks on their church. An
example was the speech by the Catholic bishop von Galen, who printed copies of
his sermon attacking the Nazi euthanasia program that gassed to death crippled
and mentally retarded Germans. Hitler called these people “worthless lives.”
Von Galen loudly denounced these killings. The German people agreed with him,
and the uproar over killing ill people resulted in so much fury that Hitler
stopped the killings. Obviously von Galen could have done as much for the Jews,
whom he did not even mention. Goldhagen describes how non-Jewish women married
to Jewish men assembled in the hundreds in front of GESTAPO headquarters and
demanded the release of their Jewish husbands. The uproar became so large that
Hitler ordered the release of the Jewish men for fear that he had a revolt on
his hands that included not only the non- Jewish wives but also their relatives.
This clearly demonstrated that the Christian population could have saved the
lives of their Jewish neighbors and co-citizens had they been willing to do so. Goldhagen
proved that the Germans were enthusiastic persecutors of all Jews, and that
those who denounced him were afraid that someone younger was providing evidence
that the German people as a whole were indeed “Hitler’s Willing
Executioners.” P.S. The book is available online or in nearly all libraries. Shalom
u’vracha. Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including The American Jewish Community in the 20th and 21st Century (2021). |