How German Was the Holocaust?

(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 1)

And what drove Christians in this regard? Something Weiss vaguely calls “intense psychological need” and a terrible anxiety buried deep within “the Christian psyche.” With medieval history dispatched in six pages, we move directly “From Luther through Pastor Stoecker”-Stoecker being a virulent nineteenth-century anti-Semite and a royal chaplain to the court of the kaisers, according to Weiss, and in a straight line to Hitler. But, after reading this volume, I would want independent verification of everything Weiss says, as he traffics not only in shockingly simplistic claims but in tendentious hit-and-run charges that are quite simply false; for example, “Even today the Vatican and Protestant Fundamentalists cannot recognize Judaism as a separate and valid religion.” No document or evidence is cited to back up this claim. What is “the Vatican” anyway? If his reference point is Pope John Paul II, the attack is not only false but scurrilous.

Moving to his discussion of “Luther and the Reformation,” in chapter 2, one is struck by the fact that not a single primary text is cited. Weiss’s boilerplate mines but one book, Leon Poliakov’s History of Anti-Semitism, to substantiate and carry the weight of the entire argument. Whether Poliakov uses primary works, I cannot say, but Weiss certainly does not. So a chapter on Luther is written sans a single reference to a Luther work. What about Martin Luther? Well, he followed the same “psychological pattern” as the early Christian primitives and “fundamentalist Protestants today.” Such people look to an “existential experience” on which to base faith; this breeds “frightening doubt” and “deep anxiety” and that, in turn, fuels anti-Semitism. Because Luther was even more uncertain and anxious than “the early church fathers” or “Catholic leaders,” he became a “far more brutal and virulent enemy of the Jews.”

Indeed, “Luther was a racist, pure and simple, bothered not at all that his hatred of the Jews denied the power of Christ to redeem all humanity. To him the Jew was simply not human.” No text, whether primary or secondary, is cited to back up this false claim. Luther’s unfortunate anti-Semitic utterances, primarily those of his dyspeptic old age, were not on the order of modern biological racism. Conversion was always open. He never ceased exhorting Jews to convert. Such exhortations make no sense if Luther was, in fact, a biological racist convinced Jews were not even human. In his ugly diatribe against the Jews of l543, “The Jews and Their Lies,” Luther assaulted not Jewishness per se but Jewish “blasphemy,” as well as the sins, not only of Jews, but of others. For the rejection of Christ was not unique to the Jews and was, as Heiko Oberman points out, “attributed above all to the pope and his curia.” Luther never ceased to see himself as a “product of the Jews,” and his end-time morbidity drove him into a rhetorical fury against all those who refused to repent.

Apart from the unsavory depths of the Christian psyche, Weiss accounts for early modern anti-Semitism by arguing that the Jews were the quintessential “supporters of free enterprise” whose embrace of market opportunities worked to implode the outmoded and reactionary “Christian guilds.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at this juncture. But, finally, it comes down to this: “Through spiritual devotion to Christian faith, humane and brilliant men became accomplices of murderers.” It is but a simple step from the “backwaters of Central Europe,” solidified by “Luther’s primitive and reactionary spirit,” to modern Germany, hence to Hitler and death camps.

In order to do justice-if that is the way to put it-to this bad book, dozens of pages would be needed. Perhaps my brief resume; of two chapters will suffice. Weiss paints with broad strokes. Any scholar who does this must earn our confidence early on. Weiss does not. In his determination to paint the “Christian” aspect of “the Christian West” as irrationalistic, brutal, and perfidious, he seems wholly unaware of the vast and towering achievements (Aquinas here comes to mind) that would put pressure on his reductionistic claims of rabid irrationalism. This book functions rather the way some early radical feminist texts did. The polemicist scours complex thinkers for any and all references that can be considered misogynistic-or racist-and presents these as the whole story. A rogue’s gallery quickly falls into place. Thinking stops. Story ends. Case closed. Weiss no doubt misses the irony of the fact that the very traits he attributes to religious believers-snap judgments, summary executions, straw men, the need to find collusion-are displayed abundantly in this unfortunate work that does nothing to deepen our knowledge, to enlarge our sympathies, or to tweak our intelligence.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book has become a best-selling cause celebre, this despite the fact that it has been critically reviewed by a small army of distinguished historians, among them Fritz Stern, Gordon Craig, Jeremy D. Noakes, Omer Bartov, Victoria Barnett, and Robert S. Wistrich. Noakes decries the fact that Goldhagen’s reversion to a “uniquely genocidal German nation” as the explanation for Nazi genocide is “dangerously reassuring in a world in which genocidal activity is increasingly prevalent.” Gordon Craig notes that the “specificity and variety of history find no place in Goldhagen’s book. There is no detailed discussion of what German life was like or what the state of politics and culture was at any time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . Instead of history, we get reductionism and are fobbed off with the impression that by the beginning of the twentieth century all Germans were eliminationist anti-Semites, whatever that term might mean.”

Robert Wistrich opines that in a “curious and probably unintended way, Goldhagen’s book blurs what was distinctive about the Holocaust. By diverting our attention from the millions done to death by desk-murderers, SS units, and Wehrmacht soldiers, and focusing instead on the relatively small numbers killed by police battalions or guards on death marches, Goldhagen brings to the fore precisely those features-brutality, sadism, killing for sport-that are not particularly unique to the Holocaust but rather part of the endless catalogue of human cruelty through the ages.”

Fritz Stern laments “this irksomely repetitive book” in strong language, noting Goldhagen’s arrogant repudiation of alternative explanatory frameworks; his hostility toward, or dismissal of, other scholars; his effacement of German Jewish history, including the “extraordinary leaps to cultural and economic prominence” made by German Jews; his refusal to think systematically about the nature of totalitarian regimes; his dismissal of the labors of “German historians and writers, who have presented their people with as stark and honest a portrait of their past as is possible”; and, finally, his “manipulated, public-relations-orchestrated” publicity campaign that, successfully, gave this “polemical and pretentious” book an “astounding reception.”

Omer Bartov fingers the simplistic “scale of its condemnation and . . . its sense of its own importance.” Goldhagen’s disdain of qualifications and subtleties is damaging. “This is history in black and white,” he continues, “and it will please those impatient with careful argument and the weighing of evidence.” Victoria Barnett decries Goldhagen’s selectivity, a kind of moral obtuseness that cannot accept that “many of the perpetrators of the euthanasia program were as enthusiastic and callous as the killers of Jews.” These programs are, at long last, receiving the scholarly attention they deserve, with major works by Michael Burleigh,Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany 1900-1945;Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene;and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.

Paying attention to this bigger picture compels the conclusion that Nazi exterminationism was a complex part of a totalistic ideology of which anti-Semitism was one central feature. But if “eliminationist anti-Semitism” is the explanation for the slaughter of Jews, and if this was entirely unique and peculiar to the Germans whose “cognitive model” of the Jews enabled them to join enthusiastically as a people in killing Jews, how, then, do we explain the killing of the mentally retarded, or handicapped infants, or gypsies, because no such “cognitive model” comes into play in these other instances?

(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 3)

Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 3

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