News
Lecturer: Germans willing participants in Holocaust
Story by Katie Michel | March 18, 2008
Montana Kaimin
Dr. Daniel Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” speaks about how the Holocaust still affects the world today during the Presidential Lecture at the University Theatre Monday night. (Hugh Carey)
Deep-seeded anti-Semitism – and not the fear of punishment – was the reason for most Germans’ willingness to carry out brutal and lethal actions in the Holocaust, a Holocaust survivor’s son said Monday night.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a former professor at Harvard University, spoke in a lecture titled after his book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” to a packed crowd in the University Theatre at 8 p.m.
Goldhagen said the one main question for which his argument revolved around was, “when Hitler gave the order for the extermination of the Jews, why was it carried out?”
Goldhagen said discussing the willing perpetrators of the Holocaust is important to “restore to the center of the story the human beings.”
The violence, brutality and murders carried out by the Germans during the Holocaust were done because they wanted to, and not because they felt pressured to, Goldhagen said.
“People have the capacity to know what they’re doing, to judge what they’re doing according to their values, to make a choice about how to act,” Goldhagen said.
Written accounts from the victims and the perpetrators make it easy to understand that these atrocities were carried out in cold blood, he said.
“Victims know a great deal about the people who are brutalizing them,” Goldhagen said. “They reintroduced slavery into the European continent.”
Regimes were formed to carry out the actions of the Nazi—and contained everyday Germans not belonging to the Nazi regime and in their 30s, of not impressionable ages. Goldhagen said that even though they were not strong followers and had enough power to make their own decisions, the anti-Semitic beliefs of ordinary Germans were strong enough to make them want to carry out these actions.
Goldhagen spoke of a unit leader nicknamed “Papa” who he said, “assembled them, told them what they were going to do and then they could exempt themselves.”
Even with the option of choosing to not carry out the murdering of Jews, Goldhagen said they almost always chose to participate.
“They knew that they didn’t have to do it,” Goldhagen said. “We know that this happened because the perpetrators themselves have told us this.”
They even chose to go on “search-and-destroy” missions where lists of Jewish names were posted and the Germans would volunteer to find and kill them.
“What kind of world did these men live in that this was posted on bulletin boards, and routinely so,” he said. Goldhagen even said, “More men would typically show up for missions than needed.”
He said the Germans experienced a zeal that made them want to kill.
“They would go out and find the Jews and kill them,” Glodhagen said.
Goldhagen said the perpetrators need to be seen as just that: perpetrators and not the victims. He said, “It forces the question-how people can bring themselves to do that, to slaughter men, women and children day after day in this manner, especially when the perpetrator knew they didn’t have to do it.”
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Comments
He is completely correct. Himmler, the head of the SS even siad that Jewish children had to be liquidated because they would seek revenge on the German people. See Poznan Speeches, October 4, 1943 and October 6, 1943 ,you can listen to them at the National Archives because they were found on disc by the uS Army in l945.
Posted by Freddy on 03/18/2008 at 2:37 am
Dr. Goldhagen is missing a very critical component in his analysis of the reasons and motivations behind the Holocaust. When considering the Holocaust, we must actually go back 30 or so years BEFORE the Holocaust to examine the childrearing behaviors of the Germans versus those of the Jews. Jewish childrearing practices had ECLIPSED those of the Germans. German children at that time suffered horrific childhoods with incomprehensible abuse and neglect. In contrast, the childrearing practices of Jewish people were that of nurturing and individuation. We can see the results of this in the incredible intellectual tradition and other significant accomplishments of the Jewish people at that time. Of course, a situation like this would create intense resentment and hatred on the part of German people—on both a conscious and unconscious level—to the point the Jewish people became abject.
In addition, we need to look at the types of atrocities carried out against the Jews. Why is it that in the vast spectrum of tortures and abuses possible to carry out against another human being, the Germans chose HUMILIATION above all? Humiliation was the centerpiece of the German atrocities against the Jews. I believe this is because the Germans were reenacting the traumas they had suffered themselves as children.
Granted, this is not THE explanation of the Holocaust. There were most certainly political, socio-economic, religious, etc., causes as well that we must take into account. However, we cannot ignore the psychological dimension either. It is interesting how we generally do not have a problem with the psychological dimension in our analyses of current violence. For example, we finally recognize the fact that many incarcerated people were victims of child abuse. We know that children who abuse animals are more likely to grow into violent adults, murderers, etc. We connect Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood fascination with road-kill to his later serial killings. Yet, whenever we read or hear lectures about the Holocaust, this dimension of childhood trauma is typically ignored.
Posted by Clare Kelly on 03/18/2008 at 12:51 pm
Not to keep belaboring this . . . but someone just said to me, “So you’re proposing that the Germans were VICTIMS and perpetrators?” Yes, contrary to Dr. Goldhagen’s claims. Innocent German children were not born hating Jews, nor were they born with any propensity to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust. German children were victims at the hands of their incredibly abusive parents, teachers, etc. A society creates its own gods and monsters. They do not descend from heaven or emerge from hell, that’s for sure. Twenty and thirty years before the Holocaust, German society was busy creating the soon-to-be Mengele-monsters. Sadly, and very unfortunately, Dr. Goldhagen misses this critical component completely.
Posted by Clare Kelly on 03/18/2008 at 3:21 pm
