 By Richard Kamber |
| Philosophy Meets History To appreciate how philosophy can contribute to historical analysis, consider the question: “Can the Holocaust be explained?” Since there is more than one way to understand this question, debaters about whether or not the Holocaust can be explained must first agree on which question they are trying to answer. To those who think the Holocaust cannot be explained, a second question must be posed: “What is it about the Holocaust that you find inexplicable?” To some, it is incomprehensible that “God would let it happen,” so to deal with this, one must enter into a discussion about the existence, nature, and purposes of God. Therefore, an explanation of the Holocaust in terms of geopolitics and the structure of the Nazi State would miss the point of this kind of puzzlement. For others, the puzzlement is not about God but about humanity. They may ask: “How could tens of thousands of people who were neither psychotics nor hardened criminals knowingly engage in the degradation, torment, and murder of millions of defenseless men, women, and children?” To deal with this, one must investigate the human capacity for such conduct and the conditions under which it is likely to be unleashed. For most historians, however, puzzlement about the Holocaust has focused on issues of planning, decision-making, ideology, and personal motivation. Some historians, called “intentionalists,” believe that Hitler formed the intention to exterminate as many Jews as possible in the early 1920s. They also believe that when initial successes in World War II provided a convenient opportunity, he commissioned his chief architects of murder, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, to develop plans for killing every Jew within reach of the Nazi regime. These plans were then implemented with hideous efficiency. Other historians, called “functionalists,” believe that the Holocaust was neither intended nor foreseen by the Nazi regime until after the start of World War II. Historians of this persuasion tend to downplay Hitler’s early rhetoric about murdering Jews and his personal leadership in implementing the Holocaust. They believe that Hitler and his henchmen were intent on ridding German territory of Jews, but unsure how to do it. They argue that the decision to exterminate European Jewry was a function of diverse and often impersonal factors, including the vast number of Jews who came under Nazi control when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the impracticality of expelling or resettling Jews in the midst of war, the seductions of industrial technology as tools of mass murder, and desensitization to mass slaughter brought on by two world wars. For historians there is no consensus on how to explain the Holocaust. Even for scholars who have spent decades studying the intricate play of historical factors that resulted in the Holocaust, the challenge of understanding how they fit together may be daunting. For the general reader, full comprehension may seem impossible. Enter Daniel Goldhagen.  Goldhagen’s
ArgumentMuch of the appeal of Hitler’s Willing Executioners lies precisely in Goldhagen’s insistence that the Holocaust can be understood, and that it can be understood largely in terms of a single cause: a form of anti-Semitism which he calls “eliminationist antisemitism [sic].” He argues that decades before Hitler, most Germans believed that Jews and/or “Jewish influence” were harmful to Germany and should, if possible, be eliminated. He asserts that without this widespread belief, the Holocaust could not have occurred as it did. Yet until the Nazis came to power, there was little agreement on how the problem of eliminating Jews or Jewish influence could be solved. Some, he says, believed that Jewish influence could be eliminated by assimilation; others favored limiting Jewish rights or forcible emigration. The Nazis, he claims, harnessed the nearly universal eliminationist anti-Semitism of the German people and transformed it into exterminationist anti-Semitism. There is much wrong with Goldhagen’s argument, and here are three examples. First, the very concept of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” is suspect. It is arbitrary to yoke together under a single concept people who wanted to promote Jewish assimilation and people who wanted to drive Jews from their homes. Second, Goldhagen insists on a “cognitive” interpretation of German anti-Semitism which treats hatred of Jews as a rational (though misguided) response to false beliefs about Jews. He does not consider alternative interpretations of anti-Semitism, which treat adherence to its falsehoods as a rationalization for personal inadequacies or an attempt to evade responsibility through self-deception. Third, Goldhagen asserts but does not prove that eliminationist anti-Semitism was nearly universal in Germany long before Hitler came to power. Although no one disputes that anti-Semitism was common in Germany before Hitler, there is considerable evidence (personal recollections, intermarriage rates, voting patterns, etc.) to suggest that most non-Jewish Germans did not fear or hate Jews and that many had cordial relations with Jewish friends, colleagues, and neighbors. A book published in the same year as Hitler’s Willing Executioners, John Weiss’ The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (1996), estimates that “Even at the height of Hitler’s popularity about half of all Germans, mainly but not solely progressives or leftists, rejected the racist violence of the Nazis, though they could not halt it.” |
