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            Goldhagen's Willing Executioners

            Last year, while browsing at
one of those sadly disappearing Upper West Side bookstores, I ran into Norman
Finkelstein, a member of the sadly disappearing tribe of left-wing gadflies.
Finkelstein said he was working on a book about Harvard Professor Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust . Goldhagen, he declared, was a fraud crying out to be
unmasked.

            This
wasn't surprising. Goldhagen made a lot of people angry with that book.
(Click here for a quick refresher on why.) Finkelstein, a political
scientist, bills himself a "forensic" scholar. He's fashioned a career out of
demystifying what he deems pseudoscholarly arguments. It also made a kind of
poetic sense that Finkelstein would become obsessed with Goldhagen. Like him,
Finkelstein is the son of Holocaust survivors and a strident commentator on
Jewish affairs. He just comes at them from the opposing side.

            Finkelstein's reputation rests on his refutation of Joan
Peters' 1984 From Time Immemorial , a book purporting to prove
Palestinian Arabs had no claims on the land that is now Israel, having been
drawn to it only by reports that Jews were making the desert bloom. Peters'
book was lavishly praised by American Jewish organizations, novelists, and
scholars. But when Finkelstein showed that Peters had manipulated Ottoman
demographic records to make her case, the book's supporters attacked him as an
anti-Zionist. By 1986, though, Zionist scholars having published articles that
bolstered Finkelstein's case, his version was the conventional wisdom.

            
Finkelstein told me Goldhagen was just another Peters. That struck me as
dubious. After all, Goldhagen's book wasn't a hoax. It was a troubling
interpretation. But Finkelstein insisted that, whatever the reviewers said, the
book had been a megapublishing event, and for one simple reason: It was useful
to Zionist Jews who believe that all non-Jews are potential Jew killers and
that Jews, therefore, are justified in using whatever means are necessary to
defend themselves.

            
Calling Goldhagen a Zionist propagandist seemed
an act of provocation, to say the least, and so it was taken. Last summer,
Finkelstein published an article with the lurid title "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's
'Crazy' Thesis" in the British New Left Review . Shortly afterward, it
was excerpted in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and in Italy's
Panorama . Goldhagen promptly denounced Finkelstein as a
supporter of Hamas, a radical Islamic Palestinian group. Metropolitan
Books, an imprint of Holt, decided to publish a revised version of
Finkelstein's essay, along with a no less hotly contested attack on Goldhagen
by the German-born historian Ruth Bettina Birn that was first published in the
Cambridge Historical Journal .

            Several
months before the publication of Finkelstein and Birn's book, A Nation on
Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth , Finkelstein's opponents
pressured Metropolitan to cancel it. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of
the New Republic , got on the phone with his friend Michael Naumann, the
publisher of Holt and a German, to express his outrage.
The Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman wrote to Finkelstein's editor, Sara
Bershtel, calling the writer's views "beyond the pale."

            Finkelstein's co-author took even worse flak. Goldhagen
accused her of having defamed him in her Historical Journal article,
then assembled a team of lawyers in Britain to demand a retraction and an
apology. In Canada, the Canadian Jewish Congress is trying to have Birn removed
from the government's war crimes division (where she helps build cases against
Nazi war criminals) on the grounds that, by publishing with Finkelstein, she
has demonstrated insensitivity unbecoming a public servant.

            The
prepublication attack almost worked. István Deák, a Columbia University
historian who agreed to write a preface, backed out. He did
provide a blurb, as did seven other distinguished academics, including the
Holocaust experts Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning, the French Jewish
intellectual Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and the eminent Marxist historian Eric
Hobsbawm. (Click here to read what some of them say and here to read why they say it.) Now that the book is out, the
grand irony is that Goldhagen should consider himself lucky to have Finkelstein
as his adversary. Not that it isn't a good dissection of Goldhagen's
contradictions and distortions. Finkelstein handily refutes Goldhagen's claim
that German anti-Semitism is all that's required to explain the Holocaust.
(Click here to read how he does this.) Checking Goldhagen's assertions
against his citations, Finkelstein demonstrates that the scholar's use of
secondary sources is untrustworthy. (Click here for another
telling example.) And yet Finkelstein turns out to be a kind of doppelgänger of
Goldhagen's, equally biased and inflammatory.

            
First, Finkelstein makes much of the point that
the majority of Germans "did not cast their lot for Hitler." Technically
true--but a plurality of Germans did. No party received as many votes in the
March 1933 election as the Nazis--43.9 percent. Finkelstein acknowledges the
Nazi state was a brutal dictatorship, but he glosses over its disturbingly
popular character.

            Second,
Finkelstein echoes conventional historical thinking when he says Nazism's main
appeal lay in Hitler's promises to restore order in post-Weimar Germany, end
unemployment, and make the country an international power. But anti-Semitism
permeated Nazi ideology, and Finkelstein is deaf to its nuances. He writes,
"Not the Jews but Marxism and Social Democracy served as the prime scapegoats
of Nazi propaganda" during their rise to power. Also technically true. But the
Nazis perceived Social Democracy as a Jewish party and Marxism as a Jewish
creed; when they rallied against Bolshevik enemies, their audiences did not
need to be told that these enemies were, if not actual Jews, then "spiritual
Jews." If Finkelstein were to apply his logic to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton
strategy, he'd have to write, "Not race but crime served as the prime scapegoat
of George Bush's 1988 campaign."

            Third, Finkelstein deduces from some Germans' disgust at
the destruction of Jewish lives and property during Nazi-sponsored pogroms such
as Kristallnacht that "Germans overwhelmingly condemned the Nazi
anti-Semitic atrocities." If they did, they gave new meaning to the term
"silent majority." The Germans, he writes, displayed "the callousness toward
human life typically attending war. ... Hardened and bitter, in search of a
scapegoat, they occasionally lashed out at the weak." The first adverb casually
banalizes German brutality; the second diminishes its extent; together, they
come dangerously close to apologia.

            The most
controversial part of Finkelstein's book, though, is the last chapter, in which
he sets out to explain why the Goldhagen book was such a big deal. Finkelstein
observes that after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, there was a boom in the kind of
Holocaust literature that portrayed the catastrophe as the natural culmination
of millennial Jew-hatred. Where some Holocaust experts, such as Hilberg and
Martin Broszat, depicted it as a "complex and contingent event," other writers,
such as Lucy Davidowicz, found it more "politically expedient" to focus on
anti-Semitism, especially as Israel came under increasing censure. (Click
here for Finkelstein's explanation of why this logic is
"expedient.") According to Finkelstein, Goldhagen's claim that all forms of
anti-Semitism "tend toward a genocidal 'solution' " is expedient in this way,
and therefore popular--though Finkelstein says Goldhagen adds no more than a
veneer of social science sophistication to this reductionist point of view.

            
Finkelstein is not breaking new ground here.
Israeli intellectuals such as Amos Elon and Tom Segev and the Holocaust
historian Omer Bartov have made similar points about ideological
subtext of Holocaust writing. But they also take pains not to dismiss the
trauma the Holocaust visited and continues to visit upon Jews. By contrast,
Finkelstein adopts an ugly conspiratorial tone when he attributes the book's
popularity in the United States to its Zionist message. This is nonsense. The
book owed its commercial success to its soothingly simplistic thesis--and to
astute marketing. At times, Finkelstein's tone even veers toward the jocular,
as when he makes fun of Elie Wiesel's racist remarks about ungrateful black
people. One is reminded of Gershom Scholem's remark to Hannah Arendt at the
time of Eichmann in Jerusalem : "This is not the way to approach the
scene of that tragedy."

            It's too bad that the noise
about Finkelstein has drowned out his co-writer, Birn. She knows the archives
better than anyone, and she has come up with more quietly damning observations.
Birn's experience as a prosecutor gives her a radically different take on the
legal testimony Goldhagen bases much of his book on, for the most part
confessions of death squad members. "Goldhagen seems to have difficulty
comprehending that when perpetrators claim to have been motivated by Nazi
propaganda, it need not be sincere," she writes. (Click here to see how these statements could instead form part of a
legal defense.) Birn also shows how Goldhagen's insistence on German complicity
leads him to soft-pedal the anti-Semitism of the Germans' collaborators,
referring obliquely to the "pressures operating on the Ukrainians that did not
exist for the Germans." This is flat-out Eastern European revisionism; you
could easily imagine some Ukrainian nationalist writing it.

            But the
weightiest of Birn's accusations is that Goldhagen glosses over atrocities in
which the victims weren't Jewish. Goldhagen recounts the tale of a witness who
saw a Russian man beaten to death because his name was Abraham; he does not
report the same witness's account, on the next page of testimony, of the
"sexually sadistic murder of a young [non-Jewish] girl by one of the officers."
In the end, this may be one of the most compelling condemnations of Goldhagen
yet: that his focus on Jewish victims leaves him indifferent to the fate of
non-Jews, from that young girl to the millions of Soviet POW's who were starved
and worked to death in the camps. Without minimizing the significance of
anti-Semitism, Birn provides an eloquent rejoinder to Goldhagen's
blood-thinking. Her essay radiates a dignified humanism that both Goldhagen and
Finkelstein lack.

            

               Endnotes
            

            Note 1: Holocaust historians have traditionally offered a
variety of reasons why Germans followed orders to exterminate the Jews. These
include anti-Semitism, the culture of German military units, the pressures of
totalitarian rule, the hysteria of wartime mobilization, and the effects of
Nazi propaganda. Goldhagen, by contrast, offers a single-bullet explanation. He
posits a society of ordinary Germans bred, like attack dogs, to despise Jews,
and unleashed by a regime that shared their bloodlust. Germany's uniquely
anti-Semitic history had, in his view, made most of them "assenting mass
executioners ... [who] considered the slaughter to be just." The book had its
defenders, but the reviews were mostly scathing. Hitler's Willing
Executioners was dismissed as fundamentally ahistorical in
Commentary , of all places, and as a "bizarre inversion of the Nazi view
of the Jews as an insidious, inherently evil nation" in the New
Republic .Back

            Note 2: This was an unfair characterization of Finkelstein's
views on the Oslo accords. Like Edward Said, who regards the Oslo accords as a
Palestinian Versailles, he is opposed to them. That doesn't make him a Hamas
supporter. Back

            Note 3: According to Finkelstein's editor, Sara Bershtel,
who was in Naumann's office at the time and heard Wieseltier on the speaker
phone, he said: "Michael, you don't know who Finkelstein is. He's poison, he's
a disgusting self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock." Wieseltier
told me he wasn't trying to silence Finkelstein: "The idea that anyone is
trying to suppress the lonely prophet in the wilderness called Finkelstein is
comical. Virtually every scholar has attacked [Goldhagen's] book, including, I
might add, our critic in the New 
               Republic . Finkelstein is just
playing this game of épater les juifs ." Back

            Note 4: Deák, who was so impressed by an early draft
Finkelstein sent him that he wrote him praising his efforts, now says, "I
didn't read the article very carefully. I made the mistake of giving my consent
too early, and then had second thoughts." Back

            Note 5: "All readers of Goldhagen's controversial book should take note
of these much-needed studies, which, in line with serious historians,
convincingly and authoritatively dismantle its arguments."

            -- Eric
Hobsbawm, author of The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914-1991

            "In this important volume
Finkelstein and Birn demonstrate that Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Judeocide
is monocausal, teleological, and severely blinkered. Finkelstein carefully sets
forth Goldhagen's distortion and disregard of the secondary literature; Birn
masterfully lays bare his gravely flawed use and interpretation of archival
sources. Both authors also raise hard questions about the political reasons for
the inordinate promotion and reception of Goldhagen's book. No serious student
of history can afford to ignore these well-reasoned and withering reflections
on the perils of pseudo-scholarship."

            -- Arno
Mayer, author of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The Final Solution in
History

            "Finkelstein and Birn
provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading
interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my
view, indispensable."

            -- Ian
Kershaw, author of Hitler

            "Among the dozens of
reviewers of Hitler's Willing Executioners , Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman
Finkelstein stand out for the seriousness and thoroughness with which they have
undertaken their task. Even if I do not embrace every aspect of Finkelstein's
conclusions concerning the politicization of Holocaust historiography, I am
grateful for these writers' courageous, conscientious, and labor-intensive
efforts."

            
-- Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the Final Solution in Poland

            "Is Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners the definitive work on Hitler's Judeocide?
The authors of this volume express serious doubt, which I share. To reduce a
phenomenon of this scale and complexity to the anti-Semitism which permeated
German society as it also permeated other societies is to be simplistic and to
show contempt for the reader. This book rights the balance."

            
-- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, author of The Jews: History, Memory, and the
Present

            "Highly recommended to the
many readers of Goldhagen's controversial book, especially those who were
mesmerized by its hypotheses. Fortunately, in an open society all scholarship
is subject to public scrutiny, and the advance of historical knowledge cannot
do without rigorous criticism of the kind provided in this important and
courageous collection."

            
-- Volker R. Berghahn, J.P. Birkelund distinguished professor of European
history, Brown University
            

            "Birn's and Finkelstein's
essays constitute a sharp rebuttal provoked by the public's and the press's
love affair with a book that casually dismisses excellent work done by others;
that contains many contradictions; and that upholds dangerous myths regarding
the existence of 'national characteristics.' "

            
-- István Deák, author of Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political
History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918Back

            Note 6: Christopher Browning told me: "What's important
about Finkelstein's critique is that he has traced the inconsistencies and
contradictions in Goldhagen, and no one else has taken the time to do that.
It's not my style of writing. But I don't think he's gone beyond the bounds of
polemic in replying to Goldhagen's polemic." In interviews, Holocaust scholars
sounded grateful that someone had stood up so boldly to Goldhagen, who, in
Hitler's Willing Executioners , had dismissed the work of virtually every
scholar who came before him. Two of the blurb writers have quite understandable
grudges: Goldhagen has, for years, been railing against Browning's emphasis on
peer pressure in explaining why German soldiers participated in genocide; in a
New 
               Republic review, he accused another endorser, Arno Mayer, of
being a Holocaust revisionist. In any event, these blurbs often appear to be
more the expressions of well-wishers than of close readers. Hobsbawm is not
alone in saying he didn't read Finkelstein's essay "line-by-line." Back

            Note 7: Finkelstein notes that anti-Semitism in other
countries was often worse; there was, in pre-Hitler Germany, "no equivalent of
the riots that attended the Dreyfus Affair in France or the pogroms in Russia."
In the Weimar period, moreover, the Nationalist Socialists found they couldn't
get much mileage out of raw appeals to anti-Jewish prejudice, and often toned
down their anti-Semitism around election time. Back

            Note 8: Footnoting historian Peter Pulzer's sober study
Jews and the German State , Goldhagen asserts that only the "core of the
socialist movement, its intellectuals and leaders" opposed anti-Semitism. In
fact, Pulzer says no such thing. He found little evidence of anti-Semitism
among Social Democrats, intellectuals or workers. Back

            Note 9: "Thus interpreted, the Nazi extermination both
justifies the necessity of Israel and accounts for all hostility directed at
it: The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next outbreak of
homicidal anti-Semitism and, conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind
every attack on, or even defensive maneuver against, the Jewish state. 'The
Holocaust' is in effect the Zionist account of the Nazi holocaust."
Back

            Note 10: Among other things, they warn against the danger
of removing the Holocaust from history and turning it into a sort of secular
religion, the central symbol of Jewish identity. They also deplore the
invocation of the Holocaust as a justification for policies that most Jews
would deplore if they were implemented in their own countries. Back

            Note 11: Goldhagen asserts the German police battalions
knew of the planned destruction of the Jews before entering the Soviet Union,
rather than two months after, as most historians believe. He bases this claim
on the "conclusive" statement of two former storm troopers. In fact, their
statements about extermination orders from above evolved over time, Birn
explains, as part of a "defense focused on superior orders as an
excuse."Back