The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

GERMAN SOLDIERS AND THE HOLOCAUST
German, who was declared a Jew by the regime and employed his great powers of
observation to analyze the transformation of German society day by day during all
twelve years of Hitler’s rule. Through his eyes another kind of Germany is seen; that
is, through his gaze we gain an understanding of the everyday life of the bystanders
and perpetrators, victims and their helpers, that we could not have grasped merely
by reference to the testimonies of “ordinary” Germans. And since Klemperer was
concerned with understanding the gaze of German society at him, he offers us an
unprecedented view of the complex relationship between victim and victimizer, which
is always, by definition, reciprocal, since neither can exist without the other. 45
Similarly, Goldhagen’s book, though ostensibly an analysis of the perpetrators,
is the only such study that demands and elicits direct and immediate empathy for
the victims, by means of its rhetoric, through its obsession and fascination with
horror and the resulting kitsch that fills its pages, and by dint of the author’s
voyeuristic fantasies of the victims’ sufferings and the perpetrators’ pleasure at
causing and observing them. 46 In this sense, this book is related to the spate of
quasi-pornographic films on the Holocaust made in the 1970s and 1980s, but it differs
from them both by being a scholarly study and by its unrelenting accusatory tone
which instills a certain sense of moral comfort in the reader not offered by those
earlier cinematic works of fiction on Nazi depravity. 47 Hence, Goldhagen’s detailed
(and only partially documented) descriptions of the killings evoke in readers emotions
and thoughts that the conventional historical literature fails to stimulate, including,
for instance, Christopher Browning’s earlier study of the very same perpetrators,
not least because of the latter’s conscious detachment and intentional separation
between victims and perpetrators. 48
This is also true regarding studies of the victims, which are always in danger of
representing the perpetrators as not quite belonging to the human race and tend to
portray them as evil shadows all cast in the same shape and form. By and large,
however, this tendency is more present in survivors’ memoirs than in recent
scholarship on the victims and is of course part and parcel of more popular forms of
representation, dependent as they are on stark polarities between good and evil. 49
Both in the case of memoirs and in that of popular representation, this is a way of
coming to terms with disaster, since only by a sharp distinction between humanity
and its murderers can one acquit both civilization and “Man” of the responsibility
for murder and thereby continue to exist in the world as a member of the human
race; but it is an exercise in self-delusion that leads away from understanding. The
victim too can ultimately be understood only through the relationship with the
perpetrator. This is an insight we owe to some of the most remarkable memoirs of
survivors, but one that is sorely lacking in German scholarship on the Nazi period. 50
Returning from this vantage point to the specific case of the Wehrmacht, we can
conclude that in order to gain an understanding of the process whereby “ordinary”
German soldiers came to practice genocide we must also know more about the
interaction between them and their victims. This can and should be done also by
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