Willing Executioners

Eliminationist Anti-Semitism is Alive and Kicking

We have been reading Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners with great interest.  [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Abacus, 1997)].  The book has attracted significant academic controversy.  Goldhagen's central thesis is that ordinary Germans in the nineteen thirties and forties were captured by an ideology of eliminationalist anti-semitism.  

The idea is that the great majority of German people were not just anti-semitic, but had come to believe that the only solution to the "Jewish problem" was the elimination of Jews from Germany--not by expulsion, but by their extermination.  The Nazis institutionalised this idea and sought to effect it as the "Final Solution".  But--and this is where Goldhagen's thesis becomes more controversial--eliminationist anti-semitism was not distinctly Nazi; it was, argued Goldhagen, a widely held idea within Germany.  One fundamental trail of evidence produced by Goldhagen was the enthusiastic extermination of Jewish people perpetrated by non-Nazi, German Order Police Reserve Battalions,  made up of older, middle-aged German men.

The historical reality is that anti-semitism became "eliminationist" in Germany.
 Anti-semitism, while a stupid idea, does not necessarily morph into a call to genocide.  Nazi Germany did not just call for a genocidal extermination of the Jewish people within Germany--and in its conquered territories--it systematically planned and carried out the idea.  Ideology became the practice.

It seems reasonable to hold that this could only be done because it was a proposition that enjoyed widespread sympathy amongst the German people--and many non-Nazi, ordinary Germans were only too willing to participate.

In 2006, the American columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. There was something unique to Germany that made its fascism genocidal. Around the globe there have been dozens of self-declared fascist movements (and a good deal more that go by different labels), and few of them have embraced Nazi-style genocide. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust" he said.

Goldberg went on to state that Goldhagen was mistaken in believing that "eliminationist antisemitism" was unique to Germany, and Goldberg charged "eliminationist antisemitism" was just as much of modern Palestinian culture as it was of 19th-20th-century German culture, and that in all essentials Hamas today was just as genocidal as the NSDAP had been.  [Wikipedia]

Ideas have consequences.  Eliminationist anti-semitic ideas were circulating in Germany in the nineteenth century.  Eliminationist anti-semitic ideas are circulating in fundamentalist Islamic circles today.  We would be foolish indeed to attribute such ideas exclusively to the Nazis.  We would be even more foolish to believe that the systematic extermination of Jewish people could never happen again.