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Europe's Killing Frenzy
DAVID R. BEISEL
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997
Following Kristallnacht, the editor of Das Schwarze Korps complained in a letter to Himmler that The Night of Broken Glass had made him uncomfortable; it had been witnessed by women, children, and foreigners, and after all, he said, we do not want to look like frenzied sadists.
Denials like this sometimes contain affirmations, and anyone wishing to disentangle the complex feelings behind what it meant to be a Nazi, especially a Nazi genocidal killer, will find scores of such suggestive anecdotes in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's horrifying, repetitive, angry, interesting, and anti-psychological book Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Goldhagen's arguments, at least his title, are by now well known, even to casual readers. He received two reviews in The New York Times and was reviewed in all the major U.S. newspapers and magazines. His book hit The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list in hardcover, and again in paperback, and became a best-seller in Germany and Austria. Both its U.S. publication and reception in Germany were covered on the newspages of The New York Times. Goldhagen was interviewed on PBS by Charlie Rose. His triumphant reception in Germany was covered by articles in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine. He was given an opportunity to reply to his critics in The New Republic and in Foreign Affairs. And his long-term influenceÑat least in the short runÑseems assured with excerpts from his book quickly appearing in the second edition of The Holocaust (1997) in the widely-used Problems in European Civilization college-text series.
One can only wonder in passing over the book's unusual success. Perhaps some suggestions as to why it became so popular can emerge, coincidentally, after concentrating on the two central issues of interest to readers of this journal: what is Goldhagen's contribution to historical scholarship; does he deepen our psychological understanding?
SOME HISTORICAL ISSUES
Goldhagen's historical arguments are straightforward enough; he makes his points clearly, and often. He aims to restore the perpetrators' identities; to convey the character and quality of their lives as genocidal killers; and to give details of their actions and lives. One can only applaud his effort at putting a human face to the killers, and Goldhagen makes good his claim with abundant, horrifying details. He finds, as the subtitle of his book asserts, that the perpetrators were neither psychopathic killers, nor soldiers in extraordinary circumstances fearing what punishments might befall them if they didn't follow orders: they were just ordinary Germans doing what, for them, came naturally.
His second goal is to explain what caused ordinary Germans to carry out the Nazi genocidal program, often with pride, dedication, and apparent pleasure. He finds all the major theories wanting, and takes us through a brief excursion into what looks like historiography, asserting that all past explanations fall into five categories. Either: the perpetrators were coerced; or they were blind followers of orders; or they succumbed to pressures to conform; or they were unfeeling technocrats with a job to do; or, participants in uncoordinated activities, they really didn't know what was going on. These explanations are too abstract he says, because they account for the perpetrators' double failure of recognition of the human aspect of the Holocaust; that they chose to act inhumanely; and that they acted on people, not animals or things.
Goldhagen points out that there were over 10,000 camps of all kinds, 645 forced labor camps in Berlin alone, and that their stench could be detected for miles around. He reminds us that they were established, staffed, and maintained within sight of the German people, making then a criminal infrastructure of suffering which no one could have ignored. He also mentions the death marches when the war was lost, and reminds us that the purpose of working Jews was to work them to death.
We are treated, again, to the sad litany of the professions which abandoned moral judgment before and during the Holocaust: judges and lawyers, schoolteachers, churchmen, university administrators and faculty, businessmen, and doctors. He reminds us of the crucial turning point of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when: Ordinary Germans spontaneously, without provocation or encouragement, participated in the brutalities. Even youths and children contributed to the attacks, and thousands more watched the night's assaults [and watched again] the next day [when] Jews were marched to concentration camps. This was, as many historians have suggested, the moment when the German people sealed the fate of the Jews by letting the authorities know that they concurred in the unfolding eliminationist enterprise.
Goldhagen shows how, when the Holocaust began, the killers volunteered for Jew-hunts, invited their wives to witness their work, and took pictures, sending them home to their families. He is at his best when he piles quotation upon quotation showing what this work was actually like.
The Germans had to remain hardened, he reminds us, to the crying of the victims, to the crying of women, to the whimpering of children. At such close range, the Germans often became spattered with human gore. Testimonies reveal: The executioners were gruesomely soiled with blood, brain matter, and bone splinters. It stuck to their clothes. Said one participant: Next to me there was the Policeman Koch. . . He had to shoot a small boy of perhaps twelve years. . . The other comrades laughed at me because pieces of the child's brain had spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. Such images are already all too familiar to those acquainted with the Holocaust memoir literature.
Goldhagen admits that an occasional perpetrator was troubled by his work, and shows that when one requested to be relieved, nothing happened to him; he was either transferred, or given other tasks. Virtually every review has cited this aspect of the study as significant, but while it is important, it is not new: Holocaust scholar and psychohistorian George Kren has been pointing out the same fact for over three decades.
The crucial question, of course, is why were ordinary people transformed into genocidal killers? Goldhagen finds his answer in what he asserts is a unique quality in nineteenth-century Germany, one which built upon the long traditions of European anti-Semitism: exclusionary anti-Semitism became eliminationist, as it became linked to, and justified by, new racial theories.
Goldhagen cites the 1963 doctoral dissertation of Klemens Felden (Ruprecht-Karl-Universitt Heidelberg), which found that 28 of 51 prominent anti-Semitic writers in the years 1861-1895 had proposed solutions to the Jewish problem, and 19 of the 28 called for the physical extermination of the Jew (Goldhagen's italics).
Felden's findings are important; they support Goldhagen's argument that: The eliminationist mind-set tended towards an exterminationist oneÑat least for some Germans. But these findings cry out for comparisons: we need to know the extent and intensity of eliminationist rhetoric in other countries (Britain, France, Russia, the U.S.), where, one suspects, it was as strident as in the Reich.
And, as therapists know, light years separate fantasy and rhetoric from acting out: the question of timing remains critical. If eliminationist anti-Semitism was the main causal factor, why weren't Jews killed during or after World War I? One would never suspect this is a question since Goldhagen's single-minded pursuit of exclusionary anti-Semitism itself excludes traditional factorsÑGermany's lack of democratic traditions, its defeat in World War I, the humiliation of Versailles, Weimar's weaknesses, anti-modernism, the Great Depression, and so onÑwhich are not even passingly mentioned as partial catalysts in intensifying hatred.
Stanley Hoffman, cited along with Peter Hall and Sidney Vesba as having supervised the dissertation that was the basis of this book, is quoted on the book's jacket as saying it is truly revolutionary, is based on impeccable scholarship, and offers a profound understanding of modern German history. Even lukewarm reviewers in the popular press have hailed it as a landmark, or a groundbreaking study. These sentiments echo Goldhagen's own claims: because studies of the Holocaust have been marred by an undertheorizing of anti-Semitism, he asserts, my explanationÉ is new to the scholarly literature.
This will surely come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have explored anti-Semitism with their high-school, college, and graduate students, and the thousands of scholars who have understood it to be a central part of Christianity, nineteenth-century European and American nationalism, Nazism, and the belief system fueling the fervor of Hitler's Belgian, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian accomplices.
So, despite the hoopla, and Goldhagen's bold claims for originality, one is hard pressed not to agree with Gordon Craig's assessment that the publishers promise that [the book] will transform our view of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany... seems unlikely, at least for the readers who have followed the literature on these subjects. Its principle general conclusionsÉ have been reasonably well known for a long time.1
Nevertheless, in a world in which over twenty percent of U.S. citizens believe it's possible that the Holocaust never happened, and in which hundreds of thousands of students believe that historians invent the past, carefully documented studies showing once again the responsibility of Hitler and the Germans for the Holocaust are important. Popularizing the findings of others may be Goldhagen's major contribution.
SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES
What ordinary people are capable of, and why, has long been a psychohistorical issue. Readers of early numbers of his journal will remember debates on just how sane were the Nazi leaders.2 (Rudolf Binion also contributed a short, sensible review.)3 But except for the current brief commentaries by Eva Fogelman, George Kren, and Flora Hogman in the lively new publication Clio's Psyche,4 none of the many reviews I have seen makes much psychological sense of Goldhagen's book. Many unwary readers, though, may be under the illusion that Goldhagen has, after reading the words of The New York Times Magazine, put Germany on the couch.5 Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Goldhagen makes occasional psychological-sounding statements, sometimes promising to take him to deeper levels of analysis, but at every turn he runs from the insights. He says: Anti-Semitism without Jews was the general rule of the middle ages and early modern Europe, and (similar to the situation in eastern Europe today) notes it was not based on any familiarity with real Jews. He calls the German image of the pernicious Jew hallucinatory, labels ancient Aztec rites of human sacrifice magical thinking, and asks: why can we not believe that many Germans in the twentieth century... [were] prone to Ômagical' thinking? He says the German idea of Jews was divorced from reality.
But he does not believe these hallucinations were derived from well-known psychodynamic processes; they are to be found, he says, in the cognitive models that underlay and informed the Germans' thinking... about Jews. His causal explanation reduces to traditional intellectual history, and the ideology of anti-Semitism is never considered as a rationalization for deeper, hidden motives.
Goldhagen cannot consider this possibility because he is consistently anti-psychological. He never mentions Kren and Rappoport, Richard Rubenstein, or Stanley Rosenman, his footnote references to Hitler's biography includes Bullock and Waite, but not Binion, and he exiles Lifton to two or three footnotes, where he dismisses The Nazi Doctors as dependent on situational factors and psychological mechanisms.
One is left, then, with cognitive models, good, old-fashioned
Rational Man, one advantage of which is never having to take
seriously the organic metaphors continuously use by Hitler and
the Nazis, which are occasionally quoted by Goldhagen himself.
(Lifted from The Nazi Doctors: I would remove a gangrenous
appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix
in the body of mankind; and from Hitler: Countless illnesses are
caused by one bacillus: the Jew!)
Psychohistorians have long understood images like these to be
important clues to the emotional and fantasy life of the
perpetrators who felt themselves to be poisoned, diseased, and
gangrenous, then projected those feelings onto Jews. When the
killing began, they were trying to kill off in the Jews what they
loathed in themselves.
But killing, as horrible as it was, was only part of the process. Goldhagen points out what many know, that the victims were verbally abused, flogged with whips, urinated upon, beaten and degraded, made to suffer hours of torture before being killed. It became part of the ritual. Reviewers repeatedly mention this culture of cruelty, but pass it by without asking why it was an integral part of the process, as if cognitive models sufficiently explain human brutality and sadism. (As Robert Conquest has written: Cruelty is not a category in political science.) What leaps out at the reader is that cruelty was central to the process: the perpetrators enjoyed it.
Some observations on concentration camp life by Bettelheim6 and Des Pres, despite their differences, point in the same direction and may be helpful in understanding the perpetrators' motives. The guards, noted Bettelheim, viewed the prisoners as the scum of the earth, strictly regulated defecation, and made them soil themselves. At times, writes Des Pres, men had to urinate in other men's mouths, soup bowls were periodically taken from the prisoners and thrown into the latrine from which they had to be retrieved. Said one of the victims: Urine and excrement poured down the prisoner's legs, and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen our limbs gave off its stench. Alexander Donat's memoirs corroborate this obsession. When he got to Maidanek he was told: This is a death camp... You'll be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your own shit; Kapos yelled, You filthy shitface, don't you know how to wash?7
This is definitely not what Goldhagen, with his cognitive model, had in mind when he wrote: Germans refashioned their victims to conform to their own image of them, thus validating their own world view. But psychohistorians might extend this notion to hypothesize, as Stanley Rosenman has written in these pages, that the perpetrators were casting their victims as externalized, concrete representations of how they unconsciously felt about themselves. They called the Jews vermin, then turned them into vermin; they wouldn't have to feel like feces if they could turn their victims into feces.
Psychological evidence shows that this kind of self-loathing is rooted in childhood experiences. The Altruistic Personality and Eva Fogelman's Conscience and Courage have shown, on the other hand, how good childhoods could produce rescuers. Is it too simple to suggest, as Alice Miller has done, that bad childhoods can produce perpetrators? Could the cruelties and the murders of Jews been tragic, traumatic re-enactments? There are hints in Bettelheim: during the transportation, the prisoners were tortured in the way in which a cruel and domineering father might torture a helpless child. Making prisoners soil themselves, and being preoccupied with cleanliness made it seem as if education to cleanliness would be once more repeated. And it was endlessly. Moreover, in speaking to each other, the prisoners were forced to employ the familiar du (Ôthou') a form which in Germany is indiscriminately used only among small children. As in their own childhoods, authorities had to be addressed in the most deferential manner, and like their fathers, guards made prisoners stand at attention for hours at a time, one of their games being to see who could stand to be hit the longest without uttering a complaint.
Much more evidence is needed, of course, but early studies of German childhood show similar patterns of abuse. Like the abused child who becomes an abusing parent, perpetrators dehumanized their victims as they had been dehumanized, beat them as they had been beaten, and starved them as they had been starved, physically and emotionally. The murderous rage their parents had felt towards them, and they felt towards their parents (and then towards themselves), could be directed at the Jews and acted out with the occupation of Europe, the onslaught of war, and Hitler's permission.
For the Holocaust is also not a thing in itself, but part of the larger destructive madness called the Second World War. I say this at the risk of alienating some readers who may think that any effort at seeing the Holocaust in comparison to other genocides, or part of a broader context, is to trivialize Jewish suffering. It is to suggest that other factors, in addition to Germany's murderous anti-Semitism, were at work, and is more akin to what Kren and Rappoport had in mind when they titled their book The Holocaust and The Crises in Human Behavior.
During the war, death was everywhere, and the killing of Jews and other Nazi victims could be normalized as part of the culture of death. As the war unfolded, it took on the character of wanton human destructiveness.
People on both sides reveled in the excitement, including the destruction. Samuel Hynes' new book The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War8 shows how war's seduction, the romantic pull of combat, played a role in World War II. Oral histories, like Studs Terkel's The Good War, testify to the fact that many participants felt the war was the best time of their lives. John Dower's War Without Mercy argues persuasively that the Pacific conflict lasted longer than it needed to because of the hatreds stoked by monstrous propaganda images on both sides, which justified continued destructiveness. Historian D.C. Watt, writing on the war's aftermath in 1989, said: To walk through the mountains of fire-blackened rubble [in Europe]... is to feel the presence once again of barbarism. The war became destruction for the sake of destruction, which amounted to a [cultural] partial prefrontal lobotomy; he judged the war was not one whit the closer to being won for this destruction.9
Broader issues like these are of little concern to Goldhagen, whose more narrow focus may help account for the book's popularity. The illusion can be maintained that these are not issues of general human concern, but bad Germans doing bad things to innocent people, which is, of course, true enough. As Laurence Weschler has written in The New York Times Book Review (April 6, 1997, p. 17) Goldhagen allows young Germans the opportunity to concur, avidly, that yes, yes, their grandparents had all been potential mass murderers, a concurrence that serves to confirm their contrasting innocence. Perhaps some readers were perversely excited by the book's tale of violence, although both times this suggestion has been made (once in The New York Times, once in The New York Review) the idea was rejected. But Goldhagen's popularity may come mostly because his book, as Flora Hogman has written in Clio's Psyche, is expressing the rage of the Jewish people.
A number of scholars and psychoanalysts have seen Hitler's Willing Executioners as confirming earlier studies that ordinary people can carry out atrocities without much difficulty. But this is not what Goldhagen says. (The Wave and Zimbado experiments are not mentioned, and Stanley Milgram appears in one sentence and a footnote.) It is not that horrific events can be perpetrated by average, everyday people; it is that they can be perpetrated by average everyday Germans: instead of being guided by the widespread assumptions of the Germans' likeness to us, he writes, we begin our analysis from the opposite, more sensible position. Nor is the related argument that the Germans needed non-German participants ever considered. Near the book's beginning, Goldhagen writes: Non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of genocide. The Foreword to the German edition categorically states that the anti-Semitism of others is irrelevant: the Holocaust could have been produced only by Germany.
Almost all the evidence from almost all the studies over the last twenty years says otherwise. At the risk of losing some readers who may feel I am letting the Germans off the hook, it is necessary to say that Hitler did not have to teach the world how to hate, and the Holocaust was considerably abetted by hundreds of thousands of Hitler's non-German ordinary henchmen. David Wyman has shown how Jewish refugees were systematically denied U.S. visas, and how, in the middle of the war, opinion polls revealed Americans believed their major enemies to be Germans, Japs, and Jews. It was the Parisian police who rounded up the Jews of Paris, a Dutchman who denounced the Frank family. The pope never spoke out against the Holocaust and the Vatican underground helped many Nazis escape from Europe. A dozen books since 1979 have demonstrated how news of the mass killings reached the West long before war's end; Auschwitz was not bombed; no one spoke out. Recently declassified British radio intercepts from July and August 1941 show conclusively that British intelligence had news of mass murders of Jews long before word filtered out in 1943.10
Fixation on Germans helps us avoid acknowledging the meaning of such evidence. For example, a fine survey of Holocaust literature by Partisan Review editor Edith Kurzweil maintains this blindspot when it asserts that a memoir under review confirms Goldhagen's hypothesis. After the Soviets occupied her native province of Bukovina in 1940, and the Germans invaded in June 1941... Ôthe Romanian vanguards enter[ed] our city, attack[ed], plunder[ed], and murder[ed] thousands of Jews... [and] the Einsatztruppen executed every Jew they encountered.' But what is confirmed is not Goldhagen's thesis, but that the Romanian vanguard was also part of Europe's squad of eager executioners.
The simple focus of Hitler's Willing Executioners helps us avoid this terrifying idea. This may help explain why John Weiss' better written, more complex, and balanced study, Ideology of Death. Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany11 also favorably reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Times at the same time as Goldhagen did not receive anywhere near the media attention of Goldhagen's simpler, angrier book.
Those readers energized by Goldhagen's anger may feel my comments to have downplayed the role of Hitler and Germans. So that there may be no mistake, let me reiterate: the evidence is clear, Hitler, the Nazis, and ordinary Germans were initiators of the Holocaust; the conquest of Europe allowed them to extend persecution and murder everywhere. But they were not alone; single-minded attention to Germans lets others off the hook. I am applying to the Holocaust a similar argument used by D.C. Watt for the origins of the Second World War: it was indeed willed, Watt wrote, but it was also willed, aided and abetted, and acquiesced in by a multitude of accomplices, German and non-German.12
Some readers may find that Goldhagen's book, despite his emphasis on Germans only, illuminates the dark places of the human heart; others that it is a comforting indictment of Germans: both groups of readers will experience its immediate emotional impact. We all became witnesses, and witnessing can be traumatic. Criticisms of the film version of Schindler's List as not graphic enough miss the point precisely because Spielberg took his audiences as far as they could go. Viewers had to be willing to risk a traumatic journey, as did the hundreds of thousands who have made Goldhagen's book a best-seller. By avoiding the non-German accomplices, the war itself, and psychological factors, Goldhagen has allowed hundreds of thousands to glimpse the normal murderous rage at the heart of Europe's killing frenzy. But a deeper understanding of the Holocaust still awaits its psychohistorian.
David R. Beisel, Ph.D., teaches history and psychohistory at Rockland Community College, State University of New York, 145 College Road, Suffern, New York, 10901. He is past-president of the International Psychohistorical Association, former editor of this journal, and the author of many essays on American and European History. He has recently finished a book, Suicidal Embrace, on the psychohistorical origins of the Second World War.
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1. Gordon Craig, How Hell Worked, The New York Review of Books, April 18, 1996, p. 7.
2. Michael Selzer, Psychohistorical Approaches to the Study of Nazism, The Journal of Psychohistory Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall, 1976), 215-230, with comments by Martin Wangh, Helm Stierlin, and Peter Loewenberg.
3. Rudolf Binion, review of The Nuremberg Mind by Mieale and Selzer, The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter, 1977), 407-408.
4. Clio's Psyche: Explaining the Why of History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (December, 1996), 69-74, and Vol. 3, No. 4 (March, 1997), 109-111. The Psychohistory Forum, 627 Dakota Trail, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, 07417.
5. The words appear before the article by Amos Elon, The Antagonist as Liberator, The New York Times Magazine (January 26, 1997), p. 40.
6. The controversy over Bettelheim's tendency to dress up his vita, and other negative revelations, does not necessarily diminish his psychoanalytic insights into camp life. See Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Nina Sutton, Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (New York: Basic Books, 1996) for the controversy.
7. The material cited is from Bettelheim's Surviving and Other Essays, and from Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, both excerpted, for convenience, in Donald L. Niewyk The Holocaust: Problems of Perspective and Interpretation (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1992), as is the quotation from Alexander Donat, pp. 58-88.
8. (New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1997).
9. D.C. Watt, How War Came. The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 8.
10. The New York Times, November 19, 1996, pp. A1, A6.
11. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).
12. Watt, p. 3.
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