Joshua D. Franklin, Ouchita Baptist University, 1998

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c. 1998 Joshua D. Franklin

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ABSTRACT: Over fifty years after the fact, there is still considerable debate over the causes of the Holocaust. David J. Goldhagen's recent controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners places a considerable amount of responsibility on the German National Spirit (Volkgeist), but historians and other social scientists criticize this perspective on several points. The traditional approach to understanding the causes of the Holocaust centers on understanding Nazism, particularly the process by which Hitler came to power and the antisemetic Nazi Worldview. In considering the implementation of the "Final Solution," historians are split into two camps: Intentionalists, who hold that the Nazis were implementing a well-formed plan, and Functionalists, who claim the Holocaust came about mostly through wartime "improvisation."

Over fifty years have passed since the Fall of 1946, when the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg made its final judgments regarding the crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Second World War. Prominent among the charges were those related to the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"-today known as "The Holocaust." Why, after all this time, is the Holocaust still studied? One key reason, though certainly not the only, is that there is still an incomplete understanding of the causes of the Holocaust.

Recently, David Goldhagen, a Harvard political science professor, published a book called Hitler's Willing Executioners. In it, he endorses a position-not new, but recently popular-that the Holocaust had its roots in the German National Spirit, or Volkgeist. "The eliminationist ideology, derived from the German cultural cognitive model of Jews, was at the root of the policies of the 1930s which the German people supported. The genocidal program of the war was grounded in the same ideology and set of cognitions."

Germans, he claims, are (or at least were) culturally anti-Jewish. Of course, this was not an inherent racial feature as such, but rather a by-product of the traditions since Martin Luther and, more recently, the German Romantic Nationalism of the 19th Century. The Nazi party only needed to bring it out into the open. One of the key reasons the Nazis came to power, Goldhagen declares, was "Hitler's own personality, which, his burning hatreds open for all to see, was attractive, even compelling, to so many Germans."

With these unabashed antisemites in power, the Holocaust was inevitable. The German people would not, indeed could not, stop it from happening. They were as committed to Jew-hating as the fanatical Nazi leadership, just unwilling to admit it openly. Goldhagen begins a chapter entitled "Eliminationist Antisemitism as Genocidal Motivation," with a statement to this effect:

That the perpetrators approved of the mass slaughter, that they willingly gave assent to their own participation in the slaughter, is certain. That their approval derived in the main from their own conception of Jews is all but certain, for no other source of motivation can plausibly account for their actions. This means that had they not been antisemites . . . then they would not have taken part in the extermination, and Hitler's campaign against the Jews would have unfolded substantially differently from how it did.

These are very strong claims, and ones with considerable moral ramifications. It is not a condemnation of racially based nationalism, as is more traditional, but of the German Volkgeist itself. Of course, Goldhagen is quick to admit that "This does not necessarily mean that some other set of factors . . . could not conceivably have induced Germans to slaughter Jews. It merely means that it simply did not happen." Along with the Third Reich, German culture is also to blame.

However, did the typical German have a "set of cognitions" that led him to want the death of Jews? Some survivors, such as Primo Levi, hold that even the SS guards "were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked." He says, "[Another Holocaust] can happen, and it can happen anywhere." This judgment is echoed by Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of a unit made up of mostly typical, lower middle class, non-Nazi men, which he ends with the chilling thought, "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men could not?"

Also, contrary to Goldhagen's claim that "No German could extricate himself from the magical spell that riveted his attention on Jews," various sociological and historical studies, including much work done in wartime Germany itself by the SD (a branch of the Gestapo), show that Germans were just not that committed to Nazi antisemitism. For the most part, they just did not care one way or another. Richard Levy, author of multiple works on modern antisemitism, even reports that "Much evidence suggests that 'the Jewish question' exerted only moderate influence on [Nazi] party members."

If the German Volkgeist did not cause the Holocaust, what did? The fact of Nazi power forms the base for historians' traditional answer to this question. The Nazis had come to power in the democratic Weimar Republic, which seems very significant at first. However, as historian Yehuda Bauer has noted, "Parliamentary democracy, in effect, was . . . rendered impotent more than two years before Hitler's accession [in January 1933]." Since 1930, President Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had been using an obscure clause of the Weimar constitution to allow the Chancellor, whom he appointed, to rule by decree.

The appointment of Adolf Hitler to the post of Chancellor in January 1933 was not really surprising under the circumstances. Von Hindenburg had experimented with Chancellors from various conservative parties, and, even though the Nazis had lost 34 seats in the most recent election, Hitler still controlled the largest right-wing party, with 196 of 572 total Reichstag seats (34%). The appointment was mainly a response to the power of left-wing parties, especially what von Hindenberg and other conservatives saw as a growing Communist menace. What von Hindenburg and the other conservatives underestimated was Hitler's political drive and ruthlessness. By July 14 of the same year, Hitler had used his office to make all parties besides the NSDAP illegal. On June 30, 1934, the "Night of Long Knives," Hitler "purged" the Nazi SA ("Storm Troops"), including longtime loyal party leader Ernst Ràhm. When President von Hindenburg died of natural causes on August 3, 1934, Hitler combined the offices of Chancellor and President and gave himself the title of Führer.

However, Nazi power alone cannot explain the Holocaust without first understanding Nazi ideology. The basis of this ideology was in fact a form of antisemitic ideology. The principal reason for this fact was that Nazi party organization revolved around "Hitler the person," who was vocally antisemitic both in his writings and in public speeches. It should also be noted that unlike many of the initially larger parties who included antisemitism in their platforms, Hitler (and the Nazi leadership) saw it as central and fundamental to their Worldview.

The form of antisemitism Hitler embraced denied the humanity of the Jews, not just to the point of making them inhuman or subhuman but also "anti-human" in a way. To the antisemitic mind, the Jews were the root cause of all that was evil in the world. Every Jew was innately a criminal. Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry gave the official position in 1944 by saying, "The annihilation of Jewry is no loss to humanity, but just as useful as capital punishment or protective custody against other criminals."

Convinced antisemites, such as the Nazis, also believed in a universal Jewish plan for world domination (outlined in the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion), making the Jews a power to be feared. Many antisemites saw banding together in anti-Jewish organizations as their only hope to avoid slavery to amoral Jewish masters. Antisemitic political parties tried to curb the supposed Jewish influence. Dealing with the world Jewish conspiracy required extreme measures. It was in many ways a war, as is seen in one statement of the 19th Century antisemite Wilhelm Marr: "There is no armistice. We move forward, or we retreat." The Nazis specifically saw the situation as an all-out war between the Jews and humanity, with Aryan Germany as the only nation willing and able to stand up against the Jews.

Once people with these beliefs came to power, it was only a matter of time before they took some action. Soon after taking control of Germany, the Nazis passed the first anti-Jewish laws to begin "Germanizing" the Reich. As the Nazis saw at each step that their policies were not "working," they passed a new and harsher set of laws or, as the war began, gave orders which were more extreme. The Nazis not kill the Jews from the beginning, it seems, not from any kind of moral principle, but "because the practical possibilities of implementing [a program to murder the Jews] were not apparent."

The official goal was instead deportation or emigration, with segregation in a ghetto or reservation as only temporarily viable. The ghetto policies in German-controlled areas, the deportation scheme, and the proposed "world ghetto" solution amounted to forms of quarantine. Nazi ideology presented all Jews as some sort of very dangerous sentient disease, and only by separation from them would humanity be able to survive. These solutions were a way to effectively eliminate the Jews without having to deal with the problems of physically killing them.

However, the Nazis destroyed many of the records from their rule, and it is unclear whether or not there was a formal prewar plan to systematically kill the Jews once it became possible. Historians of the Holocaust divide into two camps, called Functionalists and Intentionalists. Intentionalists are those who hold that it was the Nazi "intention" to kill Jews according to a prewar plan. Functionalists are those who believe the Holocaust came about because of extreme wartime conditions and decentralized decision-making (that is, as a "function" of the war).

It is also important to understand that no copy of any Hitler order to physically kill all Jews is available, though one may, of course, have been destroyed or lost. However, as one historian of Nazi organization reports, "Hitler would hide his personal will behind a shield of institutional subordinates, yet he retained the option of breaking through the shield and interfering personally . . . whenever he chose." The F¸hrer may have been unclear on his wishes, at least prior to 1941 and perhaps even afterward, or he may have personally ordered the Final Solution.

The Intentionalists base their arguments on the voluminous Nazi propaganda and Hitler's prewar speeches. They see a complete plan that was implemented in steps so as to make it feasible. An anniversary speech given to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, is one of the most famous of Hitler's prewar speeches used to verify this position. In it, Hitler declares,

Today I want once more to be a prophet: If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples into another world war, then the end result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and the consequent victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

The Second World War soon happened, and two-thirds of the Jews in Europe died. Such evidence seems to lend credibility to the Intentionalist argument.

This contention that a systematic plan was responsible for the Holocaust also has significant ethical ramifications. It makes the individual perpetrators less accountable (though of course not innocent), and instead puts more blame on the core responsible for the plan. For example, the American prosecution in their case at the Nuremberg trials used a form of the Intentionalist argument. Thus they largely indicted leaders and organizations-such as the Gestapo and SS-and not the great mass of individuals who performed the deeds. Since then, many accused of war crimes have claimed (some successfully) that they only participated in murderous actions because they had orders from high above which left them little room for choice.

The testimony of various third-echelon Nazi functionaries, such as Rudolph Hàss, the Commandant at Auschwitz, also supports this position. In his testimony at Nuremberg, he states: "In view of all these doubts I had, the only one and decisive argument [to continue carrying these actions] was the strict order and the reason given for it by Reichsf¸hrer Himmler . . . " Hàss claimed Himmler had earlier told him that it was absolutely necessary to kill all Jews, including women and children, because otherwise "the Jews will later on destroy the German people."

How then can anyone claim, as Functionalists do, that the Nazis did not intend to kill the Jews from the start? The Functionalists assert that the Holocaust is best understood as having happened through "improvisation, rather than deliberate planning." The historical evidence shows only that Hitler certainly hated and wanted to get rid of all the Jews. As Yehuda Bauer notes, however, "Throughout their rule, the Nazis advocated two alternative solutions, sometimes one to the exclusion of the other, sometimes both simultaneously: expulsion or sale of Jews, and mass murder. . . . In other words, although the possibility of murder was inherent in Nazi ideology, there were, apparently, alternatives."

The Nazis certainly employed alternatives to killing. Jewish emigration was not prohibited until 23 October 1941, more than two years after the beginning of the war, and before this time Jews were forced to emigrate in many cases. Until the end of 1940 the Gestapo even supported illegal Jewish emigration to Palestine, and approximately 10,000 arrived. Also the term "final solution, or Endlàsung, may have first appeared in June 1940 in the context of a 'territorial final solution' (territoriale Endlàsung), and clearly linked to evolving schemes for massive forced emigration of Jews to the island of Madagascar."

From the ethical perspective, if the Holocaust arose through wartime "improvisation" rather than a Hitlerite plan, there are obviously a far greater number of responsible individuals. Again, it of course does not absolve leaders like Hitler, Himmler, or Gàring who may have come to the Final Solution plan in desperation or even just watched the killing unfold, but it is the difference in culpability between premeditated murder and impulsive killing. Though both of these options clearly place an enormous amount of guilt on those responsible, it is also calls into question the viability of some war-crime defendants' claim that the Nazi leadership "made them do it." Unfortunately, no one can resolve the Intentionalist-Functionalist Debate with our current available facts and understanding of them.

The story of the Holocaust is one "involving several thousand Germans trying to find and kill several million Jews dispersed among approximately 300 million non-Jews." These few Germans caused the Holocaust, but it is a grievous tragedy that the inaction of the vast majority of Europeans resulted as it did. Of course, as Michael Marrus reasons in his book The Holocaust in History, "If the Holocaust was indeed unprecedented, . . . then it is also true that people had no experience upon which to base their understanding at the time, and no reliable guides for action." However, as Christian ethicist David Gushee has said, the inaction of the majority is still a "shattering moral failure." Perhaps understanding the true causes will also help prevent this in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, 1982.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Gingerich, Mark P. "Waffen SS Recruitment in the 'Germanic Lands,' 1940-1941." The Historian 59 (Summer): 815-830.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.

Gushee, David. P. "Why They Helped the Jews." Christianity Today 24 October 1994.

--------. "Learning from the Christian Rescuers: Lessons for the Churches." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Science 548: 138-155.

Hitler, Adolf. "The Discovery of Antisemitism in Vienna," trans. in Levy, Antisemitism, 205-213.

-------. "The International Jew and the International Stock Exchange-Guilty of the World War!" trans. in Levy, Antisemitism, 213-221.

-------."Speech to the Great German Reichstag, January 30, 1939," trans. in Levy, Antisemitism, 222-223.

International Military Tribunal. Trial of the Major war Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 - 1 October 1946, 42. vols. Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Levy, Richard S. Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1991.

Marr, Wilhelm. Der Sieg des Judenthums ¸ber das Germanenthum: Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet, trans. in Levy, Antisemitism, 76-93.

Marrus, Michael. The Holocaust in History. New York: Meridan, 1989.

Orlow, Dietrich. The History of the Nazi Party 1919-1933 Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1969.

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