Lecture 2: The Holocaust and the "Goldhagen Effect" PDF

Lecture 2: The Holocaust and the “Goldhagen Effect”  >Objective Present a basic overview of the Holocaust (a prominent example of lethal violence) Explore, in some detail, a populist theoretical account of the Holocaust: Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996)...

Lecture 2: The Holocaust and the “Goldhagen Effect”  >Objective Present a basic overview of the Holocaust (a prominent example of lethal violence) Explore, in some detail, a populist theoretical account of the Holocaust: Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) With Goldhagen’s thesis under our belt, in the following weeks we will explore some more complex (and thus less populist) accounts of the Holocaust  The Holocaust The Holocaust is the central example of genocide in this course The Holocaust: a basic overview  The Holocaust—a basic overview 1933 anti-Semitism Nazis came to power Emigration the popular solution, Kristallnacht, and concentration camps (assets frozen) War and German expansion— “Jewish problem” expands (all ‘solutions’ relating to immigration fail) Second half of 1941 Nazi regime decided to try and kill all Jews By early 1945 about 6 million Jews had been murdered >Who is Goldhagen?  Hitler’s Willing Executioners— Goldhagen’s theory “Germans’ antisemitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust.... antisemitism moved many thousands of ‘ordinary’ Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews” (1996,p. 9).  In support of his theory, Goldhagen provided evidence that supported two arguments: 1. From 19th C. virulent strain of eliminationist anti-Semitism spread throughout Germany and by the early 1930s it intensified to the exterminationist level 2. Upon the Nazi regime’s consent, during WWII this uniquely German strain of exterminationist anti-Semitism caused ordinary Germans to willingly and directly engage in the mass slaughter of Jews  Examples? Former police official: testified that those serving with him “were, with few exceptions, quite happy to take part in shootings of the Jews. They had a ball,” their killing was motivated by a “great hatred against the Jews; it was revenge… (1996: 396).  Asserted that hatred was a “sufficient” cause of the Holocaust What about all the other conventional explanations? The “conventional explanations” according to Goldhagen (1996: 379-385) were that the German perpetrators were: Coerced Obedience to Authority (OTA) Conformity/peer pressure Greed/self-interest Ambition Division of labour—fragmentation of destruction process  Brief details on the “Conventional explanations”: Hilberg: bureaucratic machinery and the five phases of destruction— 1. Definition 2. Expropriation of property 3. Physical concentration 4. Deportation 5. Extermination *Holocaust presented as an “administrative process” (Hilberg, 1961, Vol. 1, p. 9). *The German bureaucrat became “improvisers and innovators” (Hilberg, 1961, Vol. 1, p. 15). *Bur. Machine promoted compartmentalized thinking Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem banality of evil/desk murderer  >Conventional explanations continued: Milgram: invented an experiment to see if people would “just follow orders,” and most did! Browning (1992): Researched a group of ‘ordinary’ shooters: peer pressure (from the top- down & bottom up) was very important Note: Arendt, Milgram and Browning all look up to Hilberg— “Dest. Euro. Jews” is the classic! >Goldhangen (1996), with his focus on dismissing the centrality of the Nazi regime’s bureaucratic machinery of destruction, mainly had his aim set on Raul Hilberg who: “…can be seen as an exemplar of this sort of thinking…” (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 385). According to Goldhagen (1996: 385) each of the conventional explanations: “assumes that the Germans were in principle opposed (or would have been had they not, supposedly, been rendered ‘indifferent,’ numbed by their institutional circumstances) to the mass slaughter of Jews, to a genocidal programme [italics added].” Perpetrators in non-bureaucratic (unsophisticated) killing institutions: Did not feel indifferently towards their Jewish victims. Did not oppose the slaughter in the absence of the bureaucratic machinery of destruction Often volunteered to kill Jews (even disobeyed orders to stop killing) Cruelty was present >With Goldhagen having placed all the conventional theories in a state of doubt, only his explanation remained standing: A uniquely German brand of murderous anti-Semitic hatred (in conjunction with a regime bent on annihilation) was, on its own, a sufficient cause of the Holocaust.  >How successful, then, were Goldhagen’s two arguments? 1st argument bombed: Elim to Exterm. A.S. Why were Jews in Germany emancipated in 19th Century (Bartov, 1996b, p. 34; Finkelstein, 1997, p. 51)? Between 19th C and 1941 the Jews in Russia experienced far more violence than the Jews in Germany. So why didn’t the Russians try to exterminate their Jews (Finkelstein, 1997, p. 41; Hilberg, 1997, p. 724)? Why did this supposed intense hatred of the Jews by the Germans suddenly seem to disappear after World War Two (Bartov, 1996b, p. 34)? But perhaps biggest criticisms of G’s first argument comes from… (and this is where things get confusing)… Bauer’s (2001, p. 31) point: “a high proportion of [Nazi] Party members were not extreme antisemites; rather, they shared an antisemitism that one could define as pervasive, yet not necessarily murderous, perhaps even ‘moderate’. But it was not only the membership of the Nazi Party that may have been ‘only moderately’ antisemitic. This kind of moderate antisemitism was shared by a considerable part of the German population, although its pervasiveness is difficult to estimate (also see Bankier, 1992, p. 72; Heim, 2000, p. 320; Johnson & Reuband, 2005, p 284; Kulka, 2000, p. 277).  G’s 2nd argument that during WW2 ordinary Germans willingly did cruel things to Jews was not disputed: “Goldhagen is quite correct that cruelty in the Holocaust... is an issue that scholars have not dealt with at length” (Browning, 1998, p. 208).  >Despite this, Christopher Browning and Yehuda Bauer (2001, p. 102) still side with Hilberg: “ordinary people were guided by the bureaucratic machine.” Because of the failure of Goldhagen’s 1st argument, Hilberg (1997) argued: “By the end of 1996... much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map” (p. 725). Yet Hilberg (1997, p. 728) then pointed out: “Thus the cloud that Goldhagen created will hover over the academic landscape. It will not soon disperse.” If Goldhagen had been “wiped from the map”, why will his point “not soon disperse”--contradiction? If the shooters/concentration camp workers at the last link in the bureaucratic chain were “ordinary” Germans yet capable of the most disturbing of deeds—what would have stopped the “normal” and “ordinary” desk murderers from engaging in the very same behaviours in the absence of the bureaucratic process? But most of academia disputed Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners because they questioned how a uniquely German brand of anti-Semitic hatred could have caused the Holocaust when, in the first place, historical evidence is incapable of substantiating the claim that German society was intensely anti- Semitic.  We are left with a big mystery: If intense hatred didn’t spur the Germans on, why did these probably moderately anti- semitic people willingly do cruel things to Jews?  >Group discussion: Do you see any merit in Goldhagen’s argument that hate caused the Holocaust? If so why? Do you think something like the Holocaust is possible in the absence of hatred? If so, how?