| Abstract | In acknowledging how little we know as yet about the motivations of non-German collaborators, especially the East European Schutzmänner, [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen] calls for a study of the "combination of cognitive and situational factors" that brought such perpetrators to contribute to the Holocaust.(2) This is a suggestion I would support. But Goldhagen does not employ such a combined approach for studying German perpetrators of the Holocaust. He writes emphatically, "with regard to the motivational cause of the Holocaust, for the vast majority of the perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice."(3) The "one explanation" that is "adequate" is "a demonological antisemitism" that "was the common structure of the perpetrators' cognition and of German society in general."(4) Because [Adolf Hitler] and the Germans were "of one mind"(5) about the Jews, he had merely to "unshackle" or "unleash" their "pre-existing, pent-up"(6) antiSemitism to perpetrate the Holocaust.
I would now like to turn from particular issues and examples to a broader approach, examining how Daniel Goldhagen has gone about constructing his history of Germans and the Holocaust. His background chapters on pre-Holocaust German anti-Semitism are an example of what I would call "keyhole" history; he views events through a single narrow vantage point that blocks out context and perspective. Goldhagen's Imperial Germany is one in which conservatives and vÖlkisch nationalists form the vast majority, a tiny liberal elite is fighting a Kulturkampf against Jews rather than Catholics, and Socialists are invisible. Rather than a society beleaguered by social and ideological divisions, it is unified in its anti-Semitic consensus, albeit temporarily distracted by the "false consciousness" of a growing concern for foreign policy issues on the eve of World War I.(33) The keyhole approach inexorably leads Goldhagen to the conclusion that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany.(34) Blocked from the pogroms for which they yearned by the restraints imposed by the Imperial and Weimar governments, the Germans "elected"(35) Hitler to power, for the "centrality of antisemitism in the Party's worldview, program, and rhetoric...mirrored the sentiments of German culture."(36) The Holocaust represented the congruence of Hitler and ordinary Germans; ultimately, the camp system, the cutting edge of the Nazi revolution, exposed "not just Nazism's but also Germany's true face."(37)
The impact of Goldhagen's one-dimensional analysis is especially crucial in his dismissive attitude toward the issue of conformity and peer pressure. If the men fear being seen as cowards but not as "Jew-lovers," Goldhagen argues, this "can only mean" that there is "an essentially unquestioned consensus on the justice of the extermination" within the unit. "If indeed Germans had disapproved of the mass slaughter, then peer pressure would not have induced people to kill against their will."(47) But that presupposes that what is of sole interest to Goldhagen, namely a test case of anti-Semitism due to the Jewish identity of the victims, was also central to the policemen of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Were the perpetrators primarily concerned about the fate, much less the identity, of their victims, or about the looming test of their individual abilities to carry out the first difficult task assigned to the battalion in occupied territory during war? When a policeman whom Goldhagen cites as particularly honest was asked why he did not take up [Trapp]'s offer, he answered: "I was of the opinion that I could master the situation, and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their situation anyway."(48) It was himself, not the victims, that was the center of his concern. Goldhagen is right that the ethnic identity of the victims should not be ignored, but this does not justify ignoring all factors but the victims' identity.(49)
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