The Historiography of the Holocaust

Historiography and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust 207
urgency of a ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. In and of itself, this mixture
of a reductionist ‘Sonderweg’ thesis with a crude intentionalism contained very
little innovative potential; instead, Goldhagen’s ‘offer of a simple answer’ (Raul
Hilberg) confirmed stereotypical and uncritical assumptions including the
thesis (astounding for scholars, comforting for a German audience) that the
alleged German brand of antisemitism responsible for the genocide and graphically
described in the book in its deadly manifestations simply vanished after
1945 as a result of Allied re-education programmes. 35
‘Eliminationist antisemitism’, as perceived by Goldhagen, reduced the issue
of perpetration to a matter of socio-cultural engineering which left little room
for personal initiative; his opponents, on the other hand, stressed the importance
of situational factors while leaving the terrain of ideology to Goldhagen. The
fact that neither side saw reason to look closer at antisemitism in its Nazi variation
and in its application during the Third Reich was the result to a large extent of the
absence of in-depth research on the issue – a sad reminder of what historiography
had failed to achieve in the course of more than four decades. While reducing
antisemitism to a rhetorical football for the purpose of scoring goals for the
general public, the Goldhagen debate pushed to one side two of the main insights
gained by empirical research since Hilberg’s groundbreaking study: the multicausal
nature of the Holocaust and its process character. The debate’s focus on
long-term ideological dispositions on the one hand, and short-term situational
factors on the other, created the impression that the years 1933–45 – the period
leading up to the ‘realization of the unthinkable’ (Hans Mommsen) with its mixture
of different, often conflicting developments – were largely irrelevant. Scholars
could regard Goldhagen’s book and its reception as proof of what remained to
be done, especially in explaining the actions of Holocaust perpetrators; the
general public, however, was looking for lessons that could be learned from the
events – given the growing chronological distance between past and present not
an unreasonable expectation, and one that Goldhagen seemed to meet. 36
Once the debate over Hitler’s Willing Executioners had gained momentum,
the mechanics of the media market created headlines for it worldwide.
Nowhere did the book stand so prominently and so persistently in the public
limelight as in Germany where roughly 200,000 copies were sold shortly after
its publication in 1996. 37 The intensity of German interest in Goldhagen’s
thesis resulted from a number of factors, some of which had less to do with the
book or its author than with the nation’s struggle for collective identity after
unification. First, it absolved younger Germans from the legacy of a grim past
and helped them emancipate themselves from their (by the late 1990s mostly
dead) parents or grandparents who had lived through the Nazi era. Second, it
dovetailed with an increased public awareness fostered by new research that
the element of terror was of less importance to the functioning of the Nazi
system than active support from established German functional elites and