THE Holocaust will always baffle and depress those who still retain faith in human nature. Why did the Nazis kill six million Jews? Some have sought the answer in the emergence of totalitarian dictatorships and have regarded Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as two horns on a single ram named "totalitarianism". Others have explained the Nazi state as a manifestation of the later stages of capitalism. The psychologist Jung argued that Hitler represented the emergence of the old pagan god Wotan from the German collective unconscious.
All these theories saw the Holocaust as a kind of despairing epiphenomenon - as fanaticism, in the sense fitting Santayana's definition of the fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts once he has lost sight of his goal. Goldhagen, however, returns to the oldest idea of all: that the Holocaust was caused purely and simply by antisemitism. Germany in 1933-45 was profoundly and uniquely anti semitic, the product of a culture with Jew hating roots that went back to Martin Luther. Moreover, only hatred of the Jews could have triggered such an inferno. Ordinary Germans, therefore, willingly participated in the Holocaust because they thought that what they were doing was normal - sanctioned by all the norms, values and culture of German society.
This is a passionately argued book, deeply if tendentiously researched, whose horrifying case studies will revolt the ordinary reader, no matter how deeply he imagines himself inured to the horrors of the "Final Solution". Goldhagen demonstrates that ordinary Germans in low level police units did participate enthusiastically in pogroms and massacres, even though they were under no constraint to do so: he points out that no German is known to have suffered death for refusing to kill Jews.
However, our natural sympathy for Goldhagen's anger and outrage should not blind us to the considerable defects in this, book considered as a contribution to knowledge. The author scarcely enlists us on his side by his air of omniscience, his arrogance and his contemptuous dismissal of the findings of other scholars as "false". Nor does he impress by bogus claims to originality, his tedious repetition and hammering home of points already made a dozen times. Finally it must be stressed that this is scarcely an easy read, since the author has a distinct fondness for jargon, neologism and sociology speak.
Yet it is the core arguments of the book that seem most controversial. Goldhagen has a cavalier way with argument and evidence that irritate from the outset. To establish that all Germans perceived the Holocaust as normal, knew all about it, and participated with gusto, you have to get into quantitative assessments. Just how many ordinary Germans is Goldhagen talking about? He mentions a figure of possibly 600,000 (out of a population of sixty millions) but then says that to establish a precise figure would take him too far from the main subject of his research.
He takes it as self evidently true that the Nazis never seriously entertained any solution to the Jewish problem other than extermination, and says of the famous plan to expel all European Jews to Madagascar that if the Germans had deported all the Jews to that island, they would anyway not have permitted them to live. But the Germans did not control Madagascar, so what meaning can this assertion have? Again, he argues that when Hitler told Heydrich and Himmler in October 1941 that he had been inactive so far in seeking a solution to the Jewish problem, the word "inactive" could have meant only "abstinence from mass killing". This is a glaring non sequitur.
Goldhagen argues that ordinary Germans were not troubled by the horrors of killing women and children in cold blood, and were unperturbed by the gory mess that mass slaughter by machine gunning produced. Yet it is well known that the gas chamber was introduced as an agency of mass murder precisely to depersonalise and bureaucratise the Final Solution. Since this awkward fact blows a hole in Goldhagen's thesis, it is perhaps significant that this book is that rare bird: a volume about the Holocaust that, barely mentions the gas chambers. Without prior knowledge, a reader would form the distinct impression that all six million Jews died by the bullet.
Yet the most sustained and most controversial thesis in Goldhagen's book is that the Holocaust was historically sui generis, a unique and unrepeatable product of a particular society at a particular historical conjuncture. Only in Germany during 1933-45 could people have been mobilised for mass slaughter in this way and only against the Jews. There could not have been a Holocaust in Italy, say, for Italy was not suffused with a centuries old culture of homicidal Jew hating.
Yet in a curious way, such a deterministic argument actually palliates Nazi guilt. If Hitler and his sordid acolytes were simply a kind of reduction ad absurdum of pre existing rottenness deriving from a dynamic, specifically German anti semitism, then the true "epiphenomena" are the Nazi themselves. In fact, Goldhagen oscillates uneasily between a general theory that the Nazis were handmaidens to a sick German culture, and a quite distinct (and contradictory) thesis that they were genuine revolutionaries who introduced a new culture - that of the concentration camps.
The truly unsettling fact, surely, is that evil is deeply embedded in human nature and that another Holocaust could easily happen, this time, perhaps, white Englishmen against West Indian immigrants or white Americans against the big city blacks. There is enough envy, greed, jealousy, hatred, paranoia and other dark forces in human nature to allow an unscrupulous technologically sophisticated ruling elite to manipulate its Myrmidons against the perceived "enemy within". By insisting that the darkest episode of the twentieth century was a purely contingent affair between anti semitic Germans and Jews as unique victims, Goldhagen actually gives comfort to the very Panglossian "it can't happen here" attitude that is the most complacent and insidious threat to free and moral societies.