A picture is worth a thousand words, or as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it in
Hitler's Willing Executioners: "Photographic evidence, as the cliché tells us, often conveys more than do many words of testimony" (245). There are some gruesome photos scattered throughout his book, and they are as representative of the spirit behind this work as is the odious linguistic style that permeates this book about German (as opposed to Nazi) involvement in the Holocaust. Goldhagen is readable only when he expresses his heartfelt moral outrage towards the
German perpetrators of the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II. When he attempts to provide an analysis of those feelings, however, Goldhagen retreats into an ivory tower language that covers up his sophistry with syllables. Here is someone who would have benefited from reading George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" before beginning to write.
Goldhagen would like his reader to believe that his "explanation" constitutes a radically new perspective on the Holocaust, but there is nothing very new or radical about his emphasis on the uniqueness of German anti-Semitism (as opposed to American, British, Canadian, French, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, etc., etc., etc.) as the almost exclusive reason for the genocide. This is, in fact, an old argument that found expression in the far more valid indigation towards the Germans expressed by AJP Taylor in
The Course of German History first published in 1945. At that time, there was a strong need to argue for the exclusion of Germany from the family of Western civilization (in much the same manner that some still like to exclude Russia) and to reassure the collective that such an event could never have happened here. The immediacy of the Holocaust and the self-righteous perception generated by British and American propoganda demanded such a response. Goldhagen's knee-jerk outrage at what happened is about fifty years too late. The academic community has long since moved on and made the effort to arrive at a more in-depth understanding of the events that produced the Holocaust.
There are two critical works that moved academe away from the initial explanation of the Holocaust as a uniquely German anti-Semitic project -- a perspective that Goldhagen has managed to revive. The first is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. This insightful work challenged the popular image of key Nazis like Eichmann as evil monsters and offered in its place an image of rather ordinary human beings doing their jobs. There was no need to label Eichmann an anti-Semite or a German in order to understand his behavior and, implicitly, that of other Nazis. Goldhagen utterly misses this important point in a work that he acknowledges only in an end note. The second book is Stanley Milgram's publication of results from his profoundly disturbing psychological experiments in Obedience to Authority. Here can be found the universalization of Arendt's observations about Eichmann. This book tells of ordinary Americans being successfully turned into Nazi-like willing executioners without any of the social and psychological preparation so obviously evident in Nazi Europe. Goldhagen glibly dismisses the significance of Milgram's work as well. For Goldhagen there can be no question of anyone other than Germans possibly perpetrating something like the Holocaust.
