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Operating on such a flexible definition, there is little that Goldhagen cannot “prove” about the depth, breadth, and growing dangerousness of German anti-Semitism. His “conservatively” estimated 100,000 executioners were but stand-ins for millions more of Germans. But such a definition is also self-defeating.
Would not nearly everyone in Europe or where the offspring of Europeans to be found qualify as an anti-Semite, if anti-Semitism were simply “negative beliefs and emotions about Jews qua Jews”? Would not, in all honesty, most Jews be covered by this blanket definition? Would French, Romanian, or Hungarian anti-Semitism look very different from the German variety?
It is absolutely essential for Goldhagen to blur the distinction between the willingness to act against Jews and the harbouring of negative attitudes about them. One can concede that Germans who liked, respected and valued Jews were few in number well before the Third Reich sanctioned their persecution.
But labelling them anti-Semites, that is, people who wanted to act against what they imagined to be enormously dangerous Jewish power and therefore thought it was right and good to murder Jews unwarranted. Goldhagen must make prejudiced Germans into executioners or would-be executioners in very large numbers. This, too, is self-defeating, if the objective is to understand the Holocaust.
By insisting on the universality of eliminationist anti-Semitism Goldhagen can show that the development to the Final Solution is an ineluctably logical one instead of one of many possibilities. Denying that the variations among anti-Semites and their solutions ( to say nothing of the ubiquity of anti-Semitism among the Germans) counts for anything, means there is no alternative possibility that needs to be considered.
The Final Solution takes on the aura of a fatality, no longer the product of human choices. It becomes a mystery of monstrous Germanic evilunavoidable, predictable from an early date, and basically unfathomable. It is interesting, I think, that the Nazis were far less convinced about the depth of German anti-Semitism than Goldhagen. They, with Hitler in the forefront of the complainers, never ceased whining about the lack of seriousness in ordinary Germans when it came to the Jewish question.
They recognized what Goldhagen does not. Prejudice was not enough to “solve” the Jewish question. It did not translate in to the sort of consistent, ideologically-based action that was required for the genocide of the Jews. Doubtless the indifference of the great majority of Germans to the fate of Jews was useful in the Final Solution, and the Nazi leadership correctly reckoned on little popular opposition to their escalating oppression. This is an enormous burden of guilt to bear.
I don’t see why Goldhagen wishes to add it. ©