We meet ordinary Germans who fell in line with a regime that promised them peace and prosperity. Interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, some still looked back wistfully to the days before the war. “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets,” recalled Erna Krantz from Bavaria. “There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”.
Laurence Rees
Isaac Deutscher-
The most appropriate, indeed the only relevant, general
proper name for the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust is “Germans.” They
were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf
Hitler.
Daniel Goldhagen
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it
without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a
great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all
kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
The Nazi Mind by the writer, historian and broadcaster Laurence
Rees has been described as a “groundbreaking narrative history” of the
motivations and mentalities behind the Nazis and their supporters. As will be
seen in this critical review it is essentially a rehash of his previous histography
that not only downplays the social and economic and political forces at play in
the Nazis rise to power but compliments Daniel Goldhagen’s theoretical premise
that “Ordinary Germans” were to blame for the rise of German fascism and the
subsequent murder of six million jews.[1]
Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis
and those who grew up in the Nazi system to try and gain insight in to the psychological
and social composition of the Nazis.
But as this perspective document elaborates “ Nazism was an expression
of the most reactionary and brutal tendencies of German capitalism. That is the
key to understanding it. Hitler’s rise from a Viennese homeless shelter and the
trenches of World War I to becoming a megalomaniacal dictator cannot be
explained by the social composition and psychology of his supporters. He owed
his power to the ruling elite, which placed him at the head of the state. The
millions that Thyssen, Krupp, Flick and other industrial magnates donated to
the NSDAP, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, the symbolic
figurehead of the army, and finally the agreement of all the bourgeois parties
to the Enabling Act are eloquent testimony to the fact that the vast majority
of the ruling elite had placed themselves behind Hitler when all other mechanisms
to suppress the working class had failed.
The members of the National Socialist movement originated,
at least up to its seizure of power, almost exclusively from the middle
classes. It recruited from among artisans, peddlers, the civil employees and
peasants, whom the war, inflation and crisis had robbed of any faith in
democratic parliamentarianism and who longed for order and an iron fist. At the
head of the movement were officers and NCOs from the old army, who could not
reconcile themselves to Germany’s defeat in World War I. However, the programme
of the National Socialist movement was anything but petty bourgeois. It
translated the basic needs of German imperialism into the language of mythology
and racial theory. The dream of a “thousand-year Reich” and the hunger for
“Lebensraum (living space) in the East” expressed the expansionist urge of
German capital, whose dynamic productive forces were constricted by Europe’s
closely meshed system of states. Racial hatred provided consolation for the
German petty bourgeois in the face of his absolute powerlessness and prepared
him for a war of extermination.”[2]
Program and
perspective
One of the most notable aspects of Laurence Rees’s entire
body of work, and that can be said of most historians writing on this subject, is
the cursory attention given to issues of program and perspective. In all his
books virtually nothing is said about the actual policies pursued by the Social
Democrats and the Stalinists, from the German Communist party which demoralized
and split the working class, and cleared the way for the Nazi victory. This
disinterest dates back to when Rees wrote to me in 2008, saying “I'm afraid I
simply didn't have space to include a discussion of these issues- fascinating
as they are - in the Behind Closed Doors book. I decided to begin the story in
1939 and therefore felt it wouldn't be helpful to refer back to this history.
I'm sure others would have written the book differently, but for better or
worse, that's what I thought was the right way forward. Equally, I'm afraid I
can't go into my views on Trotsky here, as I would need several thousand words
to represent my thoughts on that intriguing time properly. I believe my friend,
Professor Robert Service, is currently writing a comprehensive biography of
Trotsky, so it will be exciting to see his thoughts on the subject.[3]
As I said to Laurence Rees at the time, Robert Service was a
regrettable choice of historian to assist him with Trotsky. In 2010, Robert
Service wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky.[4]
The Marxist writer David North called the biography “character assassination”, writing
that Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without
respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if
one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not
history, but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not
content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently
descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to
splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to
refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering
to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.”[5]
While there are some things to like about Rees’s new book unfortunately
it is a reflection of the current historical consensus that ordinary Germans
played a crucial part in the rise of Nazis and bear indirect responsibility for
the murder of six million jews in the Holocaust. Rees not only believes that
“ordinary Germans” were to blame but “such horrors occurred not because the
Nazis were Germans, but because they were human beings”.
Rees’s belief that all humans, given the chance, can be murdering
fascist monsters echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, who believed that forces
of human evil lurk deep in man’s soul or psyche. They can easily gain ascendancy,
as they inevitably must, over the restraining moral influences of civilisation.
As North says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argued that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation, and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than it had been before that time. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.[6]
There is little new about this “new history”. Daniel
Goldhagen’s book[7]
set the benchmark for this so-called theory. Although a substantial number of
historians condemned his book,[8]
It still went on to poison the minds of a younger generation, which swallowed
hook, line, and sinker his right-wing historiography.
Brandi Lopez, one of those younger historians, wrote in a
2016 essay: "The term 'ordinary men' was used throughout several of my
sources." It was about the people that became the leaders of the Nazi
party, Hitler’s right hand men as well as the people that became soldiers
following his orders blindly and in the end becoming willing executioners.
These individuals began as ordinary men, farmers, fathers, and everyday people.
In Daniel Goldhagen's “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust.” Goldhagen’s basic thesis is that most German people became willing
executioners in the Holocaust. He states, “eliminationist’ hostility toward the
Jewish people was so deeply ingrained in Germany”, that’s how the people were
willing to do whatever it took to rid the country of them.
In Laurence Rees’s “Auschwitz: A New History”, he mentions
Hoss and his story. His family was a simple farming family, and for them to
sell their goods, they had to go through a Jewish man. His father and mother
ingrained in him that the Jewish man was scamming them out of money, and the
reason his family struggled was because of this. Most of the people that were
in the sample size said they resembled more of “real Nazis” than an “Ordinary
German”. This article explores the theories of the perpetrators, the evidence,
and ultimately, the sample size itself. Some graphs display a visual
representation of the number of men who identified with a specific occupational
rank, such as elite occupations, lower-middle-class workers, etc. [9]
The best refutation of Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans” is by
the Marxist David North, who wrote: The methodological flaw of Professor
Goldhagen’s book is indicated in its title: Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by
“ordinary Germans?” For those of you who would like a textbook example of an
“abstract identity,” this is it. This is a category that is so broad, it is
capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of Jewish
parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an “ordinary” one? Is
it a hefty girth and a fondness for knockwurst and sauerbraten? Is it blond
hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the nude? Is it a talent for
abstruse philosophizing and a passion for 300-pound Wagnerian sopranos? A
concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes cannot be of any
scientific value in the cognition of objective reality. But if we should
attempt to include in our definition more serious sociological characteristics,
the worthlessness of the concept of “ordinariness” becomes immediately
apparent. In 1933, German society possessed a complex class structure. Was the
“ordinary German” at the time of Hitler’s accession to power a factory worker,
a ruined shopkeeper, a demoralized member of the lumpenproletariat, a heavily
indebted peasant, an East Prussian land-owning Junker or an industrial magnate?
If all these elements of diverse social strata are to be
lumped together as “ordinary Germans,” it simply means that the concept of
“ordinariness” does not reflect the internal antagonisms and conflicts of
German society as it existed in 1933. What Goldhagen, therefore, offers his
readers is not a scientific examination of German society as it really was
constituted in 1933, but rather—and it is unpleasant to say this—an idealized
portrait of a homogeneous society that uncritically substantiates the Nazi myth
of a unified German Volk, defined by race and blood.[10]
Another problem with Rees’s book is his take on the
Holocaust; for Rees, the political, social and economic reasons for this
terrible event are not important. What is essential for Rees is the
psychological reasons behind the Nazis genocide of the Jews. Rees joins a long
list of writers and historians for whom the Holocaust is unfathomable and
should not even be attempted to be understood.
If a Marxist like Isaac Deutscher- can write “The fury of
Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man,
woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who
tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests
behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the
enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery
of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify
humanity. “What chance do the rest of us have?.
North answers, “ The situation is rationalised too often
with the argument that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it simply
defies a rational explanation. If, as Adorno said, it was no longer possible to
write poetry after Auschwitz, it was presumably also no longer possible to
place much confidence in the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that
drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Historical
science and political theory were seen as powerless in the face of such
unfathomable evil.[11]
As I mentioned earlier, there are some aspects to
appreciate, but overall, Rees’s work perpetuates a very right-wing historiography.
As Leon Trotsky once said, “Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
[1]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners
[2]
National Socialism and the Holocaust-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/09.htmlthe
theory
[3]
https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/
[4]
Trotsky A Biography-Robert Service-Pan 2010
[5]
In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service's
Trotsky-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html
[6]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[7]
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 1
Feb. 1997 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
[8]
Historians criticise Goldhagen's book-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/11/gold-n17.html
[9]
Lopez, Brandi J., "German People and the Holocaust" (2016). Capstone
Projects and Master's Theses. 12.
https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/12
[10]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[11]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
