Ashley Blog #4: Hilberg vs Goldhagen vs Witt: The Question of Motivation

I nearly forgot to make a blog post this week! Things are getting pretty hectic on my end. That being said, I’ve decided to focus this week’s blog post on the arguments I’m going to be evaluating in the Review next week. I’ve decided to examine two of the leading WW2 historians, a pair that not only fails to get along, but that also bring up a few interesting points about the motivations behind genocide. For those of you who have taken any Dr. Patton class, you’ll probably recognize Raul Hilberg and Daniel Goldhagen. The citations for the two books I’m examining and the analysis are below.

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1996.

When looking at any act of war, the question of motive is always the forefront on any reader’s mind. However, this question is also highly nuanced and complicated. There are many shades of grey. This is particularly true when examining the reasons that a person or group targets another, as in the case of genocide. For historians of the Holocaust, the question of motive is one that may never be fully answered. However, leading historiography on the topic has nevertheless attempted to wade through this debate. While a full, complete answer may be out of our grasp, these historians have nevertheless put for theories to support some motives as playing a larger role than others.  It is this debate which is taken up by Daniel Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and by Raul Hilberg in his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945. Their findings, however, do not coincide.

Goldhagen’s book, which sparked considerable controversy with its findings, seeks to understand “the actions and mind-set of the tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who… became genocidal killers” (Goldhagen 4). He focuses his book around three primary subjects: the perpetrators, anti-Semitism in Germany, and German society’s role in the Holocaust. By combining these three subjects together, Goldhagen states that he seeks to facilitate “radical revision of what has until now been written” (Goldhagen 9). His findings, however, are incendiary; rather than suggesting the perpetrators of the Holocaust were driven by the conventional motives – coercion, obedience, situational pressure, self-interest, or bureaucratic myopia – Goldhagen instead writes that the perpetrators were driven by “ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades” (Goldhagen 9). These ideas, he states, created a new breed of bloodthirsty anti-Semites that, “having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say ‘no’” (Goldhagen 14).

This was understandably met with disbelief from the academic community. To suggest that all those involved in the killings of Jews, from clerks signing papers to soldiers at the killing pits, were driven by an innate cruelty completely overlooks any other reasons that may have been behind the genocide. Hilberg’s book, though more of a compliation of information than an argumentative essay, nevertheless states that the non-German volunteers “varied in their motivations. Some of these men wanted to avoid hard physical labor; others wanted privileges or prestige; still others were inspired by conviction” (Hilberg 87). He further suggests that individual motives may have been stronger for different ethnic groups. While Goldhagen states that Lithuanians and other Baltics “came from cultures that were profoundly anti-Semitic” and “were animated by vehement hatred of the Jews,” Hilberg suggests otherwise (Goldhagen 409). He states that the Lithuanian pogroms were “instigated by the newly arrived German Security Police,” and that the volunteers were merely “a second tool in the hands of the German occupation authorities in the east” (Hilberg 91-92). He argues in favor of anti-Soviet leanings as the driving motivation for Lithuanians, rather than extreme anti-Semitism.

These questions of motivation are tricky to juggle. In my paper, I will be taking a middle ground between both of these scholars, suggesting that, while Hilberg is correct in placing importance on the role of anti-Soviet propaganda, he is incorrect in his overemphasis on the role of the German soldiers in instigating Lithuanian uprisings. From my evaluation of the primary sources, I believe that it is this anti-Soviet atmosphere, coupled with the idea of Jewish Bolshevism, which drove so many Lithuanians to commit genocide. This is not to say that I agree with Goldhagen; Lithuanians as a whole are not radical murderers. However, there is something uniquely fascinating about the eagerness of the Lithuanians to participate in the Holocaust, and it is this eagerness that my paper will address.