Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1939

Historian Saul Friedlander first published Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 in 1997. Since then, the book has gone on to establish itself as a major contribution to Holocaust studies. Volume II, which covers the years of the War, 1939-1945, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Friedlander was born in Prague and spent his boyhood in Nazi-occupied France posing as a Gentile, sheltered in a Roman Catholic monastery. In 1942, when he was nine, his parents attempted to escape to Switzerland but were captured and handed over to German authorities who sent them to Auschwitz. It was only after the War, in 1946, that the author learned the fate of his parents. Thus, his scholarship has always been an attempt to face and to deal with the world of his past.

In 1963, Friedlander completed the doctorate at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Since then, he has published a memoir as well as several major books and articles, all of them in some way related to the Holocaust. Today, he teaches at UCLA.

In the “Introduction” to Nazi Germany and the Jews, Friedlander notes that, as he sees them, many previous works on his topic tend to be lopsided. For example, books like Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, focus almost exclusively on the perpetrators, "the Nazi machinery of persecution and death." On the other hand, works like The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy Dawidowicz, concentrate almost completely "on the history of the victims." The goal of his book, says Friedlander, is to "convey an account in which Nazi policies are indeed the central element, but in which the surrounding world and the victims' attitudes, reactions, and fate are no less an integral part of this unfolding history" (1-2).

In his focus on Nazi anti-Jewish measures which ultimately led to the Final Solution, the author emphasizes the responsibility of Adolf Hitler. He is careful to note that he has no intention of going back to "earlier reductive interpretations, with their sole emphasis on the role (and responsibility) of the supreme leader." At the same time, he observes that some historians, attempting to explain the complexity of the events that led from persecution to extermination, have neglected one simple fact: "In all its major decisions the regime depended on Hitler" who took to its most extreme and radical limits a worldview that Friedlander calls "redemptive anti-Semitism" (3).

Here, the reader who knows the work of Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, instantly recognizes the unspoken critique of Goldhagen's comparatively-weak phrase, "eliminationist anti-Semitism." Friedlander, by using what he considers to be a more precise and appropriate adjective, goes beyond merely describing what Hitler's anti-Semitism did and what its intentions were. Instead, he indicates why the members of the Nazi high command, in spite of any remnants of a genuine humanity, found eliminationist anti-Semitism so appealing, why they deemed it a good thing. Indeed, with this telling phrase, he reveals how it was that the Holocaust could have happened at all: "It was this redemptive dimension,” he writes, “this synthesis of a murderous rage and an 'idealistic' goal, shared by the Nazi leader and the hard core of the party, that led to Hitler's ultimate decision to exterminate the Jews" (3).

The book that follows is comprised of two major parts, each one containing five chapters. In “Part I: A Beginning and an End,” Friedlander describes the Nazi regime from the time of Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933 to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws near the end of 1935. This was a time of shocking political and cultural change in Germany. The period saw so many radical anti-Jewish measures that by the time the Nuremberg Laws, which promised racial isolation, were announced even some of Germany’s Jews were themselves relieved. Behind all of this was Hitler’s redemptive anti-Semitism, which Friedlander partially describes as follows: “Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist worldview, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a worldview in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages” (87).

“Part II: The Entrapment” is made up of another five chapters which bring the story from 1936, a pivotal year according to the author, to 1939. The author reports the major events of this significant period of time. He includes telling descriptions of how, for instance, Hitler and the Nazis “achieved one of their greatest propaganda victories: the successful unfolding of the 1936 Olympic Games” (180). And he provides an account, of course, of the Kristallnacht pogrom during which 276 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 businesses were vandalized, and hundreds of Jews committed suicide or were killed (276).

Throughout his work, Friedlander enlivens the story by providing details from government documents and first-person accounts, and by quoting from the diaries of both victims and perpetrators. He also manages to strike what I regard to be a good balance between intentionalist and functionalist interpretations of the Holocaust:

"The crimes committed by the Nazi regime were neither a mere outcome of some haphazard, involuntary, imperceptible, and chaotic onrush of unrelated events nor a predetermined enactment of a demonic script; they were the result of converging factors, of the interaction between intentions and contingencies, between discernible causes and chance. General ideological objectives and tactical policy decisions enhanced one another and always remained open to more radical moves as circumstances changed" (5).

Based on painstaking research among the best sources, Saul Friedlander’s work offers penetrating insight and judicious conclusions. Both the subject and the long sentences of the historian's style sometimes make for a difficult read. But the payoff is well worth the investment of time and effort.

Hitler's Willing Executioners, by D. J. Goldhagen: An Overview

In Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, first published in 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen sets out to understand "the actions and mind-set of the tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who . . . became genocidal killers" (p. 4). He begins with a premise that seems obvious enough: to explain why and how the Holocaust occurred, one must explore "the question of what impelled the perpetrators of the Holocaust to kill" (5). He claims that, in the vast literature on the the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, comparatively little has been written on this central question, a neglect he intends to remedy.

Goldhagen, a historian and political scientist at Harvard, emphasizes that it is too simple to say that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. By definition, all leaders have followers; and without the tens of thousands who willingly followed, the Holocaust would never have occurred. So exactly who were those followers, and what made them tick? Specifically, what were the motivations that led them to not merely execute, but to demean and torture and slaughter, as many Jews as they could? The author reports that in the majority of the previous interpretations of the Holocaust, the motivations of the perpetrators of genocide have been explained along the following lines:

A. They were coerced by the threat of severe punishment or even death.

B. They were blindly following Adolf Hitler, their popular, charismatic leader. Another example of this type of obedience explanation says that people generally obey authority. They are even more likely to obey state authority, and this would be as true of Germans as anyone.

C. They were subjected to high levels of social pressure and expectation.

D. They were petty, callous bureaucrats who were out to make careers and to provide for themselves and their families.

E. Because the Holocaust was carried out by a series of acts that involved different people doing different things, the responsibility for such inhumanity was dispersed. According to this explanation, very few of the thousands of perpetrators, therefore, accepted that they were killing millions of Jews. Under these circumstances, they found it relatively easy to shift the blame.

Goldhagen says that these explanations or rationalizations are mostly, if not entirely, untrue. The fact is, millions of ordinary Germans knew exactly what the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem" was. Perhaps as many as 100,000 or more of these people became willing, responsible perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Coupled with this thesis is Goldhagen’s assertion that most of the previous interpreters of the Holocaust have not rightly understood the depth and the character of the antisemitism that motivated its perpetrators. Too often, he says, people have imagined that most Germans living under the Nazi regime were basically like most everyone else. They weren’t. Using anecdotes and statistics from primary sources, Goldhagen paints a portrait of Holocaust perpetrators who had very little of what might be called special exposure to Nazi propaganda. Nor were they a group of young, impressionable, hand-selected, highly-trained soldiers. Only small percentages of them were “SS men” or members of the Nazi party. Instead, the perpetrators were typical Germans, animated by what the author calls an "eliminationist antisemitism," a particular type that led the perpetrators of the Holocaust "to conclude that Jews ought to die" (14, original emphasis).

As Goldhagen attempts to demonstrate, this most-radical and hateful sort of antisemitism pervaded German society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And that, he says, is how and why the Holocaust occurred.

Places I've Been and What I'm Reading

When it comes to Genesis 1-3, a well-known American dichotomy says "It's either history or it's myth." But is that a faithful approach? I'm intrigued by how N.T. Wright responds to such questions in this video.

I don't particularly care for the expression, but it communicates something that many conservative Protestants think and debate about. We call it the question of "Women's Role in the Church." Whether you lean egalitarian (more liberal) or complementarian (more traditional), you might want to read Wayne Grudem's challenge: "An Open Letter to Egalitarians: Six Questions That Have Never Been Satisfactorily Answered."

I'm currently reading Hitler's Willing Executioner's: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. One of Goldhagen's most basic points emphasizes the word willing. In many of the previous interpretations of the Holocaust, the motivations of the German perpetrators of genocide have been explained along the following lines:

(a) They were coerced by the threat of punishment or even death.

(b) They were blindly following Adolf Hitler their popular, charismatic leader. Another type of this obedience theory is that, generally, people obey authority. They are even more likely to obey state authority, and this would be as true of Germans as anyone.

(c) They were subjected to high levels of peer pressure or social expectation.

(d) They were petty, callous bureaucrats who were out to make careers and provide for themselves and their families.

(e) Because the Holocaust was carried out by a series of acts that involved different people doing different things, the responsibility for such inhumanity was dispersed. According to this explanation, very few of the thousands of perpetrators, therefore, accepted that they were killing millions of Jews. Under the circumstances, it was relatively-easy to shift the blame.

Goldhagen says that these explanations or rationalizations are mostly, if not entirely, bunk. The fact is, there were many, many ordinary German people who knew exactly what the "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" was. These people were willing, responsible perpetrators. Coupled with this thesis is that most previous interpreters of the Holocaust have underestimated the depth and the strength of German anti-semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Too often, we have imagined that most Germans living under the Nazi regime were basically a lot like Americans living in the post-War years. Goldhagen seems to be saying, "No, they weren't. And if you don't get that, then you're bound to get the Holocaust wrong too." Has anyone else out there read this book?

And, by the way, what are you reading these days?