Goldhagen makes his best argument by reasoning backward from what perpetrators did to what could explain their conduct. He focuses on the shooting operations that killed over a million Jews before gassing became the principal method of execution, the work camps in which the near-starvation and continual beating of Jewish laborers undermined productivity, and the death marches of emaciated Jews from one concentration camp to another in the final days of World War II. As most of his critics concede, Goldhagen argues convincingly that many of the perpetrators involved in these operations exhibited cruelty, zeal, and celebratory attitudes that were clearly in excess of what they were ordered to do. These characteristics, he asserts, are entirely consistent with the thesis that Germans killed Jews because they (mistakenly) believed Jews to be dangerous and demonic enemies. They are not consistent, however, with any of the other motives typically adduced to explain German conduct. Motives such as peer pressure, obedience to authority, careerism, dullness, and resignation to the horrors of war might explain the conduct of dutiful executioners, Goldhagen argues, but they do not explain the conduct of cruel, zealous, and celebratory executioners.

Goldhagen holds that by 1940–41, most Germans had come to believe that Jews were an incorrigibly demonic race locked in apocalyptic battle against the German people. Consequently, they believed that the destruction of the Jewish race was “just” and even “a beneficent act for humanity.” But Goldhagen overlooks the need to explain how ordinary German perpetrators were able to sustain beliefs that convinced them that torturing and killing Jews was right, in the face of experiences that should have shaken those beliefs. On this critical point he even fails to question his own examples. How was it possible for a mature man putting a bullet through the head of a 12-year-old child in some remote village in Eastern Europe not to wonder whether that child was really his dangerous and implacable enemy? How could staff members who helped supervise Jews in the work camps not have been appalled by the fact that the near-starvation and continual beatings of their Jewish slaves undermined productivity that was becoming increasingly important to the German war effort? How could the ordinary men and women who led the agonizing death marches in the very last days of World War II continue to think of their helpless victims as the greater enemy, when their country was being reduced to rubble by powerful armies from East and West?

Belief proper, as opposed to faith, is open to revision on the basis of new experience. Why did so few German perpetrators revise their beliefs during the war, whereas many revised their beliefs after the war? According to Goldhagen: “During the Nazi period, and even long before, most Germans could no more emerge with cognitive models foreign to their society...than they could speak fluent Romanian without ever having been exposed to it.” Yet this analogy is obviously weak. Changing one’s beliefs about another people is very different from becoming fluent in an unfamiliar language, and models other than eliminationist anti-Semitism were readily available to Germans both within German culture itself and within the collective heritage of Western thought. A far better answer is that the anti-Semitism that animated perpetrators was a passionate, and perhaps defensive, choice to be deceived. It has often been noted that Jews were physically and psychologically degraded during the Holocaust to “show” that they were physically and psychologically inferior. The cruelty and zeal of perpetrators may have been less the product of anti-Semitic beliefs than ways of producing and sustaining those beliefs. In many cases, the beliefs themselves may not have been the principal motives for the commission of vicious acts, but ways of rationalizing and excusing acts driven by other motives.

The Search for Answers

In the end, Goldhagen’s audacious bid to provide a simplified explanation for the Holocaust fails. Indeed, the principal merit of his book resides not in the answers that it gives but in the questions that it raises. Reflecting on his own experiences in Auschwitz, the Italian writer Primo Levi remarked: “The greater part of historical and natural phenomena are [sic] not simple, nor simple in the way we would like.” After 55 years of research, historians have pieced together a fairly clear (though still incomplete) picture of what happened during the Holocaust and identified the principal factors that led to that tragedy. What remains uncertain is how those factors interacted and their relative importance in the mix. Part of this uncertainty stems from lack of information—especially about the beliefs and attitudes of ordinary Germans. But the greater obstacle is our imperfect understanding of human motivation and conduct.

The yearning for understanding is an admirable trait and a source of human dignity. We try to understand our world by bringing particular things and events together under general concepts and laws or by knitting them together in explanatory narratives. Thus, understanding typically involves some form of simplification. The challenges for us are to craft modes of understanding which give honest accounts of available information and keep them open to revision or rejection in light of new information. The dangers are always that we will oversimplify and learn to ignore inconvenient facts.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners exemplifies one form of oversimplification. A far more chilling form is Holocaust denial. Active Holocaust deniers, like David Irving, are usually Nazi or neo-Nazi sympathizers who share Hitler’s belief that deceit is a legitimate weapon for achieving political ends. But the audience for Holocaust deniers includes young people, often ignorant of history, who may be seduced into taking seriously the simplest possible explanation for the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust—namely, that it did not happen. For those who know nothing about the mountain of evidence that proves the murder of approximately five to six million Jews, this might sound plausible. For those who are vaguely aware of the evidence, there is always the standby myth that the Nazis used to explain inconvenient facts: the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. But this myth has a new twist. Since Germany provides both indispensable documentation for the Holocaust and important Holocaust scholarship, Holocaust deniers are put in the embarrassing position of having to argue that the German establishment is now in league with Jewish conspirators.

If the Holocaust can never be fully understood, why should we keep trying? We should keep trying out of respect for those that suffered and died. We should keep trying because knowledge of this kind is worth having for its own sake. We should keep trying because the Holocaust may help us to understand how to anticipate and prevent genocidal behavior. The post-Holocaust cry of “never again” has become something of a mockery in view of the millions of people who were later murdered for ideological reasons in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia and the hundreds of thousands who have been murdered even more recently in campaigns of ethnic subjugation and cleansing in places like East Timor, Guatemala, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Clearly, the sheer horror of the Holocaust has not deterred similar horrors. Nevertheless, the Holocaust remains the best documented and most carefully studied case of genocide in history. As such, it may yet help in the development of an early warning system for detecting and diverting nations on the road to mass murder.

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George Segal’s The Holocaust, Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California. Photographed 1985, © Ira Nowinski/Corbis.

Barbed Wire from Holocaust Memorial at Mauthausen by
Fritz Cremer, Mauthausan Concentration Camp, Linz, Austria. Photographed 1987, © Ira Nowinski/Corbis.

Memorial Sculpture of Prisoners Laboring at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Auschwitz Concentration Camp Museum, Auschwitz, Poland. Photographed 1988, © Ira Nowinski/Corbis.

Richard Kamber is a professor of philosophy. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from Claremont Graduate School. Over the past four years he has given several papers at professional meetings and written two articles on the Goldhagen debate. The first article, “Goldhagen and Sartre on Eliminationist Anti-Semitism,” was published by Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the scholarly journal of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The second, “The Logic of the Goldhagen Debate,” is being published in the United Kingdom by a journal
that specializes in philosophy and public affairs, Res Publica.