When approaching the historiography of the Holocaust, a fundamental concern for historians and researchers lies in uncovering the motivations of the perpetrators. The question of motivation has consistently challenged scholars working in the field of Holocaust research, centering on the argument of intentionalism versus functionalism. Intentionalists believe that the Nazi Regime’s decision to exterminate European Jewry was methodically planned and executed process derived from Hitler’s rampant anti-Semitism and personal initiative. Functionalists, on the other hand, believe the Holocaust manifested along more utilitarian lines, with the methods and inclinations of the genocidal killers being dictated more by the “situation on the ground” in Eastern Europe which left the perpetrators with rapidly reduced options to deal with the increasing number of Jews in Nazi occupied territories. During the 1990’s, two books, Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, became the focal point of the intentionalist/functionalist debate and through their differences of understanding, helped to reshape historian’s understanding of perpetrator motivations and the causation of the Holocaust.
Ordinary Men, published in 1992, is an extremely microcosmic approach to understanding what motivated, as Browning describes, “ordinary” Germans to become genocidal murderers. By utilizing a wealth of documentation and post-war testimony regarding the actions of Order Police Battalion 101, Browning discovered a break in the misconception that the murderers of Jews were all fanatical Nazis and ideological automatons and was capable of giving a “human face” to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Documents used by Browning showed that the members of Police Battalion 101, responsible for the deaths of 83,000 Jews, were men of all ages and from all walks of German life and not representative of the traditional model of genocide-inclined Nazis. Based on the surviving battalion roster, Browning was able to surmise that the battalion’s demographics in regards to social background were extremely representative of the German state as a whole. Given the demographic reality of the men in Police Battalion 101, Browning concluded that by 1942, prior to the battalion’s arrival in Poland and perpetration of genocidal violence, the men “would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.” Additionally, Browning concluded the following analysis to be true of the men of Police Battalion 101:
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not sent to Lublin to murder Jews because it was composed of men specially selected or deemed particularly suited for the task. On the contrary, the battalion was the “dregs” of the manpower pool available at that stage of the war. It was employed to kill Jews because it was the only kind of unit available for such behind-the-lines duty.
The problem Browning was left with was how to understand the manner in which these “ordinary” Germans were capable of facilitating the deaths of so many Jews.
Browning believed that the origin of Police Battalion 101’s capability to participate in the murder of Jews was manifold. Following the traumatic initial massacre at Józefów, the men of Battalion 101 were consistently involved in ghetto-clearing operations, deportations, anti-partisan actions, “Jew Hunts,” and additional massacres. Browning asserts that while most men succumbed to the brutalization of their existence and killed, whereas relatively few did not, the majority of the men acted as follows:
The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalized, they felt more pity for themselves because of the “unpleasant” work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanized victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not try to think, period.
Browning concludes that the combination of factors ranging from a brutalized existence to ideological influence to pressure for conformity resulted in the fundamental psychological shift necessary to create genocidal killers out of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen, however, would summarily disagree.
Published in 1996, Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, is a far broader approach to perpetrator motivations and presents a sweeping analysis of German history and culture both before and during the Nazi era. Unlike Browning’s multi-causal approach, Goldhagen vehemently asserts that Germany’s cultural history of not just anti-Semitism, but eliminationist anti-Semitism is the prime-mover in motivating German perpetration of the Holocaust. Goldhagen directly challenges Browning’s assessment while simultaneously indicting all Germans when he states:
Germans’ antisemitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust . . . The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans – and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned – to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not the social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.
According to Goldhagen, the history of German cultural anti-Semitism developed in a manner far different than the rest of Europe, essentially substantiating the Sonderweg thesis normally applied to German political development. Unlike the rest of Europe, German anti-Semitism was especially virulent and destructive and took on a form that was not just exclusionary in form, but eliminationist in regards to European Jews.
Because the German conscious is grounded in such a radically different conception of anti-Semitism, Goldhagen maintains that it had developed into a defining cultural axiom, and that all that was necessary for ordinary Germans to make the leap to genocidal murder was the green-light from higher authority, namely Hitler and the Nazi party. Goldhagen states German anti-Semitism “was in this historical instance causally sufficient to provide not only the Nazi leadership in its decision making but also the perpetrators with the requisite motivation to participate willingly in the extermination of the Jews.” In essence, Hitler and German society were in collective agreement in regards to the status of Jews, and because of this symbiosis, ordinary Germans, like the members of Police Battalion 101, would become motivated genocidal executioners not because they required to, but because they wanted to.
Goldhagen’s argument of cultural anti-Semitism as a motivating factor is beneficial, but at the same time is too narrowly (and harshly) focused. From a historical perspective, it is erroneous to group all Germans into the category of anti-Semite, particularly under the heading of eliminationist anti-Semites. Additionally, Goldhagen’s thesis of German anti-Semitic heritage does not sufficiently explain the genocidal actions of the Ukrainian Hiwi auxiliary troops or Lithuanian civilians, both of which perpetrated atrocities against Eastern European Jews with little or no instigation from German occupiers.
For historians, both author’s works provide valuable insights into understanding the motivations of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. At the same time, however, neither is completely sufficient in fully explaining why Germans, such as the men of Police Battalion 101, continued to brutalize and kill Jews time and again. German anti-Semitism, when compared to European anti-Semitism as a whole, does not provide sufficient force alone to facilitate the murderous actions of the perpetrators. At the same time, external environmental and psychological factors can certainly create a complicit atmosphere, but are not concrete enough to drive individuals to cruelty, torture and murder. These revelations have left historians to conclude that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were motivated by a symbiosis of the two arguments, part intentionalist, part functionalist which has moved the historiography down what is known as the “crooked road to Auschwitz.” Although Browning poignantly states in his response to Goldhagen, “[t]hat these policemen were ‘willing executioners’ does not mean that ‘wanted to be genocidal executioners,’” it does not negate the fact that they killed time and time again.
Bibliography
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution
In Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
