How convincing is the argument

made by Daniel Goldhagen in his

book “Hitler's Willing
Executioners?”
International Baccalaureate History Internal Assessment

Word Count : 2098

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Table of Contents:
Identification and evaluations of sources……………………………………………p3
Investigation…………………………………………………………………………p5
Reflection…………………………………………………………………………….p9
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………p1
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Identification of sources
This investigation will explore the question: How convincing is the argument made by Daniel

Goldhagen in his book “Hitler's Willing Executioners”?I have chosen two sources one of

which is the book “Hitler's Willing Executioners” written by Daniel Goldhagen (2010). My

second source is a testimony by Shmuel Beller who is a Holocaust survivor who experienced

anti-semitism while living in Poland.

Goldhagen’s book,“Hitler’s Willing Executioners” was first published in 1996. One the one

hand, this book has value because it was written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen who is an

American author and former associate of Government and Social Studies Department at

Harvard University. According to his website, Goldhagen entered Harvard in 1977 and

remained there for some twenty years, eventually becoming an assistant professor in the

Government and Social Studies Department. (Goldhagen, n.d.) This would mean that

Goldhagen would be expected to have detailed and academic knowledge on the Holocaust

and he has done extensive individual research on the topic focused on the motivation of

perpetration of the Holocaust for his doctoral dissertation (Hilberg, 1997 p721). Moreover,

his book was praised by Elie Wiesel who was a famous Holocaust survivor and one of the

leading authorities or historians of the Holocaust.(Goldhagen, 2010 International Acclaim)

However, the origin of this book also presents limitation since the book was written in a time

where there was little researched or understood in the area of motivations for the Holocaust

perpetrators. Furthermore, Goldhagen’s father was a Holocaust survivor whose family was

interned in a Romanian-Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, now in Ukraine (Smith, 1996). This

seems to indicate that Goldhagen’s opinions are heavily influenced by his personal

connection to his father and therefore there is a strong possibility that his judgment of the

perpetrators of the Holocaust is clouded and heavily biased.

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The testimony by Shmuel Beller about Polish Antisemitism ("Testimony of Shmuel Beller on

Polish Antisemitism", n.d.) comes from Yad Vashem a holocaust remembrance center.

Established in 1953, as Israel’s official memorial of the victims of the Holocaust, Yad

Vashem considered one of the, if not the leading institution of Holocaust education and

research. This testimony was taken from their official site. This source is an eyewitness

account making it a rare and valuable primary source and the value of this source is high

because it is one of the very few testimonies that have been officially translated into English.

It also contains the personal insight of a victim of polish anti-semitism and specific details of

his experiences in Poland before World War Two(WW2).

However, this source has limitations because there is not an exact date as to when the

questions had been asked and when this had been uploaded. As Yad Vashem wasn't

established until 1953 and hadn’t been collecting data or testimonies so in any case("Yad

Vashem Publications | www.yadvashem.org", n.d.), the source must be at least six to seven

years old and most likely older. This means that the source would lack immediacy. This

would increase the likeliness of Beller forgetting or misremembering important details.

Furthermore, the fact that this source was in the shape of an interview of a victim means that

the interviewer could have asked suggestive questions that Shmuel Beller would be

compelled to answer in a certain way. For example, the interviewer first asks “How did the

Polish population behave to you?”. The word “ behave” is used to describe when one is

supposed to act in a certain, proper way. Therefore it could imply that there is a way that the

polish should not have acted. When compared with asking “what was your experience in

Poland” the question seems to have the potential to elicit a certain kind of answer from the

interviewee.

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Investigation
The Nazis who came to power in January 1933 instigated a systematic persecution and

murder of about six million Jews during WW2. This incident that took place between 1941 to

1945, is now referred to as “The Holocaust”(Cowan and Maitles, 2017). When the Holocaust

started in 1941 the Jewish population in Europe was little over nine million (Beasley, 2010

p380). After the “Soviet invasion in 1941”, soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen “murdered more

than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of

others”("Introduction to the Holocaust", n.d.). Between 1941 and 1944 Nazi German

authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany or conquered territories to extermination

camps where they were murdered in specially designed gassing facilities.

There are many theories and reasons for the brutal mass murder which have been debated to

this day. Goldhagen’s book which first came out in 1997, argues that “anti-semitism was the

central causal agent of the Holocaust” and that Germans anti-semitism led the population “to

kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically

and without pity” (Goldhagen, 2010 p9). This essay will argue that the Goldhagen’s

argument is flawed because German anti-semitism alone cannot sufficiently explain the

actions of perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Daniel Goldhagen’ argument centers on the fact that Germany had a long history of anti-

semitism. He uses this to support his argument saying ”In the middle ages and the early

modern period, without question until the enlightenment, German society was thoroughly

anti-semitic”(Goldhagen, 2010 p30). Goldhagen gives a name to the anti-semitism that had

developed into the idea that Jewish influence is destructive by nature and must be eliminated

referring to it as the “eliminationist” ideology (Goldhagen, 2010 p48). He links this to the

history of anti-semitism in Germany stating that it had developed “well before the Nazis

came to power” (Goldhagen, 2010 p23).

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On the one hand there is evidence that supports this assertion.The Strasbourg Massacre in

1349 is a good example of this. In 1348, the Black Plague descended on Europe and reached

Strasbourg early in 1349. Superstitious beliefs led to a rumor that the Jews had plotted to

poison the drinking water of the wells used by Christians in France, Switzerland, and Italy.

On Saturday, February 14, 1349, the Strasbourg mob led by Johannes Betschold, dragged

about 2000 Jews to a pyre in the Jewish cemetery. Here they burned several hundred Jews

alive, forcibly baptized others and expelled the rest from Strasbourg. (O'Leary, 2014)

German anti-semitism also flourished in the 19th century. Evidence to support this would be

that there were many iconic figures in Germany at the time that were anti-semitic. One of

them is Richard Wagner who was a renowned German composer of the 19th century. His

essay “Judaism in Music” published in 1850 is said to be highly anti-semitic (Avineri, 2013

p39) and he even makes an appearance in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf when he praises him

and another famous German, Martin Luther as men who were right to dislike Jews.

Another anti-semitic, iconic figure is Wilhelm Marr, a journalist and political activist from

Hamburg, who published the pamphlet “The Way for the Victory of Germanism over

Judaism” and coined the term “anti-semitism” to designate the new kind of anti-Judaism

forming at the time. This differs from the original idea which is a Christian critique of the

Jewish religion. Instead, it is a concept to rally Europe against the Jewish nation and race and

marked the start of modern hatred against Jews which claimed that the Jews were racially

inferior (Avineri, 2013 p40).

Economist, philosopher, and popular commentator, Eugene Duhring claimed that the Jews

should be forced into labour camps once again, to guard the European culture against them.

One of Germany’s greatest historians, Henrich von Treitschke also turned anti-semitic,

publishing his first anti-Jewish work “Preussiische Jahrbucher” in 1876. (Avineri, 2013

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p40,41) These examples would seem to support Goldhagen’s thesis as they highlight a

particularly rich history of Anti-semitism coming from Germany.

In contrast to Goldhagen’s arguments, Christopher Browning argues that the Holocaust was

not as monocausal as Goldhagen suggests and instead introduces the idea of multiplicity. He

argues that there were many mundane motivations that stopped men from stepping out of the

task such as the fear of losing face, loyalty to comrades, anxiety about job promotion or lack

of moral reflection(Browning, 2017).

Aside from the judicial records on the men, to support his argument, he introduces the

Milgram Experiment conducted by the American social phycologist Stanley Milgram. While

Miligram focused on the authority figure as the source, Browning’s found that soldiers were

more influenced by the ties to their fellow soldiers than to their superiors and their bonds

with their comrades were not to be taken lightly(Browning, 2017). In either case, it suggests

that the perpetrators would probably not have done what they did without the social influence

of either authority figures, their comrades, or more likely a combination of the two. Therefore

Browning’s argument dismisses Goldhagen’s as oversimplified and one that fails to take

account of important factors.

In addition to this, Goldhagen argues that the cause of the Holocaust was German anti-

semitism, but there is much evidence to show that anti-semitism wasn’t confined to Germany

but was rather wide-spread throughout parts of Europe. The testimony from Shmuel Beller

supports this. It contains a detailed description of how he and other Jewish children

were ”stoned by the Polish youths” Victims were quoted as saying, “There was a lot of

antisemitism, very much antisemitism” in Poland ("Testimony of Shmuel Beller on Polish

Antisemitism", n.d.). Anti-Jewish violence also took place in Poland 1946 after the war had

ended, in the shape of post-war pogroms. One of the most famous of these is the Kielce

pogrom, a violent attack in July 1946 by Polish residents of Kielce against survivors who had

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returned from labor and concentration camps, in which 42 Jews were murdered (Ochayon,

n.d.). Not only did it take place in Poland but it took place after the Nazis had been defeated.

Also, Poland was not the only anti-semitic country. The parts of Romania that had sided with

Germany had an anti-semitic leader, Ion Antonescu. (Deletant,2006 page 116). Ion

Antonescu ruled Romania from the September 6th, 1940 to August 9th, 1944 (Deletant,2006

page 1). During his rule, he launched a series of pogroms that included the Iasi program

which happened on the 28 of June and 1944 killed about 15,000 Jews because people had

thought they were responsible for communism (Rozett & Spector, 2013 page 499), and the

Odessa pogram that happened in the fall of 1941 killing an estimated 80,000 Jews(Holmes,

2009 page 176). These atrocities were organized and carried out almost completely

independently of the Nazis. Clearly, anti-semitism wasn’t confined to Germany but was

rather wide-spread throughout parts of Europe, suggesting that Goldhagen’s assertion that the

holocaust was solely born of German Anti-semitism is not supported by the facts.

To conclude, there is undeniable evidence that Germany had an anti-semitic past and under

the rule of the Nazi’s, was an anti-semitic country. Goldhagen is to be praised for putting up a

convincing argument and for shedding light on a previously little researched or understood

area. However, his argument that German anti-semitism was the principal motivation for the

perpetrators of the Holocaust, ignores many facts. Goldhagen did not take in the fact that

anti-semitism had it’s roots in other countries and that there were many non-German

perpetrators of the Holocaust such as in Poland, Russia and Romania. He also failed to

account for the social factors as evidenced by Miligram's work and Browning’s argument that

has evidence to show that not all Germans were enthusiastic to kill Jews.

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Reflection
My investigation required that I search for details and primary sources from the Holocaust

survivors such as letters, diaries or testimonies. Through this process I came to realize the

difficulty of maintaining an objective stance. I was faced multiple times with the problem of

having to choose which sources to use and found that facts that confirm each other tended to

appeal to me, thus making me unconsciously biased. This is why although I do not agree with

Daniel Goldhagen’s views, I understand that a fair amount the information on the Holocaust

is focused in Germany, making it hard to find sources that support the idea of anti-semitism

in other countries.

Through my investigation I was also obliged search for study various texts on the Holocaust

in order to understand at a high level what happened and to get a good overview of the

different perspectives on the topic. One of the interesting things I came across through this

process was that two scholars, Goldhagen and Browning, using the same sources are able to

come to entirely different conclusions. This demonstrates how the same source can lead to

very different things based on the people who interpret it proving that facts can be swayed by

the historian.

Finally, when investigating history, I noticed the methods of scientists and historians differ

greatly. While scientists are able to conduct multiple controlled experiments, history never

repeats itself, creating areas where sources are scarce. The Holocaust is a very difficult topic

to find primary sources for because most of the victims were murdered and the Nazi are

likely to have destroyed the few accounts that exist, making it hard for me to find a reliable

primary source.

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Browning, C. (2017). Ordinary men (3rd ed., p. 1). United States HarperCollins Publishers
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