Germans Offended By Characterization

Sun., April 28, 1996

Terrence Petty/Associated Press

German historians and critics are furiously assailing an American author for arguing that the Holocaust sprang from a rabid anti-Semitism that was peculiar to Germany.

The uproar over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” is one of the loudest to ever to have occurred in this country over how to explain the murder of 6 million Jews.

“We don’t dispute the atrocities,” Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein wrote in Monday’s editions of the magazine. But to say that most Germans wanted Jews exterminated “is ignorant, if not in fact malicious,” he said.

Similar reactions to Goldhagen’s book have shown up in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, two of Germany’s most respected newspapers.

In years past, there have been arguments among German historians over how it happened that normal Germans let Adolf Hitler come to power and then looked the other way as Jews were sent off to extermination camps.

So far, however, the consensus among German historians is that Goldhagen’s own theses are way off-base.

Norbert Frei, a Berlin historian, agrees with Goldhagen that the Third Reich was suffused with anti-Semitism. But Frei says it is wrong to assert that “nearly the whole German society wished for this genocide.”

In his book, Goldhagen says as many as a half-million Germans were active participants in the Holocaust and that many of them killed with relish.

But Frei says hatred of Jews was not the only motive for such atrocities. Also playing a role, Frei claims, were peer pressure, emotions that had been numbed by the war, alcohol abuse and other factors.

Other critics say that Goldhagen has revived a theory about the origins of the Holocaust that first was introduced by American and British historians after the Nazis’ defeat and later abandoned because it assumed “collective guilt” for all Germans.

More recent theories have argued that ordinary Germans supported Hitler because of his charisma and his promises to end the country’s 1930s economic crisis.