In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book that proposed to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Its central point was that the Nazi genocide was chiefly made possible by the existence of a deep form of “demonological antisemitism” that had seeped into German society; Hitler and the Nazi regime weren’t so much agitating against Jews as they were simply giving ordinary Germans the green light to act on their already virulent genocidal attitudes. Without this form of “eliminationist antisemitism,” which according to Goldhagen was essentially a part of the fabric of German society long before the Nazis came to power, the Holocaust would not have been possible.
Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was an international bestseller. It purported to unseat what had previously been considered the conventional understanding among scholars of the motivations of the German soldiers who carried out the Nazi genocide — that they were essentially “ordinary men” without any particularly strong ideological indoctrination who found a way of rationalizing their participation, albeit in many cases willingly and enthusiastically, in acts of human barbarism under orders of the Nazi regime. One of the most important works that examined the mindset of the German soldiers was Christopher Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, an itinerant paramilitary force of erstwhile civilians who were transformed into “professional killers” that perpetrated the mass murder of tens of thousands of Polish Jews in the space of a few months in 1942. …..more
