Author – Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

ISBN – 0 349 10786 6

‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ is not a new book, far from it, it was published in 1996 and is an extension of and based upon a PhD thesis by Mr Goldhagen. However despite being published nearly thirty years ago it still has the capacity to educate the public about the deeply entrenched culture of Jew hatred that existed not just in the Nazi Germany period of 1933 to 1945 but throughout much of German history.

Mr Goldhagen’s book looks beyond the established and broadly accepted histories of Nazi Germany and of the Shoah and into why exterminationist Jew hatred took such a stranglehold on Germany and its citizens. It also busts wide open some of the self-exculpatory post war claims by Germans, that to a greater or lesser extent Germans were forced out of fear to follow Adolf Hitler.

The book opens with an account of a German military man who was aghast at the affront to his honour at the decision by his superiors to require those under his command to sign a declaration that they would not steal. The officer in question was more exercised by what he saw as an affront to his men’s honour by the request to sign a no theft declaration than he was by the job that he and his men had done day in and day out, which was to mass murder Europe’s Jewish population.

The moral inversion of German society in which mass murder was considered as less of an issue than oblique suspicions of theft are laid bare and in great detail in Mr Goldhagen’s book. However this moral inversion did not come about entirely because of the Nazi government of Germany but because exterminationist Jew hatred was a factor in German society well before the rise of the Nazis, or even the post WWI Freicorps right wing paramilitaries. Jew hatred had been baked into German society, as Mr Goldhagen shows, from at least the early 19^th century. As Germany coalesced from a multitude of small independent or semi-independent states into a unified nation, something that finally came about after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, there were numerous debates about what the nature of a united Germany should look like and who should and who should not be considered as part of the German people. Of course the upshot of this debate was that Jews could not be considered as part of the German ‘volk’ and as Mr Goldhagen said, even the relatively liberal voices in this debate were markedly hostile to Jews.

What Mr Goldhagen has clearly shown using copious evidence and references is that the Nazis did not spring from nowhere. Whilst the Nazi’s and their antecedents such as the German Workers Party and elements in the Freicorps did promote the lie that Germany was ‘stabbed in the back’ in WWI, this narrative was not entirely the reason why Germans eventually flocked to the banner of the Swastika. The German Workers Party and the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) that emerged from it were also clearly based on ideologies that had within them significant amounts of Jew hate. This ideology of Jew hate rather than turning off German citizens became something of a magnet to them because of it. As Mr Goldhagen shows the ground from which the Nazis sprung was not barren but instead was fertilised by centuries of a German culture that was infused with both religious and secular Jew hatred.

After reading this book I pondered the other parties and political movements that were either based on Jew hatred or had Jew hatred as a large or significant part of their ideology and I had to come to the conclusion that there was a difference between these parties and Germany under the Nazis. Jew hatred in other nations according to Mr Goldhagen sometimes differed in intensity when compared to Germany and Germans. The more I think about this point the more that I agree. The likes of Mosley for example might have grown up with the sort of upper class dinner party Jew hatred of the sort we see today among the ranks of the Corbynistas, but he didn’t grow up with a culture of eliminationist and exterminationist Jew hatred as his contemporaries and analogues in Germany would have done. Oswald Mosley was, although for a time quite popular, not able to make rabid Jew hatred a winning strategy and that might be because Britain didn’t have the same culture of Jew hatred as Germany did. It’s clear from what Mr Goldhagen has written that Germany, unlike many other nations in the early to mid 20^th century, had a culture of Jew hatred that was far more deep rooted and more dominated by exterminationism than the Jew hatred found in other countries. Mr Goldhagen’s argument is that the Shoah could only have been instituted by the Germans, as it was the Germans who from 1800 to 1945 lived in a culture where eliminationist and exterminationist Jew hatred was almost completely normalised. Mr Goldhagen’s arguments for this position I found became increasingly compelling as I read the book.

Prior to reading Mr Goldhagen’s book, I like many others took the view to some extent that the majority of Germans of the early to mid 20^th century were decent. I believed that the Germans were led astray by Nazi rhetoric and on some levels chose the Nazis as they were promising to stop the Weimar chaos of economic failure and political violence on the street. Once the Nazis were installed in government, the population were then kept in line by the oppressive organs of the Nazi state. Because I knew from other sources that entities like the Gestapo and their hundreds of thousands of informants, were constantly informing on the Germans, I felt that I could understand to a certain degree why Germans might have thought it unsafe to voice views counter to that of their government of the time. I thought that I should cut the ordinary German some slack as standing up and voicing dissatisfaction with an authoritarian government has, as we saw in Soviet Russia and countless other dictatorships today, tends to give the dissenter a life that is nasty, brutish and often shortened considerably.

However Mr Goldhagen’s book caused me to radically review my position on the role of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazi era. This Mr Goldhagen achieved with some remarkable evidence of crimes and atrocities committed not by the brainwashed elite of Nazi Germany such as the SS but by police battalions, who were in the main staffed not by the young and fully indoctrinated as was the case with the SS, but by those who were much older. These police battalions were made up of those whom were not suitable for the Army or the SS and who had a much higher age profile than those entities. The police battalions that served Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe were full of what could be called normal Germans, people with backgrounds in factory work or retail or the civil service or a multitude of other relatively humdrum occupations.

The police battalions were made up of men who had seen a bit of life and who might in other circumstances have been expected to have built up some degree of morality and moral courage, especially those in these battalions who were professing Christians and members of various churches. But it was these ordinary Germans from ordinary towns, who normally did ordinary jobs who enthusiastically murdered tens maybe hundreds of thousands of people in what has come to be known to historians as the ‘Holocaust of bullets’.

If you read this book you may find the revelation illuminating that contrary to what many, including many in Post War Germany, may want or have wanted to believe, the Shoah was not carried out entirely by the ideologically enslaved of German society, at the time such as the SS or the regular armed forces but by bog standard Germans. What is especially shocking about the evidence that Mr Goldhagen uncovered about the police battalions is that these men were not forced to kill, they didn’t have to but did it anyway. Mr Goldhagen has examined the records of several police battalions in great detail and he came to the conclusion that not only was there a significant degree of volunteerism when it came to participating in atrocities, there was also very little in the way of sanctions imposed on any member of these police battalions who wished to be transferred to other work and not take part in mass murders. A member of these police battalions who was unhappy with what they had to do or who had family issues back home or who had moral or religious objections to being involved in mass murder, could readily approach their commanding officer and be placed in a position where they were out of the mass murdering police battalions. Those who chose to leave these battalions could either get transferred back to Germany and do other non-murder related work for the police or even in some cases, be discharged out of the battalion and go back to civilian life. What’s key here and what Mr Goldhagen’s book amply shows is that the men in these police battalion units were not only, unlike the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, made up of astoundingly ordinary men who might have been expected to have grown a moral pair and got out, but by men who chose to commit mass murder because they saw it as normal for them and normal for their society. The idea of removing the Jew from German society was so deeply ingrained in these men and the towns, cities and culture that they came from, that they didn’t see anything morally wrong in mass murder. Such crimes were for them part and parcel of building the Germany they wanted to see built.

This book goes into much more detail about the attitudes of ordinary German citizens to Jew hatred and the Nazi’s adherence to it and how the ingrained Jew hatred of the average German of the time caused the death of Jews, even when it should have been obvious to the most dim of minded Germans that not only was the war lost, but so was the ideology of Nazism itself. Ordinary Germans continued to murder Jews as Mr Goldhagen said even during the closing days of the War and of the Nazi regime. Ordinary Germans continued to kill Jews even when Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler ordered a halt to the murders for his own self-serving political reasons. Yes, not even a direct order from Himmler himself could stop the average German from committing acts of mass murder.

I cannot do the book total justice in this review but I have to say that the research that has gone into it is astoundingly good. It’s obvious from the main text and from the notes that not only had many archives been opened in order to garner the evidence that Mr Goldhagen has obtained, but that the author has done a great job of marshalling disparate bits of information and creating a coherent story of a culture and a nation warped by Jew hatred, dating back to even before Germany was even a unified nation.

My conclusion after reading this book is that the ordinary Germans of the Nazi period were a lot more guilty than many of us may have previously assumed. The criminals were not just the members of the SS and of the Wehrmacht actively taking part in mass killings or the ‘desk murderers’ like Adolf Eichmann, but the sort of unremarkable German who was relatively untainted by brainwashing. It really was the case that Germany’s atrocities during and prior to WWII were often not committed by an elite who could be easily identified and classified correctly as criminals in the post Nuremberg trial era, but by the German butcher, baker or candlestick maker, in other words the average German citizen of the time.

Looking back at the era of immediate post war Germany and of the Allied occupation of Germany, it is somewhat easy to understand why the ordinary German who voluntarily followed orders to commit mass murder, often got left out of the tales of that time. The Cold War was starting to get going and the West needed a functioning West Germany to play their part in countering the Soviet Union and its allies. I believe it was out of expediency and a dire need to counter the Soviet bloc, that the story of the ordinary Germans who committed extraordinary crimes got forgotten, until Mr Goldhagen decided that he would unearth it and share it with the world.