How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  16. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). The names of Goldhagen’s critics are legion. Yehuda Bauer observes that professional historians, and especially specialists on the Holocaust, “have been overwhelmingly critical of the book” and comments on “the anti-German bias of the book, almost a racist bias.” Bauer finds some merit in Goldhagen’s book and characterizes him as “a gifted scholar,” but his critique is fundamentally devastating to Goldhagen’s argument. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 93–111, esp. 108, 111. Another thorough critique, which accuses Goldhagen of tendentious and selective use of evidence, among other failings, comes from Christopher R. Browning, one of Goldhagen’s leading antagonists in the debate over his work, in his Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 191–223, esp. 211–217. In a more recent comment, Alon Confino observes of Goldhagen: “His attitude is profoundly anti-empirical: he presupposes the very motivations he intends to explore.” Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 69.

  On the pervasiveness of this “eliminationist” anti-Semitism: see Goldhagen, Willing Executioners, 56 (on anti-Semitism generally in Germany), 59ff (on German society being “axiomatically antisemitic” throughout the nineteenth century), and the discussion at 74–77. Although he concedes that we cannot say “precisely how many Germans subscribed to it in 1900, 1920, 1933, or 1941” (75), he also finds it to have been “ubiquitous” since the early nineteenth century and to have constituted the “common sense” of German society (77). At 419 he asserts that German anti-Semitism was “sui generis” and “unmatched” in any other nation in many distinctive qualities; at 408–409 he limits transnational comparison to the observation that Danes and Italians resisted Nazi extermination policies, while Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians frequently assisted the Germans in the capture and murder of Jews. At 63 he briefly contends that in Germany, unlike in any other Western country, “groups with broad popular support” repeatedly advocated reversing Jewish emancipation. Goldhagen also contends, at 419, that the fact that “it was only in Germany that a rabidly antisemitic movement came to power—indeed was elected to power—that was bent on turning antisemitic fantasy into state-organized genocidal slaughter . . . substantiates the Sonderweg thesis: that Germany developed along a singular path, setting it apart from other Western countries.” However, the Nazi Party was not “elected to power,” having received only one-third of the vote in the last free elections, and was certainly not, at the time of taking power in 1933, “bent on” perpetrating genocide; by the time Goldhagen published his book, specialists in German history had largely discarded the Sonderweg thesis, as discussed above in Chapter 3.

  17. Niall Ferguson, War of the World (New York: Penguin, 2006), 64–68; Laqueur, Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 104, 109.

  18. Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).

  19. The figure of half a million elites is a somewhat arbitrary compromise between minimum and maximum estimates of the percentage of the German population made up by the society’s elite in 1914, drawing on figures given by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and applied to Germany’s population of about 80 million on the eve of World War II (which had been expanded by the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland). The maximum estimate is 5 percent of the population in 1914, of whom one in five would have been an adult male, producing an estimate of 800,000 men and a few thousand women in 1939. The minimum estimate limits the definition of “elite” to the elites of education (0.75 percent of the population at the lower range of estimates), titled aristocracy (0.3 percent, conservatively estimated), and the upper ranks of business owners and managers (0.5 percent), again assuming that one in five of these was an adult male, producing an estimate of 250,000 men and at most a few thousand women in 1939. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:845–846; B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3–4.

  Organizations excluding Jews included the veteran’s organization Stahlhelm (400,000 members), the Jungdeutscher Orden (200,000), the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband (400,000), the agricultural interest group Reichslandbund (1 million), and almost all student fraternities. Ulrich Herbert, “Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions About the History of the ‘Holocaust’ in German Historiography,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 20. On fraternities: Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 45.

  On attitudes in the population: Herbert, “Extermination Policy,” 20; Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 110, quoting Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 80. On anti-Semitism during the Third Reich: Christopher R. Browning finds an “impressive” degree of consensus among scholars to the effect that anti-Semitism was “not a major factor in attracting support for Hitler and the Nazis,” and that few Germans shared the “fanatical” anti-Semitism displayed by a minority of Nazi Party activists. Christopher R. Browning, “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? A Reply to the Critics,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Re-examined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 253–255.

  20. Herf, Jewish Enemy, 80–82; Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage, 1997), 123; William D. Rubinstein, “Antisemitism in the English-Speaking World,” in Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy, eds., Antisemitism: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 150.

  21. On France: a useful summary is Richard J. Golsan, “Antisemitism in Modern France: Dreyfus, Vichy, and Beyond,” in Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy, eds., Antisemitism: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136–149. On comparisons for the period before 1914: Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 148–152. Thomas Nipperdey goes so far as to say that before 1914, the “classic countries of anti-Semitism” were France and Austria-Hungary, not Germany, while Russia differed from all three as a place of active governmental persecution. Saul Friedländer endorses the view that, compared to France, Austria, and Russia, Germany was “certainly not the most extreme.” However, he does find two distinctive features of German anti-Semitism: the way anti-Semitism permeated all manner of civic organizations and economic and political pressure groups; and the development, if only among a small minority, of a full-blown anti-Semitic ideology. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie, 3rd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 289; Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 81, 87.

  22. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 772.

  23. On Jews in the first Weimar cabinet: Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 93–94.

  24. Herbert, “Extermination Policy,” 24; Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1996), 66–68; Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 45.

  25. Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 44.

  26. On most Germans’ anti-Semitism not causing the Holocaust: Herbert, “Extermination Policy,” 42.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. Quoted in Henry Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1.

  2. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 326; Omer Bartov, “The Holocaust as Leitmotif of the Twentieth Century,” in Lessons and Legacies, vol. 6, The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 9–10; Detlev J. K. Pe
ukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 236–237.

  3. A good overview of Social Darwinism’s impact is Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  See Alfred Kelly’s devastating critique of several scholars’ attempts to turn some leading pre–World War I popularizers of Darwin into obvious precursors of Nazism. However, Kelly largely misses the point: although Hitler or Himmler probably never read any books about Darwin, they thought in unmistakably Darwinian categories, using themes and language that had been the stock in trade of the German Right for decades. Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 119–122. For a trenchant summary of the role of Social Darwinism in Nazism, with the focus on Hitler’s thinking, see Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 272–284.

  On reasons for the popularity of Social Darwinism in Germany: Kelly, Descent of Darwin, 5. Kelly describes Darwin as “a popularizer’s dream,” because the ideas are simple and because Darwin wrote with an engaging “personalized, anecdotal technique.” Moreover, Darwin’s theory had “enormous philosophical, religious, political, and even emotional implications.” Ibid., 4–5. In contrast, mystical racist thinkers such as Julius Langbehn and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, although very influential among elites, trafficked in murky notions of “spiritual substance” and “national souls” that would have taxed the patience of many readers. See the discussion in George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), Chapter 7.

  4. Darwin described a second important mechanism, “sexual selection,” which favored the reproduction of those members of a species who were especially attractive to prospective mates. Members of a species who held attractive traits would more easily find mates, he explained, and pass on their attractive traits to the next generation. I have omitted sexual selection from our discussion for the sake of simplicity, and because it did not figure very prominently in Social Darwinist thought.

  5. Kelly argues persuasively that most adherents of popularized Darwinian thought in pre–World War I Germany were on “the left half of the political, cultural, and social spectrum.” Kelly, Descent of Darwin, 8, 100–103, 123–141.

  Kelly also argues, but in my view unconvincingly, that popularized Darwinism had little appeal for conservative German elites. He proceeds by narrowing his focus to the small set of right-wing popularizers “who believed that Darwin alone held the key to understanding human society,” while dismissing the importance of “those vast ranks of saber-rattlers, socialist-baiters, and self-righteous rich” who “occasionally appropriated a Darwinian phrase or two.” Here Kelly ignores the probability that the pervasive acceptance of Darwinian thinking made it unnecessary for these elites to belabor their references to Darwin, because Darwinian “truths” were already assumed. Ibid., 100–103.

  6. On the United States: see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 5–10. On France: see the discussion of Clemence Royer in Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 123–132.

  7. See, for example, Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 203–215.

  8. See the discussion of Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 1081–1082.

  9. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 1–3.

  10. Kelly, Descent of Darwin, 106–107; Daniel Frymann [Heinrich Claß], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (Leipzig, Dieterich, 1912), 34–38 (quotation at 38).

  11. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1890–1914 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 240–243. The League’s journal was the Alldeutsche Blätter. Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, 1904–1945,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 27.

  12. Friedrich von Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Berlin: J. G. Cotta, 1912); Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 3:1149–1150.

  13. Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg, 11, 13–16. A few phrases are emphasized in the original.

  14. Ibid., 110–111.

  15. Speech excerpted in Raymond M. Hyser and J. Chris Arndt, eds., Voices of the American Past: Documents in U.S. History, 4th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008), 1:372. On Social Darwinism as justification for American racism and imperialism during those years: see Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 170–200. Cecil is quoted in Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: New Press, 1997), 140. I am indebted to John Cox for this reference.

  16. Garland E. Allen, “The Ideology of Elimination: American and German Eugenics, 1900–1945,” in Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener, eds., Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 16–17, 19–28; Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 5–9; Weiss, “Race Hygiene Movement”; Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 73ff; Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, “Eugenics, Race and Nation in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940: A Historiographic Overview,” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (New York: Central European University Press, 2007), 6.

  17. Allen, “Ideology of Elimination,” 22–23, 25, 28; Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 5–6. On the discrediting of eugenics: see, for example, Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), esp. 251ff.

  18. A good brief account of the sterilization program is in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136–140. The leading work on the euthanasia program is Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide; see also Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, 142–167; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 75–100). It has been argued that the protests played little role in curtailing the euthanasia program, because by August 1941 it had reached its initial “target” of 70,000 killings. However, this target was arbitrary in the first place; the program’s planners adjusted it upward and downward depending on the obstacles they encountered and the degree of “success” they were having. In the fall of 1940 the target stood at 130,000 to 150,000. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press), 140–141, 277–278. It is also worth noting that the regime decided not to punish the leader of the protests, Bishop August Count von Galen, fearing that doing so would alienate the population of Westphalia as well as other Catholics. This is another example of the regime giving way when confronted by widespread dissent.

  19. Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, 166; Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 16–18.

  20. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, “Vom Wandel des Polenbildes in Deutschland,” in Von der Strategie der Gewalt zur Politik der Friedenssicherung: Beiträge zur deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 302–331; Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, Hans-Erich Volkmann, and Wolfram Wette, Ursachen und Voraussetzungen der deutschen Kriegspolitik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 41–42, 44–45.

  21. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 314–317, 732, 742. The phrases “perishing from the Earth” and “slave people” are italicized in the original.

  22. Ibid., 334, 742–743.

  23. Ibid., 751.

  24. Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, a
nd Joachim Hoffmann, Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), 416–417, 444–446.

  25. Ibid., 442–443. “Bulletin for the Troops” translates Mitteilungen für die Truppe.

  26. On the attitudes of civil servants: see, especially, Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1084–1104.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. Quoted in Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 72.

  2. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1993), 92–93.

  3. Browning, Ordinary Men; Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 181–282 and passim.

  4. Browning, Ordinary Men, 1. Browning formulates his conclusions as to their political background more cautiously, and with some reason, given that about 25 percent of the rank and file had joined the Nazi Party by 1942. Ibid., 47–48. However, many of the people who joined the party after Hitler took power in January 1933 may have done so out of opportunism, to further their careers, rather than out of commitment to Nazi ideology.

  5. Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial Policy in the East (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 15–16, 90. Of the 23 police battalions that went into the Soviet Union in the initial assault, 7 “were made up of older police reservists with no prior service.” Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 186. The battalions averaged 540 men in size; subtracting commissioned and noncommissioned officers, that means at least 500 men per battalion, and 3,500 going into Russia who resembled the men of Battalion 101 in Poland.

  6. Browning, Ordinary Men, 53–54.