Are the Germans guilty? - genocide - Editorial

National Review, May 20, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The new book that insists that the vast majority of the German people were exterminationist in word and deed (the title of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book is Hitler's Willing Executioners) is more merely than historically depressing. It is bad enough to be asked to believe that the huge majority of the German people were aware of Hitler's enterprise. It is horrifying to meditate on the question: How safe is it to assume, if that were so in 1938 - 45, that its equivalent isn't reposing in the minds and hearts of other cultures right now?

Professor Goldhagen's thesis will be disputed by other scholars, given that he is not everywhere furrowing fresh historical ground. His thesis is that the anti-Semitism of the Germans was so deeply rooted that they had no problem at all in going from what he calls the "eliminationist" stage (let us get rid of the Jews) to the "exterminationist" stage (let us get rid of them by slaughter).

There are, to say the least, some very rough edges in Mr. Goldhagen's thesis, among them that in describing the indifference to slaughter evidenced by the Germans when they conquered Poland he seems to be talking about an undifferentiated impulse to slaughter. It didn't seem to matter whether the victims were Jewish or non-Jewish, any more than it seemed to matter what was the attachment, religious or ethnic, of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of East Europeans and Ukrainians murdered at both ends of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. If an entire population is inflamed with the lust to kill, how much does it matter who the victims are, except to those who wish to come up with a vague schematic handle for justifying an antagonism? At an academic level, researchers have written about those terrible years without concluding that the German people were empathic collaborators, let alone participants in genocide. At a personal level I am a friend of a German expatriate (he left Germany twenty years after Hitler) who even as a boy was given to sharing his father's necessarily concealed hatred of the Fuhrer. My friend's trade (in retail) keeps him in common touch and he reports -- frighteningly -- that he has encountered more anti-Semitism in America than ever he did in Germany. If this is so or even nearly so we have reason to question the most basic claims of civilization.

It is a haunting question, and reduces to microcosmic measure. Mr. Goldhagen would have us believe that many, perhaps even a majority, of those killed in the years he writes about were killed by single bullets. Science came along with the extermination process, which could take care of hundreds at a time. But the support system even for extermination camps was extensive, hundreds and thousands of executioners, suppliers of lethal materials, barbed-wire manufacturers and installers.

But how widely was news of the enterprise known? The evidence is everywhere sobering. When Mao Tse-tung promulgated his Cultural Revolution he was able to count on the approving roar of the mob, which included sons and daughters of those proclaimed to be enemies of the people and therefore fit to die. In Cambodia they did have machine guns, but they did not depend on weapons of corporate death: there were enough individual peasant soldiers willing to kill one and one-half million of their brothers and sisters. In Rwanda - Burundi we think of tribal antagonism as generating the impulse to the killing of a half-million, but what is it that causes that tribal antagonism to go to genocidal extremes? Why does the Serb so despise the Muslim as to go to lengths one would never suppose a California Anglo would go to against a Hispanic?

Few of us have reviewed inflammatory anti-Semitic literature published in Germany during the twenty years before the Holocaust. But of course it exists, Hitler's own manifesto being of primary importance. There is anti-black (and anti-white) material published in America. We are all absolutely fatalistic about, if not acclimated to, episodic violence traceable to race and religion, but it is incomprehensible, if not inconceivable, that the kind of thing we have could develop into genocide.

We have a considerable stake in hoping that Professor Goldhagen has himself committed sociological genocide. You cannot exaggerate the terrible implications of ethnic hostility. But if it is true that almost the entire German population actively contributed to what happened in mid-century, then no minority, anywhere, is safe.