A Nation on Trial by Norman G. Finkelstein

Author:Norman G. Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Notes

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Crazy” Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners

1. New York, 1996.

2. The New York Times, 27 March, 2 April, 3 April 1996. The New York Times Book Review ran a somewhat less effusive notice (14 April 1996). The New York Times Index lists fully forty-two separate references to Goldhagen in 1996 alone. See Time, 23 December 1996. The New York Review of Books first gave Hitler’s Willing Executioners a tepid notice but then ran a glowing piece in which it was acclaimed as “an original, indeed, brilliant contribution to the mountain of literature on the Holocaust” (18 April 1996, 28 November 1996). Initially running a hostile review, The New Republic subsequently featured Goldhagen’s nine-page “reply to my critics” (29 April 1996, 23 December 1996). Crucial as it is to fully apprehending the Goldhagen phenomenon, the German reaction will not be considered in this essay. Deciphering its anomalies would require a much more intimate knowledge of the German cultural landscape than this writer possesses.

3. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1961). My page references will be to the three-volume “revised and definitive edition” published by Holmes and Meier in 1985: vol. iii, 1011, vol. i, 327; cf. vol. iii, 994. Cf. also Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (New York, 1992), 28: “Whether they were in command or lowly placed, in an office or outdoors, they all did their part, when the time came, with all the efficiency they could muster.” For initial reaction to Hilberg’s damning portrait of German culpability, cf. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory (Chicago, 1996), 124–6. In this text, Nazi holocaust refers to the actual historical event, Holocaust to its ideological distortion. This distinction will be clarified in the conclusion.

4. Hilberg specifically pointed to the Order Police—the subject of Goldhagen’s study—as perpetrators whose “moral makeup” typified “Germany as a whole” (vol. iii, 1011).

5. Ibid.

6. For background and critical commentary, cf. Eric A. Zillmer et al., The Quest for the Nazi Personality (Hillsdale, NJ, 1995). Sampling a wide array of clinical data, the authors dismiss the “simplistic” notion of a “specific homicidal and clinically morbid” German personality (13). See also Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (New York, 1993), 6–7, 14.

7. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York, 1975), 47; cf. 163–6; cf. also Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, 1981), 11–12, 41, 59. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context (Oxford, 1994), 10–11.

8. Goldhagen dissents from Christopher Browning’s estimates that 10–20 percent of the German police battalions refused to kill Jews as “stretching the evidence” (HWE: 541 n68; cf. 551 n65). It is one of Goldhagen’s central contentions that the police battalions were prototypical of the murderous German mind-set; cf. HWE: 181–5, 463ff.

9. Compare Saul Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination,” in Yad Vashem Studies, XVI (Jerusalem, 1984), 7.

10. Not to be deterred by the hobgoblin of consistency, Goldhagen writes a couple of pages earlier: “By the time Hitler came to power, the model of Jews that was the basis of his anti-Semitism was shared by the vast majority of Germans” (Reply: 40).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.