PDF file: History - Advanced Higher - Germany - Education Scotland

The controversial nature of this topic and the strong feelings it arouses, not least
between Jews, was reflected in the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s (Hitler’s
Willing Executioners, 1996) best-selling book in the mid 1990s. (For a discussion of
the reaction to Goldhagen’s book see Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler, 1998,
pp.337-68. The chapter in Rosenbaum’s book discusses the reaction to Goldhagen’s
book at a symposium held North America in 1996 which the author attended.)
Goldhagen claimed that the German people were aware of what was happening to the
Jews in the east. He goes on to argue that up to half a million Germans were, by the
end of the war, actively engaged in the persecution of European Jewry. Goldhagen
believes that the roots of the mass killings went back in to the nineteenth century and
was the result of an ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. In 1997 another prominent Jewish
historian, Saul Friedlander (Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1997) published a book in
which he referred to what could be termed ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’. The German
people were looking for a ‘redeemer’ who would ‘save’ them from their enemies and
in particular the Bolshevik menace. Friedlander also wrote that the German people
were a curious mix of racial and Christian anti-Semitism allied to a xenophobic
Wagnerian nationalism. Research on the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich
has understandably concentrated on the Holocaust. (Otto Dov Kulka, ‘Major Trends
and Tendencies of German Historiography on National Socialism and the ‘Jewish
Question’ (1924-1984)’, Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 30, 1985; Saul
Friedlander, ‘From Anti-Semitism to Extermination. A Historiographical Study of
Nazi Policy Towards the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation’, Yad Vashem Studies,
16, 1984; M. Marrus, ‘The History of the Holocaust. A Survey of Recent Literature’,
Journal of Modern History, 59, 1987.) Anti-Semitism as a topic of study on the Third
Reich will continue to arouse controversy and heated debate.
History: Germany: Versailles to the Outbreak of World War II - 1918-1939 (AH) 49