"The Weimar Republic was succeeded by the only German regime-by the only regime that ever was anywhere-which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews, for `Aryan' had no clear meaning other than `non-Jewish'."-Leo Strauss, in the preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion

"I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews;...-about this, one should not deceive oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews..., that the German stomach, the German blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this quantum of `Jew'-as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger digestive system-that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act."-Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 251

Although Daniel Goldhagen does not make use of these two quotations in his remarkable book, they together convey a great deal of the argument that he makes. Leo Strauss's statement, made over thirty years ago, captures with clarity what few people who have studied the Holocaust realize: that the only clear and consistent purpose pursued by the Nazis from their days as street thugs to their election as the government, through their mastery of Europe, up until their military defeat, was the destruction of Jews. The second quotation (which can be found in the same essay by Strauss) tells us that anti-semitism was a part of German culture and that German hatred of Jews was different from other versions of European anti-semitism. When one places these two statements together as Strauss did, they summarize the explosive mixture that in Goldhagen's view led to the Holocaust.
According to Goldhagen, German culture was thoroughly anti-semitic. The widely shared sentiment to which Nietzsche testifies needed a catalyst to bring about the explosive results. This catalyst was Hitler and the Nazis, who created the conditions and opportunities in which ordinary Germans voluntarily killed millions of Jews.

Goldhagen's book is a worldwide publishing phenomenon. It has not only been extensively reviewed here and in the United States, but it has received wide attention in Europe and in Germany, where it will soon be available in translation. The Holocaust Museum in Washington devoted a symposium to it which was telecast on C-Span. And now Goldhagen is experiencing the cycle of initial praise followed by harsh rebuke that is the fate of all those who dare to challenge a dominant way of thinking.
Over the years a certain popular understanding of the Holocaust has taken hold. According to this way of thinking, the Holocaust occurred because a fanatical minority was able to enforce its will upon a majority that was largely indifferent to the fate of Jews. There was nothing specific to the German-Jewish relationship that allowed the Holocaust to occur. Germans were not particularly anti-semitic, especially in comparison to their neighbours, but Germany had two distinct features: first, it had a political crisis that allowed Hitler to take power, and second, it had the technical ability to carry out a program of mass extermination. And therefore the lesson of the Holocaust is that it could happen anywhere. Although this is a thumbnail summary of a consensus, to which few scholars would assent, it nonetheless captures a widely held viewpoint. And it is this consensus that Goldhagen challenges.
There are three main faults with that argument. First, it places too much blame upon the Nazi leaders and says nothing about the large number of Germans who either participated in, or supported the Holocaust. Second, it does not explain how a supposedly civilized and enlightened nation could become so easily infused with such barbarity. And third, it fails to explain why the perpetrators were Germans and the victims were primarily Jews, and why no matter what the institutional setting, the external pressures, the background of the killers, and the orders they were given, Germans continued to kill Jews until the complete destruction of the Third Reich.

In order to argue that Germans from all walks of life willingly killed Jews, Goldhagen employs the method of comparative case study. In selecting his cases he had three purposes. First, he wanted to isolate anti-semitism as a cause for genocide from other possible explanations. Second, he wanted to show that the murderers were ordinary Germans. And third, that they were not faceless bureaucrats, but people who were willing to kill in close proximity to their victims and personally witness the horror of what they were doing, and yet chose not to abstain.
The most powerful case for his thesis emerges from the study of the police battalions who were assigned to kill Jews in the East. It was the job of these men to liquidate ghettos and round up and execute Jews. They followed the Wehrmacht into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and they took part in the hands-on slaughter of all the Jews they could find.
There are two factors that make these battalions particularly fertile ground for Goldhagen's thesis. First, they were made up of a cross-section of German society. They crossed all economic, educational, age, and class lines. Many were married men with children and their average age was over thirty. Most were neither party members nor in the SS. Police battalions were generally filled by men who were left over after the SS and army had acquired the best available men. By and large these men were not trying to make a career for themselves. In every way they were ordinary Germans. Second, none of these men were forced to kill. From the very beginning, it was made clear that those who did not want to kill Jews could be excused. Some, but very few, chose not to. And most that asked to be excused in the middle of a killing operation, returned after they got over their nausea. No-one who-for whatever reason-abstained from killing was ever punished or reprimanded.
And many of their missions were unsupervised. When they were sent to find Jews in hiding, on a "Jew-Hunt" (Judenjagd), they could decide how much effort to make, how hard to try to find victims to kill. To say the least, they were extremely zealous in their pursuit. When it came time to volunteer to hunt down Jews, there were always too many volunteers. These police murdered Jewish men, women, and children at close range with their guns or their rifles. Many times human body parts would fly and splatter them. And yet barely a single one ever had any sympathy for their victims. Not only did they not evince normal emotions at what they were doing, but they sought to humiliate and make their victims suffer as much as possible before their execution. These were men who rather than being ashamed of killing children were proud of it. They posed for pictures with their victims. They inscribed these pictures so as to memorialize a specific killing; they traded these pictures, made copies of them, and sent them back to their families. In some cases their wives were present at the murders. No, these men were not robots obeying orders.
A lot of the controversy that Goldhagen's book has generated has to do with the fact that he is a social scientist working in an area dominated by historians. Some reviewers have legitimately questioned his interpretation of certain historical details. But others have based their criticisms upon a misunderstanding of his method of argument: they have said that the book contains little that is historically new. And although this is not really accurate, it completely misses what is original about this book. Goldhagen is not primarily interested in developing a historical narrative, but in providing a theoretical explanation. His originality is in his method. He is the first to test against one another the competing explanations for the behaviour of perpetrators. This is what makes this a pathbreaking book and why his results require us to rethink much of that we have come to believe about the Holocaust.
The methods employed here differ sharply from the work of historians of the Holocaust. Underlying the historian's craft is the assumption that an explanation will emerge from breaking down a large event into its component parts and seeing how all the parts fit together. The limits of the historical approach can be seen by the results. Historians have told us a great deal about how the Germans achieved their genocidal aims. But they have told us very little about the motives of the perpetrators for carrying out that task. And they have not been able to sort through the variety of plausible answers.
In contrast, social scientists do not believe that knowing what happened will tell us why it happened. They believe that the only way of choosing between rival explanations is to derive hypotheses from them and to test these in historical cases. The tests must be designed so that the evidence for one explanation can be isolated from that for another. Goldhagen selected cases in which Germans continued to kill Jews, although there was no external pressure on them to do so. In this way he demonstrates that the only possible explanation is that they chose to be killers.
And because his critics do not understand the method behind his argument, their attempts to refute his thesis are not persuasive. Refuting Goldhagen cannot be done by just taking an alternate explanation, such as blaming Hitler, and supporting it with evidence. The Holocaust is so well documented that any researcher can just pile up archival evidence in support of his or her favourite argument. A serious challenge to Goldhagen requires a more powerful and compelling explanation for the cases he studies.
Some critics have accused him of trying to foist the stigma of collective guilt upon Germans by attributing certain national characteristics to them. Goldhagen does no such thing. He simply argues that a majority of Germans held a common set of beliefs about Jews. Beliefs are not a permanent national feature and they are subject to change over time.
His definition of a perpetrators seems to me fairly reasonable: "anyone who knowingly contributed in some intimate way to the mass slaughter of Jews." He focuses upon the Germans "because what can be said about the Germans cannot be said about any other nationality... no Germans, no Holocaust." And he calls the perpetrators Germans, because only some of the killers were Nazis or belonged to the SS. What they all had in common was that they were Germans, acting on behalf of a German regime that was democratically elected and was supported by the vast majority of its citizens until the very end of the war.
The central argument of the book is that only the peculiar form of German anti-semitism can account for why the killers were Germans and the victims were Jews. Goldhagen argues that Germans held a set of beliefs about Jews that had become part of the "common-sense" outlook of the German people. Jews were seen as the source of all evil and a race that would destroy the Germans unless the Germans destroyed them. This longstanding anti-semitism was harvested and further developed by Hitler and his Nazi regime, which provided the opportunities in which ordinary Germans, could in good conscience, kill every single Jew who came under their control.
Goldhagen is very careful throughout to argue that it was the combination of Hitler and German anti-semitism that brought about the Holocaust. Some reviewers, such as Clive James writing in the New Yorker, have incorrectly accused him of not placing enough blame upon Hitler, as if hatred of Jews were something that Hitler forced upon the German people.
What makes Goldhagen's argument so difficult for us to readily accept is that it requires us to believe that Germans would slaughter millions of innocent men, women, and children solely because of some fantastic and irrational ideas that they had about them. We tend to think of the Germans of that era as being like us, but under the influence of a mad leader. Then we end up asking the question, How could a modern, developed, and enlightened people embark upon such a murderous enterprise? And since we cannot imagine ourselves choosing to behave as they did, we end up arguing that they were coerced, or we scratch our heads, throw up our hands, and declare it to be a mys-tery. It is holding on to this assumption, according to Goldhagen, that has more than anything else made the Holocaust incomprehensible. Clearly, the Germans' likeness to us should not be assumed, but should be matter for a question.
Goldhagen advises us to approach our study like anthropologists examining an unknown culture. And just as we accept that peoples of the past believed in ghosts, witches, and demons, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that mid-twentieth-century Germans believed in the demonic power of Jews.

Goldhagen provides an account of the Christian origins of anti-semitism. Christians could not accept the continued existence of Judaism after the coming of Christ. The Jews, by not accepting Jesus and not seeing that their covenant with God had been superseded, came to be seen by Christians as the enemy.
In Christian anti-semitism, the Jews were primarily seen as a religion and as such, Jews could be saved through baptism. But in nineteenth-century Germany, a new view of the Jews arose in which they were seen primarily as a race. This meant that they could no longer be saved, because race was a genetic and therefore a permanent feature. The potency of the combination of Christian and racial anti-semitism can be seen in an statement from the 1933-34 Yearbook of the German Evangelical Church: "Since the crucifixion of Christ to the present day, the Jews have fought against Christianity or abused and falsified it for the attainment of their selfish aims. Christian baptism does not alter at all the racial character of the Jew, his affiliation to his people, or his biological being."
Hatred of Jews did not just play a marginal role in the public discourse of Germany. Jews and what to do about them was an obsession. This can be made abundantly clear with just a few statistics. Jews in the last part of the nineteenth century and up to Hitler's time constituted less than one percent of the population. From 1870 to 1900 there were, it is estimated, 1,200 publications devoted to the "Jewish problem"; the number of publications that focused on Jews, "exceeded the number of all other `political-polemic publications' devoted to all other topics combined." This obsession, which had no bearing upon reality, was fully present fifty years before Hitler was elected.
Even if anti-semitism was as prominent a feature of German culture as Goldhagen argues, this still raises the troubling question of how hatred of Jews turned into the intention to annihilate them. And how could the German people become willing participants in this project? Goldhagen argues that Hitler was not the first to propose mass murder as the best solution to the "Jewish problem". A scholar who did a content analysis of anti-semitic writings between 1861 and 1895 found that 68 percent of those that proposed a solution to their problem favoured physical extermination. No wonder then, that in 1893 openly declared anti-semitic parties won a majority in the Reichstag.
Within the Holocaust literature, there is a controversy about the development of the final solution among Hitler's inner circle. Some interpreters of his early writings and speeches have argued that his early statements in which he prophesied the end of the Jews should be taken as rhetoric, rather than conveying his true and clear intentions. They argue that he embarked on genocide when other ways of getting rid of the Jews were no longer possible.
Goldhagen sharply disagrees. Hitler didn't opt for genocide because he gradually came upon this as a solution. He opted for it when he had the opportunity to fulfill his long-stated promise. Goldhagen writes, "I can think of no other instance in history in which a national leader proclaimed an intention with regard to a matter of this magnitude with such evident conviction and, true to his word, carried out his intention, and then historians assert that his words should not be taken literally, that he had no intention of doing what he announced for the whole world to hear (an announcement to which he later and repeatedly and emphatically referred)."

There have been five sorts of explanations that scholars and those accused of war crimes have put forward to account for their behaviour. These are that they were forced to kill, that they were obeying orders, that they were under psychological and social pressure, that they were trying to advance their careers, and finally that they did not comprehend what they were doing, because they were just cogs in a wheel. In quick succession and convincingly, Goldhagen is able to show the logical and evidentiary flaws of each.
The argument that the killers had no choice or thought they had none is without evidence. In no trial in which a defendant made this claim, has this defence been upheld by the courts. Goldhagen writes, "It can be said with certitude that never in the history of the Holocaust was a German, SS man or otherwise, killed, sent to a concentration camp, jailed, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews." In the cases of the police battalions that he examined, there was a written order from Himmler stating that no-one had to participate in the killing operations. Furthermore, many of the members of various battalions have testified that in accordance with Himmler's order they were repeatedly told they did not have to kill Jews. Those few who chose not to take part were transferred to other units and suffered no consequences.
Goldhagen is not blaming Germans because very few risked their lives to save the lives of Jews. It is unreasonable to ask people to do that much. What he is pointing out is that many people were not just passive bystanders, but either participated in or endorsed the Nazi genocidal enterprise.
Another explanation plays on a national stereotype and asks us to believe that Germans are particularly prone to obey orders, and will do whatever they are told. The book is replete with examples of Germans refusing to carry out orders they saw as unjust. Labour strikes occurred frequently in 1936 and 1937. An incomplete government account shows 192 such disturbances occurring in the course of fifteen months. Throughout the war, individuals and the churches protested the treatment of Poles. Although many Germans identified Poles as fellow human beings, they hardly ever identified with Jews.
The most significant protest against Nazi policy was against the euthanasia program in which doctors gassed Germans who were retarded or mentally ill. This protest, which was spearheaded by family members and the churches, succeeded in formally halting these killings in 1942. This event is very important for understanding the Holocaust. It shows that a concerted protest could force the Nazis to stop a program to which they were committed. And it shows that when Germans identified the victims as fellow Germans, humans, or Christians, they would not go along with killing. They could not be "brainwashed" to see the handicapped, or mentally ill as subhuman.
And finally there is the argument most clearly developed by Raul Hilberg that "the work was diffused in a widespread bureaucracy, and each man could feel that his contribution was a small part of an immense undertaking." This view is challenged by Goldhagen's book. There is no evidence to suggest that even the desk killers had no idea of the consequences of their individual actions. Whoever was involved in the killing process knew what happened to the Jews who were herded on to trains.
This of course says nothing of what must have been more than a hundred thousand people who faced their victims and who actually were carrying out these murders. Their tasks were not fragmented. Too many people made too great an effort and took too much initiative, for us to believe that these killers were alienated from their work. Goldhagen writes that "contrary to Arendt's assertions, the perpetrators were not such atomized, lonely beings. They decidedly belonged to their world and had plenty of opportunities, which they obviously used, to discuss and reflect upon their exploits." They didn't just acquiesce in a task they found abhorrent; they enthusiastically said yes.
The scholars who have placed the blame for the Holocaust almost entirely on Hitler have often been led to the argument that while Germans did not like Jews, they did not hate them fanatically-that at worst, most Germans were indifferent to their fate. Upon closer examination, this view also proves to be untenable. All of German society saw Jews wearing their yellow stars, they saw them dismissed from their jobs and their belongings confiscated, they witnessed Jews on the street being verbally abused, spat upon, and beaten up, and they stood by as they were arrested and deported. On Kristallnacht they watched as every synagogue in Germany was torched. And on the following day one hundred thousand people-mainly civilians-participated in a celebratory rally at Nuremberg. Events like this went on for a decade before there were no Jews left in Germany. What can it mean to be indifferent to people under these circumstances? It means only that most Germans were without any sympathy for the suffering of Jews. They were without sympathy because they believed that Jews were responsible for all German suffering, especially their defeat and decline since the First World War. And now it was time to avenge themselves upon the Jews and make the Jews suffer.
And it is this desire to make Jews suffer that begins to account for the cruelty with which Germans acted. It was not enough to kill Jews; the Germans wanted them to suffer as much as they could every moment that they lived. This cruelty flies completely in the face of the "indifference thesis", or of any view that argues that Germans were obeying orders, or that they were under social pressure to kill. These acts demonstrate the degree to which Germans took the initiative and the relish that they brought to their work. One has only to look at one photograph in the book, of their diabolical grins as they cut the beard of an old Jewish man, to see how much they were proud of their activities. Goldhagen analyses the central importance of this cruelty for understanding the motives behind the perpetrators' deeds.
No doubt the success of Goldhagen's book will prompt scholars to further study German anti-semitism. And this is all to the good. As for those who wish to seriously challenge his argument, they must do two things. First they must unearth private diaries and other such historical documents that demonstrate that there was a large body of Germans who held views about Jews that were different than those propagated by the Nazis. And second they must provide a better explanation for the behaviour of the Germans Goldhagen studied. Until then his thesis stands as the best available explanation of the Holocaust.

David Yanowski writes on the history of war. He is a Canadian who is currently at the University of Chicago.