UM President's Lecture Series 2008, "Hitler's Willing Executioners"

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]

Good evening everyone. Welcome to the ninth presentation in this year's University of Montana President's Lecture Series. My name is Gerald Fettz and I serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Here it's my pleasure to introduce this evening's presidential lecturer. But first, a couple of words about our sponsors.

The main sponsor of this series, of course, is President George M. Dennison. And we ought to thank him once again for his vision, support, uh, and commitment to bringing to campus and to the larger Missoula community on a regular basis some of the most outstanding, influential, and provocative thinkers and speakers on a wide range of important topics and issues. I also want to thank members of the president's office staff for their part in organizing and arranging this event. And finally, I also want to thank once again Professor Richard Drake, who is chair of the department of history, for his diligent efforts over the past 17 or so years in working so successfully, imaginatively, and even courageously on occasion to invite and negotiate with such an impressive array of speakers and thereby made this series such an important one for the campus and the community.

In my role of as dean of the college of arts and sciences, I'm often asked to welcome guests, open conferences held on campus, and introduce visiting speakers to campus. But it doesn't all that often happen that I have the chance to do so in my own fields of study. Tonight is therefore special in this regard as well since as a professor of German studies, my own work in 20th century German and Austrian literature and culture has often butted up against or even been smack in the middle of the complex of events and issues that we refer to as the Holocaust.

Our presidential lecturer this evening is, as you all know by now, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Dr. Goldhagen received his PhD in political science from Harvard University in which department he also taught for a number of years. He has been since the mid-1990s an associate of the Mind de Gunsburg Center for European Studies at Harvard and is today an independent writer and speaker as well as a member of the board of directors of Humanity and Action. His PhD dissertation, which was turned into the book that forms the basis of his presentation this evening, received the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics that year. And that dissertation turned blockbuster book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, became with its publication in 1996, one of the most controversial, that is, most highly praised and most sharply criticized works in Holocaust studies since those studies began in the mid-20th century. I suspect that it challenged Dr. Goldhagen's life and the further direction of his work immensely as well.

I assume that most of you who are here this evening have heard about the book and the publicity, controversies and discussions it has generated. Many of you, I hope, have read the book yourselves and given thought to the merits of its main thesis, its assertions and its conclusions. And I will return to that work in a moment. But before doing so, I want to mention that Dr. Goldhagen has written and published since 1996 on other topics, some directly related to that initial work, some not as directly. His second major book, published in 2002, was titled A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. And that book too demonstrated again his penchant for dealing with topics and those topics in ways that get people agitated. I suspect he'll do the same this evening so that we can anticipate a lively discussion following his lecture. He is currently at work on a major book as well as a PBS documentary on genocide in the 20th century.

Those of us who have followed and even been involved in scholarship that deals with the Holocaust in its many complicated facets have witnessed every so often a publishing event, a public or scholarly debate, a speech or essay even that stirs the pot and generates a new wave of study, accusations, conclusions, reputations, new questions, new perspectives, and new publications. It was perhaps the Avitz trials in the early 1960s themselves that played that role back then, the Holocaust television series in the next decade, the so-called historians' debate in the 1980s, and most recently the heated discussions about whether Germans have the right to focus at all on themselves as victims as well as perpetrators. This in the context for example of the appearance of works like Jurg Friedri's "Debraunt" translated into English as "The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945." There's no doubt in my mind that it was Dr. Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, that served that purpose and that role in the 1990s and continues to exert much influence and generate resistance in our own decade.

Wherever one ultimately stands as a scholar or educated reader in the context of Dr. Goldhagen's thesis, that stand behind this book or the many arguments he presents in support of those thesis. It is clear that Hitler's Willing Executioners remains an important and influential work about the Holocaust, about the Germans in the mid-20th century as well as both before and after, and about the Germans and the Holocaust in general.

Let us welcome this evening's presidential lecturer, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and his lecture, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. [Applause]

Dennis. Thank you for your very kind introduction and thank you all and uh President Dennison for having me here. Um, very pleased to be part of this lecture series which I know has had many distinguished lecturers. What I will do this evening, you've already been told, is lay out the fundamentals of uh my understanding of the Holocaust, of its perpetrators. And uh before I do so, I just want to make a prefatory remark or two.

I will speak about Germans and the Holocaust. And you should know that there I will be giving you the central thrust of my understanding and that for everything I say there are exceptions, there are qualifications. We can talk about them afterwards and so please don't hear me as saying that whatever statements I make apply to every single person at every single moment. So keep in mind there are exceptions. Um, having said that, I think that the exceptions are the minor part of the story. And so I will give you the major part of the story, but I still want you to keep them in mind.

And the first issue that I want to tell you about is how I came to the study of the perpetrators because it in itself is significant. And this was during one of the other major debates uh about the Holocaust and Germany during the Nazi period, probably the only one that should be added to your otherwise comprehensive list of them, which was the so-called intentionalist-functionalist debate which took place in the 1980s. Uh, and this was a debate about the initiation of the extermination of the Jews. The questions were who gave the order, when exactly was it given and what were the circumstances of the order being taken and promulgated. When I was in this debate was taking place when I was in my early years in graduate school and I was listening to a speaker giving a presentation on the debate when I realized that all those taking part in the debate were not asking a second important question. And by this time most of the major figures in the field had weighed in and the second question was: when Hitler and it was Hitler gave the order for the annihilation of the Jews, why did people carry it out? All those in the debate seemed to assume that once the order was given, it would be implemented as automatically as reflexively as a machine would roll forward when you flicked a switch. Now, it seemed quite clear to me that this is something that could not be assumed and that needed to be established. And so I began to look into the study of the perpetrators, look into the perpetrators. And it became clear to me quickly that at that point we collectively scholars in the field knew very little about them. In fact, you could have read the entire scholarly literature on the Holocaust at that time and you would have learned almost nothing about the perpetrators. Such a fundamental question as how many people by any reasonable definition of what a perpetrator is could be called perpetrators? How many perpetrators were there was not only unanswered in the literature. The question was literally not asked. You had no idea. It's a phenomenon of one kind if say 5,000 people are involved and a phenomenon of another kind if let's say half a million are. And yet we didn't know something as basic as this. And so I set out to write a study of them knowing that that the knowing that there that there were vast resources for studying the perpetrators which had been essentially unused.

And when I began to do my research, certain things became clear to me very quickly. And before I mention them, let me just say that one of the things that I from the beginning sought to do was to shift, and this is clear by the nature of the project itself, shift the focus of attention in the study of the Holocaust away from where it was, this was quite self-consciously a project on my part, from where it was, which was on Hitler and the leadership who were pretty much the only people who were studied and abstract institutions and structures. So really away from abstract institutions and structures such as the terror apparatus so-called, the SS, the Nazi party, and to restore to the center of the story the human beings who were the agents of the mass murder, who were the people who carried out the mass murder, who implemented it, who slaughtered people. And in doing so, I wanted to restore a strong notion of human agency, which is a philosophical term that in other that in religion or many religions is called free will, but can be understood to mean something very basic which ran against much of the grain of the scholarship at the time. I mean the basic thing that agency can be understood to mean is that people have the capacity to know what they are doing, to judge what they are doing according to their values. That is to judge whether it's right or wrong and furthermore have at least in principle the capacity to say no, to make a choice about how to act. And it seemed to me quite clear that one had to at least consider the strong possibility that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human agents who had these capacities.

And so I began to do research on the perpetrators and and as I said there were rich sources for studying them. The first was the vast materials collected by the German legal authorities during their post-war legal investigations which led to the trials of several thousand perpetrators. Many of you, I'm sure, have heard of the Nuremberg trials, which were conducted by the Allies immediately after the war. What many people don't know is that starting in the 50s and systematically in the late 1950s, the authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany of the time, began to do systematic investigations of Nazi crimes, specifically murder, specifically but not exclusively the murder of the Jews. And starting the late 50s, they did these investigations, as I said, very systematically and thoroughly. And in the course of them interrogated all the kinds of people that you would want to interrogate in such murder investigations. All the perpetrators you could find, whatever victims you could find and also whatever witnesses otherwise called bystanders who were available and of course collect whatever documentary material was pertinent to a given case. These materials were in the German justice system and they were essentially unused. They had been used by a few scholars in certain ways but essentially unused. Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of interrogations. So I knew I could use these for a study.

And there was another rich source for studying the perpetrators and that is the testimonies of the victims independent of these trials. There's a vast memoir literature from Jewish victims which had been also essentially unused by those writing about the perpetration of the Holocaust. These testimonies have been used by those writing about the victims, the Jews under Nazism, the condition of Jews in the ghettos and camps and elsewhere, but not to shed light on the perpetrators. And in fact, victims know a great deal about the people who are brutalizing them or simply incarcerating them, guarding them, brutalizing them, etc., etc. I'll come back to these testimonies later on because it's significant. There are significant aspects of them aside from what they reveal.

And so I went to Germany, which is where the materials on the perpetrators are. And quickly several things became clear to me that led me to think that we needed to revise our understanding of the Holocaust in fundamental ways. And I'll tell you of some of the central points.

Contrary to how the perpetrators have been represented to the extent that there had even been some kind of discussion of this, uh, the number of people involved in the perpetration of the Holocaust was by no means small. Let me just say that by perpetrator I mean, and you can come up with some other reasonable definition, but the one I use is anyone knowingly involved in some intimate way, in some direct way, in the killing of Jews at any stage. So that means people who shot Jews, people who manned the camps, people who guarded ghettos, people who rounded up Jews knowing if they knew what they were rounding the Jews up for, people who transported them. Anyone who was involved in the machinery of destruction in some way is a perpetrator. And let me just say that I focused the book on the German perpetrators. There are books and there have been more studies to be written about the perpetrators in other countries. I restricted myself to the Germans for two reasons. One is because it was enough to do to begin with and second, quite obviously, it's because the Holocaust was started as a German enterprise and the thrust of it and most of it was came from Germany and so many of the perpetrators were German. That's where, to use a colloquialism, the action was.

I wanted to come up with a number of people who by this reasonable definition could be called perpetrators, but realized early on in my study that it would have taken too much time and too much effort to the exclusion of other things to come up with a good number. So I settled for a rather imprecise but still instructive figure. By any reasonable definition of what a perpetrator is, there were at bare minimum 100,000 Germans who were perpetrators of mass murder. And the number was undoubtedly far higher. I gave a low number in the book because of the charges that that fly easily from people's lips over this subject, charges of exaggeration. I gave a purpose-low number. Let me give you some figures that gives you a sense of what the numbers might be. Uh, the German justice, the part of the German, the institute in the German justice system that coordinates the investigation of Nazi crimes, they had a clearing house for the investigations, has a catalog. And when I was doing my research in their unit catalog that lists the names of all people who were suspected of having been in institutions of killing, they had the names of over 300,000 people. That's a complicated number because in some ways it overstates the number of people, anyone suspected of having been in an institution is in there. Obviously the same people move from institution to institution at times and other ways it underestimates because clearly they didn't know about anything, but it's an enormous number.

Um, when you move beyond the Germans who were involved in the killing of the Jews, let's broaden out for a moment because it's not just the slaughter of Jews. It's not only the Jews that Germans were slaughtering and not only against Jews that they were committing deeds that we would consider to be criminal. But when one moves beyond the perpetrators of the Holocaust per se to looking at the broader criminality, other numbers become relevant. There were at the end of the war more than 7 million slave laborers working in the German economy, most of whom were not Jewish slaves. They were really slaves. One of the many radical things the Nazis did, usually not discussed in this way or conceptualized properly, is that they reintroduced slavery into the European continent. All of these slaves had to be guarded, kept in line, often with considerable violence. To get them there in the first place required considerable violence. Germans killed many of them. All these people and the number of people who were involved in dealing with these slaves is unknown and obviously astronomical. In addition to that, there were camps all over the European continent and in all over Germany itself. There were at minimum 10,000 concentration camps, German concentration camps in Europe. Some you've all heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc., a few of those and some had enormous production facilities like Auschwitz, but there were many also small camps dotting the German and dotting the European, particularly the East European countryside. Again, all these camps had to be guarded. They were embedded in local economies as were the use of slaves. The number of Germans involved in deeds that we would deem to be fundamentally criminal and that Germans today would deem to be fundamentally criminal is as I said unknown and utterly astronomical. And I'll say parenthetically, when you hear, which one often can, people not just Germans but others say, "But nobody knew about these things back then," think about the numbers I've given. It is simply a bald-faced lie to say something like that. Or people may say this without knowing better, but it is simply not plausible on any level that people didn't know about the fundamental criminality of this regime.

So knowing that there were so many Germans involved in the annihilation of the Jews leads to a question, a very simple question, which is: Why would a large number of Germans kill Jews? Why would they do it?

A second central fact of the Holocaust is that again, contrary to how the perpetrators had for so long been represented, most of the perpetrators were not the frenzied followers of the regime, not in the SS, not in the Nazi party. One of the units that I studied in depth when I did my research, and I particularly chose this kind of unit because the men one presumed were not Nazi party members in great numbers or SS men, were police battalions or reserve police battalions. These were units of men that were raised when Germany conquered the European continent and needed police forces to garrison the occupied territories. You conquer Poland, you move into the Soviet Union, you conquer France, you need policemen to maintain order. The units were raised in the following manner. The police chief of Germany would send a telegram to the police chief of Bremen or Munich or wherever and say that he needed to raise a unit or two units of reserve policemen. Each unit had roughly about five, roughly 500 men in them. And he should choose men who were from certain age cohorts. And then he would specify the age cohorts. They chose men who were older, typically in their 30s, men who were not at that point. This is often in 1941, 40, 41, 42 when there is a full, an all-out war or all-out mobilization taking place or already having occurred. These were men who were not already in military or police institutions, which suggests that they were neither the most zealous followers of the regime nor the most martial in spirit. And the manner of choosing them, simply taking men in certain age cohorts who were not in the military or police, who were older, suggests that you would get some kind of cross-section of the German population. Again, not particularly Nazified, not particularly martial in spirit. These men came from all regions of Germany. And so what you would expect is a group of men who were not the kind of people that armies or police institutions typically like to mold, which is young, unknowing, unworldly people who they can mold in any image. These were men after all who had actually lived under another political system, the Weimar, the democratic Weimar political system. They had families. They were married. They had families. They had children. They had some life experience. And when you do the demographic work on them, in fact, what you would expect is borne out. Their occupational profile roughly mirrored that of Germany as a whole, which is a good indication they came from all walks of life. They had all religious backgrounds. Many of them were fathers, had children, most of them were married. And their fidelity to the regime, their zealousness, which can be judged by institutional affiliation, was about that or less than that of the country as a whole. Their SS party membership was about 4% in the units I've studied, which was higher than the national average, but it means 96% of them were not SS men, not members of the regime's Praetorian Guard, and the vast majority of them were also not Nazi party members.

And so when you see this, or I should say, when the regime began its assault upon the Jews of Europe and it found these men in the occupied territories because they were there, it just mobilized them for the killings. It gave them very little prior indoctrination, if you want to call it that, or teaching. That very so little that you could not plausibly think that the ideological training they got as part of these units would be enough to turn people around who had different, who had prior different views than what they were being taught. Some of these units were raised and sent essentially right to the front, right to the killing with virtually no training, either military, not much military training, nor ideological training. And what the regime found is that these men had little difficulty in killing Jews and killed Jews just as well and just as much as SS men or any others in Germany did. And so what one sees here is that these were ordinary Germans by any standard of what one of what one would call ordinary during this period. And so this leads, knowing this fact, leads to a revision of the question I asked, which now becomes: Why would a very large number of ordinary Germans kill Jews?

A third central fact of the Holocaust which should be at the center of every single discussion of its perpetration and which has been absent from almost every single discussion of its perpetration, certainly before I wrote my book and even to this day. It's quite amazing how rarely this fact is mentioned and is a and and is a self-indictment I think of many of the people working in this field. The fact is that contrary to how the perpetrators, or rather how this period had been represented and the perpetrators in this period had been represented, never in the history of the Holocaust did a German, was a German perpetrator ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. They were simply not coerced. And we know it's not only that we presume that this didn't happen. We can say as a historical fact it did not happen because there was such an enormous effort on the part of many people to uncover cases where a perpetrator was punished for refusing to kill Jews. And the reason there was such an enormous effort to find any such person, let alone many such people, is that it was a critical legal issue for the prosecution in all cases and for the defendants in all cases because there was always or frequently this claim of coercion or presumed coercion. And so whether it actually was coercion was a critical issue because obviously if you're being coerced, if a gun is being put to your head, it changes the nature of your actions legally. This issue was first investigated in Nuremberg where they scoured the internment camps for prisoners of war and others looking for people or stories of people who had been co who had been punished in this way. The German legal authorities have subsequently investigated every single case where it was claimed that someone was killed or severely punished for refusing to kill Jews and have shown that every such claim is baseless. And there are further reasons to believe that it would not and did not happen. We can say it never happened. And it's not only that we know that no perpetrator was ever so punished for refusing to kill Jews. And so therefore, we presume we presume that people had some leeway because it's unlikely that every single German would have wanted to kill Jews. In fact, we know that many perpetrators had the option to exempt themselves from the killing. In one unit of policemen I've studied, before the first killing operation, the commander, who was deemed to be a kindly man, in fact, his nickname among his men was Papa. He was quite solicitous of them. Assembled his men, told them what they were bound to do the next day and told them that if they, anyone, and told them that if anyone was not up to it, that he could step forward and he would be exempted from the killing. When the offer was made, only a few of them accepted the offer. And even if some of the others had thought that this was a ruse and there was no good reason for them to think it, given their relationship with their commander, they saw that indeed the other men were given other duties and they were not forced to kill. And so they knew that they didn't have to do it. And yet in this unit and in the other units where we know that the perpetrators had such an option, only a very small percentage of the men availed themselves of the option not to kill Jews in cold blood. And we know that this happened because the perpetrators themselves have told us this. It is the German perpetrators who have testified that they have had these options. And so that is all the more reason to believe that the possibility to get out of the killing existed at least in many units and yet so few did. And knowing this leads to a further revision of the question that I've been asking, which now becomes: Why would a very large number of ordinary Germans choose to kill Jews? Why would they choose to do it?

This in my view is the central question, or if not the central question, certainly one of the central questions of the Holocaust. And any account of the Holocaust of the Holocaust which purports to explain it that does not answer this question must be deemed to be a faulty explanation. And while this is a central question of the Holocaust, or the central question, it's not the only thing that must be asked about the perpetrators. One of the striking things in the literature on the Holocaust is, in the shadow of the killing, how the perpetrators' other actions have been lost from our analytical view. Because after all, the killers were not clinicians, coolly dispatching their patients with minimal pain, doing as little as they needed to. They did many other things and they're quite clear patterns of the things they did to their victims. They too need to be explained. In fact, we need to recognize that the perpetrators lived complex lives and were really human beings, not caricatures, robotic individuals as they're often portrayed to be. And that they did. And we have to come to understand the fullness of their lives as killers and their lives during the time they were killing, which included lots and lots of actions towards Jews, towards non-Jews, towards others, among themselves.

Now, some of the things they did towards Jews included the immense brutality that they visited upon their victims. Beating Jews, torturing them in so many ways was so common, in fact, was more common than the act of killing itself. It was so common as to have been a constituent feature of the Holocaust, as central to its perpetration as the killing itself. As so many Germans have testified after the war and they use the same kind of phraseology, "Beating Jews was our daily bread." It was the daily bread of guards in camp after camp after camp, in ghetto after ghetto. Why would they do this? Why would they beat and torture their victims?

A second set of actions that the perpetrators, or second kind of action the perpetrators undertook, was to volunteer for killing operations. It's not just that they carried out the orders they were told to. They often volunteered to go on killing operations. In one unit of men I've studied, one was police battalion, notices, they were stationed in Poland at the time. Notices of search and destroy missions, that is to find Jews who had fled the ghettos, who were hiding in the forest. Notices for these search and destroy missions were put up in the company's headquarters, just put up on the bulletin board, saying that on such and such day, at such and such time, a search and destroy mission would begin to find Jews in a particular region. Anyone interested in joining such a search and destroy mission should show up at that time. Just think for a moment about this. What kind of world did these men live in that this was posted on a bulletin board and routinely so? How normal it was in every sense of normal, perhaps, but certainly in the sense of being an ordinary part of their lives, an unremarkable part of their lives, that such notices would simply be posted on bulletin boards. And then according to the testimony of the men themselves, more men would typically show up than were needed for the missions. They had no problem staffing these missions. And then what is significant is that they would go out and find the Jews and kill them. Searching for Jews hiding in the forest, hiding in the countryside is like searching for a needle in a haystack. The easiest thing to do when you're looking for a needle in a haystack is not to find it. And yet they went out again and again and found and killed the Jews as they themselves have testified. Why would they do that? What is the significance of it? Where did the zeal come from? And finally, focusing on these search and destroy missions. What is significant is what they called them among themselves, which was "Jew hunts." The hunt is a pleasurable activity. No danger to the hunters. They were Jew hunts.

So in addition to the killing is the brutality, the cruelty, the torturing, the volunteerism and the zeal which I've mentioned. The image, the appropriate image of the perpetrators of the Holocaust is not that of reluctant killers dragging their feet, doing as little as they have to, holding back, having to be prodded forward. But instead is of men ferociously, zealously, with enormous energy pursuing their goals. Their goals being the annihilation of their targeted victims, the Jews. One of the striking things about the Holocaust is the immense zeal of the perpetrators. The zeal on the micro level, which is at the point of attack, the ghetto clearings as they were called, the roundups. If any of you have seen Schindler's List, which is not a historical document, it's a, you know, dramatic film so it's not evidence as such and it is not without its flaws, but the part of it that is excellent is the rounding up of the Jews of the Krakow ghetto. That is depicted quite well, the ferocity, the energy that is done well and accurately. So if you see the movie or if you have seen it, dwell on that scene, think about it. So the zeal was seen at the point of attack, but also in the overall operation, in the overall execution, rather, of the mass murder. Here we had a continent-wide assault upon a people for which there were no precedents, no logistical maps, had to be conducted by a wide range of institutions that were not always that good at cooperating with each other and were often quite antagonistic. That is, the different kinds of German institutions that required the overcoming of all kinds of obstacles and all kinds of initiative. And the most striking thing about this far-flung operation for which there was no precedent and so on and so forth is how smoothly it was implemented. How it went forth without a hitch. Where did the zeal and energy come from? Anyone who has been part of a large organization knows how difficult it is to move people in a direction, people in an organization if they don't want to go there. And yet this was implemented like clockwork.

In addition, there's still other things about the perpetrators. You may imagine, most of you have seen photographs of the Holocaust. The photographs are enormously significant and again, not discussed properly. You see photographs in books and they're almost never discussed. The first thing that needs to be said about them is that we have them because the Germans took them and they took them quite obviously not to indict themselves. They took them furthermore against a stream of orders that came down from in every institution involved in the mass murder that photographing was not permitted precisely because the authorities did not want so much documentary evidence to exist about what they were doing. And we'll come back to this, significantly enough, against the orders not to photograph killing operations against Jews, Germans routinely photographed them. So much so that the camera was an all but ever-present part of killing operations. So much so that like the killing, like the beating, like the cruelty, one can say a cam, the camera was a constituent feature of the Holocaust. And then it's not just that they took them, but what the images reveal. Germans standing next to bearded Jews cutting their beards, forcing them to pose in degrading positions. Germans with their victims, their prey, with big smiles on their face, grinning, laughing. Why would they want themselves to be depicted in this way? Why would they want such images? What do these images reveal about their attitudes towards what's towards what they were doing? Furthermore, it's significant what they did with these photographs after they took them. They passed them around. They brought them home. In this unit that I studied intensively, photographs were hung in the headquarters and anyone could order copies of them, just as one might order copies of snapshots taken of the beasts one has slain on safari. Imagine in the same headquarters where the notices are put up about going on Jew hunts, there are then photographs that you can order copies of. And furthermore, the reason we have so many photographs are because after the war, when the German legal authorities arrested perpetrators to put them on trial, they found the photographs in albums in their homes, often with identifying words like "mementos," identifying identifying words written on them so they like mementos so they could remember the significance of the photographs.

So how do we explain all of this? And finally, the perpetrators so frequently celebrated their deeds, actively celebrated after milestones had been reached in the annihilation of Jews of a particular city or region. Jews often had b-, sorry, the Germans often had banquets or parties, banquets which they called "death banquets." The unit, a unit of one policeman which was guarding the Warsaw ghetto and preventing Jews from leaving the ghetto and returning to the ghetto, bringing back the meager provisions they could bring back in order to try to keep themselves and their families alive. This unit had in their headquarters what they called a shrine to the death of the Jews in which they recorded figurative notches for every Jew they killed leaving or returning to the ghetto. Why would they do that? The Germans all over Eastern Europe and not just there, but typically there, celebrated Jewish holidays in an impromptu fashion. Passover, Yom Kippur. This was done so frequently without orders from above by rounding up or apprehending or getting a hold of the Jews they most identified with Jewishness, rabbis, community leaders, older men with long beards, and would torture them, cut their beards, force them into degrading positions as ways to celebrate Jewish holidays. The most feared days of the year for Jews under German domination were their own holidays because they knew what awaited them. Why would they celebrate in all the ways? Why would they mark symbolically in a positive manner all the things in all the ways that they did the things they were doing?

So these are some of the other aspects of the Holocaust, that is of the perpetrators' actions, that need to be explained, not just the killing. So how do we explain them? There have been, even though there had been virtually no study of the perpetrators themselves, that is, no empirical foundation for drawing conclusions about them, still many notions were put forward over the years and I'll just tell you them and go over them quickly.

The first, and you've all heard this, is that the killers were coerced. They were forced to do what they did. Kill or be killed. Everyone understands how that can motivate people to do things they might not otherwise want to do.

A second notion holds that the perpetrators were merely being obedient to authority. That under the guise of authority, these Germans, like other people, often do things that they wouldn't otherwise do and that authority tends to elicit its own obedience. This is one version, a general kind of notion about the ways in which authority produces obedience. And then there was a more specific German account of this, which is Germans are particularly slavishly devoted to authority. Again, many of you have probably heard this.

A third notion is that the perpetrators were subjected to social psychological pressure, particularly peer pressure. And we all know how social psychological pressure, peer pressure, can get people to act in ways they would not have expected themselves to act.

And finally, there was a notion that these were bureaucrats acting as bureaucrats do, which is to get a, which is to do a job well. And again, we've all seen people in bureaucratic positions doing things according to the book, as opposed to acting in other perhaps more ethical ways than they, than the book says that they should.

Now, all of these explanations, as I said, have been put forward, and I will explain to you in a moment why they should all be rejected. But first, I want to point out their common structure and common failing, which is each of these explanations posits that the perpetrators either did not approve of or actively disapproved of what they were doing. And each of the explanations provides a mechanism to explain how people who disapproved of or who otherwise or who did not approve of what they were doing could be brought to do it anyway. They had to be coerced. You wouldn't say that if people wanted to do it. They were merely following authority or they were slavishly devoted to authority. You wouldn't say that if they thought it was the right thing to do. They were pressured socially psychologically to do it or they were just bureaucrats with a narrow bureaucratic mentality doing whatever the job requires, but without any internal approval or inner assent to what they were doing. Now, those who put forward these explanations had never actually demonstrated, and indeed had not really asked the question, and not really asked, they had never really demonstrated that the perpetrators actually disapproved or did not approve of what they were doing. They simply posited these explanations which were derived from philosophical notions or social psychological notions or simply simply arrived at in one manner or another, but not through the study of the perpetrator. So they have this common structure and common failing, which is in itself is a sufficient reason to think that they may not be valid and certainly would require the showing of the, for them to be valid, to show it would require that this foundation of disapproval or lack of approval be demonstrated, which it hasn't been.

But aside from this common failing, there are other reasons to reject the explanations. I'll run through them quickly. I've already explained to you, I already told you why we know the perpetrators were not coerced, or we can say that those perpetrators we know that were not coerced killed anyway. So there's no reason to believe, we have no reason to believe that it was different for other perpetrators. The notion that they were merely obeying authority can be shown to be false in many ways. For one thing, we know that authority does not elicit obedience in every example. In fact, it's almost a laughable notion that this was put forward. To give an example which is not meant in a jocular fashion, but people cheat on their taxes everywhere. Italians are famously disobedient to authority. The problems that all states have is trying to get citizens and even their own functionaries to actually obey laws and implement them. The reason there is so much crime in the world is because people are not obeying state authority. And in fact, when we look at Germany, we see that the same people who were supposedly slavishly devoted to state authority were during Weimar, the democratic regime that preceded Nazism, were under Weimar fighting in the streets of Weimar to destroy the state authority of the time. And miraculously, they're deemed to be robotic implementers of state authority once the Nazis come into power. What this shows is quite obviously not that people, and not that Germans are slavishly devoted to any authority, but that they, Germans like other people, assess the legitimacy of authority, of state authority, and willingly obey state authority they deem to be legitimate and struggle against authority that they deem to be illegitimate. And you would think that the order to slaughter entire communities and then community after community of unarmed, manifestly unthreatening men, women, and children would in itself delegitimize any state authority, if indeed you did not think that that was the right thing to do.

Furthermore, Germans throughout the Nazi period routinely disobeyed state authority and resisted all manner of policy which they disagreed with. One of the many fallacies about Nazi Germany is that it was a totalitarian terrorist state on the image of the Soviet Union or the image that was put forward about Nazi Germany. It simply wasn't. If you were a non-Jewish, non-gay, non-Gypsy German, Germans resisted economic policies, all kinds of laws, religious policies. At the same time that they're implementing anti-Jewish policies, they're protesting against the regime for de-, for ordering the, for ordering in Bavaria that crucifixes be removed from schools. Statewide, statewide protests, shutting down of schools. Why? Because the regime was doing something that violated their deepest values and they resisted. And what typically happened when Germans resisted the regime is that the regime backed down. And yet they didn't resist any aspect of the persecution and extermination of the Jews in anything like what I just mentioned. So, Germans resisted. They evaluated what the regime was doing according to their values. They thought about it. They made decisions and they made choices. The perpetrators themselves often resisted orders they didn't approve of. All manner of orders. I open the book with a description with an account of the captain in this police battalion I've been discussing frequently who refused an order. He had an order from the, from, he had, they had been given orders. I know, I'm sorry. They had been given an order to sign an oath. Again, another significant small episode. That's, they had been given an order to sign an oath that they would not steal from Poles. The captain wrote back saying that he would not ask his men to sign the order. In fact, he refused to do so. Because the signing of the order would imply that without signing an order that they would not steal from Poles, that they in fact would steal from Poles, and that the act of signing such an order would besmirch their honor as Germans and soldiers, as he put it. A remarkable document, a remarkable act on so many levels. First, what kind of mental world does he live in? That he's that they're slaughtering Jews by the tens of thousands and he thinks that the act of stealing food from Poles would be a violation, a burmer-, bismerching of their honor as Germans and soldiers. What is their mental world, their mental moral universe that this makes sense to him? Second, he, as you've already discerned, is evaluating the order according to his values, making judgment and willing to make choices to go against it. And furthermore, deems this institution, which is after all a hierarchical police institution during wartime, not exactly the most freewheeling kinds of institutions in Nazi Germany. He deems the institution to be so draconian that he's willing to put his insubordination in writing and send it up the chain of command. And he knows the institution for which he works because he was not punished for doing this and life went on. So the perpetrators too, I have many, many examples, disobeyed orders frequently. Disobedience to authority simply has no empirical, let alone conceptual validity for explaining the perpetrators' actions towards the victims.

The notion that they were moved by social psychological pressure also doesn't make sense. Social psychological pressure, peer pressure works if a majority of the people want to do something and an individual small group find themselves subjected to the pressure of those wanting to do the thing that he, the individual, or the people in the small group don't want to do. It can certainly explain how certain individuals felt pressured to do things they would not otherwise have wanted to do or not, or would not have otherwise done. And I have no doubt that that happened. But it cannot possibly be a general explanation for the perpetration, for the perpetrators' actions. Because as a general explanation, social psychological pressure implodes on itself. Because if all of the men or

If most of the men had thought that this was a great crime and didn't want to do it, it would have only increased their collective resolve to resist doing it. It cannot possibly be a general explanation.

And also we should know that the person that even the person who puts forward this explanation most strongly cannot point to a single case of a perpetrator actually saying that this is what happened. None of the perpetrators say that this is why they did it. This explanation is simply invented out of whole cloth.

And finally, the notion that the perpetrators were bureaucrats implementing their orders as a bureaucrat in Ohio or Montana might implement a tax policy he doesn't like coming from Washington is to fundamentally misunderstand what we're talking about, which is not the implementation of a tax policy, but the shooting of men, women, and children, often at point blank range in scenes of unspeakable gruesomeness, with the perpetrators becoming spattered by the bone and brains and blood and flesh of the victims.

In the book, which I will not do for you tonight, I describe the killing scenes in great and graphic detail. In my view, again, most literature on the Holocaust is antiseptic. You may not think that because you read some of these accounts and they seem pretty gruesome, but I think they really are antiseptic because the accounts and the significance of the gruesomeness is is not discussed. And there's only a paragraph or two. You got you need in a sense to wade in the blood that the perpetrators waited in in order to ask the appropriate question. And I present this material not to horrify you, but to for you to try to understand what the horror must have been like for the people doing this. Not for the victims, we all know that, but for the people doing it, if indeed they didn't think it was the right thing to do.

And so it forces the question, which is not how a bureaucrat in Montana can implement a tax policy he doesn't like, but how people can bring themselves to do that to slaughter men, women, and children day after day in this manner? Where do the psychological and emotional wherewithal come to persist in this? Especially when you know that the perpetrators knew that they didn't have to do it.

Now, the explanations that I have discussed and rejected when looking at the killing at least have a surface plausibility. They make sense when you first hear them. While they cannot at second glance account for the killing, the plausibility they have when thinking about that, they do not even begin to have when you look at the other actions of the perpetrators that I've discussed, which those people who put forward these explanations do not even address those actions. And I'll run through them quickly.

No explanation which holds the perpetrators to have disapproved or not to have approved of the perpetration of the killing of what they were doing can tell us why they would torture and brutalize and beat their victims and why they would do it as much as they did which was an enormous amount. If you're told to kill someone, you do not have to beat and torture the person first. And yet this is what they typically did.

No explanation which holds the perpetrators to have disapproved or not to have approved of what they did could tell us why and I didn't mention this before they so frequently degraded and mocked their vis victims. Laughter was another constituent feature of the Holocaust. The laughter of the perpetrators at the plight and suffering of the victims.

No explanation which holds the perpetrators to have deni to have disapproved or not to have approved of what they did can explain to us where the zeal and the energy and the ferocity came from that could be seen the macro level and at the point of attack.

No explanation which holds the perpetrators to have disapproved or not to have approved of what they did can explain the enormously widespread volunteering for killing operations.

No explanation which holds the perpetrators to have disapproved or not to have approved of what they did can tell us why they would so frequently photograph and memorialize what they did and so frequently and all the things they did with those photographs. And no such explanation can tell us why the perpetrator so frequently celebrated what they were doing. and marked in so many ways symbolically in a positive manner their deeds.

None of these explanations have even a surface plausibility for these actions. The only way to explain why the perpetrators did what they did is to recognize that they were anti-semites. that they were Hitlerian Hitlerian anti-semites who believed that the slaughter of the Jews was right and necessary who approve of what they were doing. It is the only way.

Now, if we had another hour or so, I would explain the character. I would go into the character of this anti-semitism and explain how it developed and where it came from and how we can also make much more sense of Germany in the 1930s in light of it. That's a talk for another time. I'll just say that what I've done until now and I'll just speak for a little more and then I'll open it up for your comments and questions and criticisms.

What I've done is what social scientists typically do when they try to arrive at an explanation, which is to hold up the actions, the outcomes rather, that need to be explained. In this case, the actions of the perpetrators on the one hand and the plausible hypotheses on the other that purport to explain or account for these outcomes and then to rule them out until one is left or one can be constructed that can plausibly account for the outcomes. in this case, the actions of the perpetrators that need to be explained.

If we knew nothing more about the Holocaust and these patterns of actions that I've laid out for you, I think we'd be forced to conclude what I've put forward here, that the perpetrators were asenting mass murderers moved by anti-semitism to kill and torture and so on and so forth all the things they did to Jews. If we knew nothing more, we would have to draw that conclusion.

But we do know more. We know a great deal more about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. We know from the victims who say almost in a single voice that they hated us, that they were anti-semites, that they told us in so many ways that we deserved the fate that we did, that we received, and who significantly enough seemed to take pains to describe time a German in the camp or the ghetto who differed from the others by not hating them by not torturing them or if under the watchful eye of a superior by hitting them in a way calculated to do less damage than the others did. Such Germans were seen to be startling, startling, unexpected, almost heroic figures in the eerie landscape in the Dantesque landscape the Jews inhabited under German domination.

We have the vast money of the the vast testimony of the victims which as I told you before has barely been used and it's not been used by the people who put forward these other views quite obviously because what the victims say roundly repeatedly voluminously and roundly falsify the claims they are putting forward and those who put forward these claims not all of them many of them just don't use the testimonies they ignore them in silence but others actively ly deprecate them and say that they should not be used which is quite stunning. I know of no other instance of mass murder or brutality or oppression where it said that the victims the testimony of the victims should not be used. The victims don't know anything about the people who are oppressing or repressing or perpetrating violence against them. It is a shocking state of affairs.

But this is what the victims say. It's not just a testimony of the victims, but also the testimony of the perpetrators. Listen to the member of one police battalion who explained the main spring of the Holocaust when in his post-war testimony, he said, not just speaking for himself, but for all of his comrades, the Jew was not considered by us to be a human being.

And if one listens to another policeman who was in the Lublin region of Poland, one understands the source of the great brutality or some of the source of the great brutality that the Germans exhibited towards the Jews. He said that all those around him liked to go on killing operations. They enjoyed it. For them it was a ball. Why? It was revenge. Revenge not for anything Jews had actually done to Germans, but revenge for the harms that Germans in their anti-semitically inflamed minds believed, imagined, fantasized that Jews had done to them and their loved ones and to other Germans.

One listens to this man and thinks about revenge killings which are typically cruel which includes taunting and degrading the victims. One see gets a sense of the source of this great brutality the rage the taunting the cruelty. There's a sense in which the Holocaust can be seen its perpetration that is as an immense revenge killing. Again, not for anything Jews had actually done, but for what the anti-semites said and most Germans who were anti-semitic believe the Jews had done to them.

And so it's not just because of the actions of the perpetrators, but it's also the testimony of the victims and the testimony of the perpetrators themselves, which leads us to the conclusion, I think, that the inescapable conclusion that most of the perpetrators were willing or anti-semitic, Hitleran anti-semmites, and willing executioners.

Now, let me just end by saying that as you were told in the introduction, my book has been deemed controversial. And I must tell you, and I say this not tongue and cheek. I'm really quite surprised by this. When people think of other mass slaughters, think of anyone you know, Rwanda, for Yugoslavia, Darur, whatever, whichever ones you know about, or just think about how they're represented. It is automatically almost reflexively assumed that the perpetrators of these mass slaughters believe that what they're believed or believe that what they're doing is right that that they are asenting to what they're doing. It's not even questioned by and large. What the critics of my book are saying is that the Holocaust, the German perpetrators are the one exception to everything we know about mass murder. And what I'm saying is that in this respect, the German perpetrators are like the perpetrators of other mass murders. They too were willing executioners. Thank you for listening and I'll be happy to hear your comments. Thank you.

First over here. Hello again. Oh, hi. Hi. U Thank you very much for bringing to consciousness this excruciating uh part of western history of ourselves. Might we like it or not? Uh but your question comes down to what Aaron say about the banality of evil. Why is evil quote unquote which is already a problematic world uh so plain and I don't think your book is controversial according to me but I would see it doesn't go far enough because there are other explanations which uh are not in the realm of pragmatics or empiricism or traditional criticism you have to shift uh tools if you want and I don't know if it's explanation is the try to work if there's such a thing as a satisfying explanation speaking about genocide holocaust but um your question is and I don't know if by I know you are specializing through your uh scholarship on anti-semitism itself but anti-semitism or this type of extreme prejudice doesn't stop or start with anti-semitism it's genocide in general what was done to the Jews in a scientific, technical, industrial way was done in another mode to the Indians. The concistador ran into the feminine matrix of the uh native Americans and did horrible things. So the problem is how selfhate is changed and projected on the other. Right. And you spoke about pleasure was very interesting Jewish sounds. There's a word in German ginos. How come in certain period of history pleasure the projection of selfhatred and uh torture sadism is given free reign and there are tools sorry to say the words not psychology psychoanalysis okay and in the 20s artist in Germany like vinner the cabinet of Dr. Dr. Galleri, Dr. Mabus, they smelled, so to speak, so French, they smelled what was coming off. And so the the thing to to do would say, how did Hitler, how the Nazi mismearized the working German uh class, you know, the German, the largest socialist communist class in Europe until 1932. And they Hitler with his spoken machine went into the unconscious and there's analysis you have to read against the grain susan z.

Let me as as you have before you you we had a seminar earlier today you raised many different questions at once and I thank you for that so let me just but I'll I'll be telegraphic and um in response um whatever Whatever whatever the psychological or if you want psychoanalytic uh foundations are for the capacity of people to to do these kinds of things. Um the question still becomes and this actually may lead into the second part of your statement. The question becomes why are these kinds of capacities or these mechanisms activated and mobilized against certain kinds of people certain targets and not others. Um and in the case of in the case of uh the Holocaust uh you can easily show that the Germans the same perpetrators with the same presumably psych you know each individual is the same person at each um in dealing with different the different victims that the perpetrators systematically treated different victim groups differently. This happened in camp after camp after camp. There was a hierarchy of bad treatment. Everybody's treated badly. badly doesn't begin to convey the the horrors of what was perpetrated upon them. But the Jews are always treated the worst by the Germans. The Russians are treated the next worst. The Poles the next worst. West Europeans better. Northern Europeans better. Germans the best of all. So you can't explain. It's just a it's a basic a basic maximum of social science, but you don't have to be a social scientist or fancy to to to say this. It's a bas it's a basic it's a basic fact that you can't explain a variation outcome by looking to a constant source. So the only way to explain why the same people are treating different groups systematically differently without orders from above. And this happens again and again in camp after camp is by looking at their conception of the victim. Not their psychological dispositions or the psychoanalytic expression of some inner drive or some trauma or however you want to specify it, but at their differential conceptions of victims. And so we get back in the question of why Jews are conceived of the way they are in Germany and how that is similar or different to how other people deemed to be subhumans by the Germans, Russians, Poles, others are conceived of and why the West Europeans who are in camps are in camps and how the Germans see and again there's enormous variation on some of these dimensions but how the Germans see when they look at the human map and social map of the European continent. What kinds of beings do they see inhabiting different areas? What are the how do they conceive of the different groupings in different areas? And so, yes, that's what we have to do. But I don't think we can point to Hitler mesmerizing people for reasons that I've already implied, but have to look to the development of these kinds of prejudices and cognitive models of different groups in Germany and not just in Germany, but around Europe more broadly in the 19th century and into the 20th century and then during the Nazi period. So, one of the things we want to do when looking at the Holocaust, and I've only been speaking about the Jews by and large, is look at the brutal treatment, the murderous treatment by Germans of non-Jews and different non-Jewish groups, and do the kinds of comparative analysis both on the outcomes and also on the causes or potential causes that I did in just talking about Jews. And by doing that, we can build up a more differentiated and more and more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the events. Yes, let's go back and forth.

Your argument about anti-semitism I find persuasive, but if I decide to agree with you, I'm left with questions about still why did it happen? What was it that brought these forces that we hadn't really seen on such a scale before? Is there something about German culture? Was there something about the time? about pressures of modernization. Okay. What do you think the important factors to discuss there would be?

Okay. There's a very long answer and a quick one and I'll give you the quick one. Um the very long answer would would produce would include an account of the development of German politics and German political culture in the 19th century and into the 20th century. It's long and complicated. I won't give that here. Um, and that would explain two things. Why these kinds of notions, whether it be about Jews or about Slavs, Slavic peoples came into being and how they were pro how they took on the forms that they did and how they became as disseminated as widely or narrowly as they did. And it would also help us understand why the Nazis came to power. Obviously, that's a critical part of this. Why German political development was such that the Vimmer Republic fell apart and the Nazis came to power. The short answer, so that would be the what the long answer would have to include. The short answer is that anti-semitism and other kinds of prejudice never produce genocides or large scale mass murders on their own. And the most intensive prejudices don't. They produce riots, pilgrims, attacks that eventually peter out unless they're organized and channeled and sus in a direction that is to sustain which needs to be done by a state. In all mass murders, you have two factors coming together and they're necessary factors. One is a prejudice and I prejudice is a shortand for a bunch of different things. Ideas about other people, antipathies and so on and so forth. um prejudices from within a population so that you can recruit a population of perpetrators and a political leadership that decides to enact a program of mass murder. If you don't have that political leadership, prejudices, as bad as they can be, as bad as they are, lie dormant. I don't mean to say they don't produce ill effects for the victims. They do and can produce even violence. But but it takes political leadership to enact such a program. And what we had in Germany was an unusual confluence of circumstances in unusual in general in a general sense and singular in a specific sense. Unusual I thought this was a short answer. Unusual in that you had both this intense prejudice and against a series of prejudice not just against Jews come together with a political leadership that was motivated by the most virulent kind of anti-semitism and more generally a racial biological view of the world and to try to turn the world in refashion the world in this image a very unusual confluence of circumstances not unknown elsewhere but unusual but what made it singular is that this happened in the only country in the world that could have done something like this because it was the only country in the world that had the geostrategic and military power to conquer the European continent and to begin to enact this devastatingly murderous program against Jews and others. It didn't have to happen. Had Hitler not come to power or had he been assassinated early on, in all likelihood this or not, you know, certainly this in this form would not have happened. Who knows what would have happened. So a person of Hitler is critical for this because he was the prime mover. But just as Hitler was critical, so were the German people because the way to think about the relationship is not that Hitler mesmerized them or forced them to do things they wouldn't have done, but that he led them where in a where they would have in a sense where where they were in a sense already prepared to go, but would have never gone on their own without him.

Yes, your your argument which is sounds very reasonable is that the ordinary German existed in a mental immoral universe of virilent anti-semitism where mass murdered Jews seemed reasonable but right usually intellectuals think that they have some function in the forming of a metal moral universe where uh you your book mentions in pass and not in that great extent but to a certain extent about the absence of any counterveailing efforts by the clergy, but it says almost nothing about the universities. Um, what was the role of intellectuals? Were they caught up in the same anti-semitism? Did they have the same failings? Were they just as anti-semitic or was there any effort on their part?

Um, by and large they the anti-semitism that was the province of what we what have used to be called the masses um was also the province of the of the intellectuals. They were deeply they were deeply believing. Of course, there were exceptions, deeply complicit in what the in the pers regime's persecution. I mean, it was really another world. You would have doctors writing learned medical articles on how contact with Jewish blood would irrefutably would ir would irreversibly rather contaminate and pollute and and destroy German a person of good area stock. How if a German woman slept with a Jewish man and didn't even conceive, how her future children conceived with a German man would have Jewish characteristics. You have legal scholars writing legal treatises on all kinds of just out of this world things about why Jews must and this is also during the Vimar period must be why there must be these all these hundreds and eventually thousands of laws to prescribe Jewish contact with non-Jews and so on and so forth. um intellectuals of all stripes and one of while this may be hard for some of you to believe and you may be thinking look it couldn't really have been like that I mean this is too wacky um think back to the American think back to the history of our own country our founding fathers many of them were slaveholders many of them believe that people of African descent were genetically inferior and not only fit but deserving and would of being slaves and would benefit from being slaves or that was their the only the the place that they could best flourish given their limitations. These were highly cultivated, educated men. When people grow up in a world where certain notions of other groups, prejuditial, dehumanizing notions of other groups are the norm and indeed almost the unquestioned norm. They embibe this and believe it no less than people who are less educated. In fact, most of most of human history and maybe in the future they'll say this about us too. And most of most of human history, most human societies have been animated by notions that we find reprehensible that we find have little to do with reality. Notions about how other groups are inferior, not human, deserving of slave, being enslaved. Most human societies have had slavery of being killed or of not being protected by the moral law, however it's been conceived. What is shocking and surprising to people is that this happened in the most cultivated and learned country in Europe, so-called Germany, in the middle of the 20th century, a country that is otherwise deemed not to have been so different from our own. In a country where you think people should have known better because somehow we think that's the case. But the evidence is overwhelming that they didn't. and the universities. The professor was completely complicit in this and from everything we know as believing of this nonsense um as the uneducated peasant. It was only slightly more highutin nonsense but it was essentially the same set of beliefs.

Yes. Oh, I didn't see you there. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Um I would like I don't know you and I don't know your book. I just saw an advertisement and came and I'm very glad I did. Thank you very much. Um I so much um that you shared with us is very um familiar to me because I have transcribed testimony after testimony of fellow fallong practitioners in China who are imprisoned, tortured, beaten, executed, murdered. Their organs are harvested by everyday people who are just doing their jobs. And I've never ever really heard the side of the Holocaust. It It's very familiar. These heinous acts are being um done by people who are like you and I. And somehow um societal values don't sustain morality in the country. And like you talked about in Germany, people are able to do horrible things when they go home to their families and their children. And I just want to say it's still going on in the world today. I read about it every day. I interact with people who this has happened to in China and they are practitioners of fallen gong. And I'd also like to say there's something um and I've asked myself this question many many times like you have. How is it that people who are inherently good one day can do these terrible acts the next day? And um and I don't know I don't know what happens to people. There's something inherent that happens um when our acts of conscience turn against us, when we do things that we know are not right. And um I just want to say that um I uh I think that um one of the ways that we can do something about all this and and of course we can't go back to Germany and do anything about it then, but today we can do something about it. And I I've written hundreds of letters to the perpetrators who act this encouraging them to remember their good side and stop performing these heinous acts. Thank you.

Thank you. Um I'll just thank you for saying that. Uh, I'll just say that to me, you know, there's always kind of an element of incomprehension even when you work in this material and you think so much about it and you think you understand it because if you don't if you it's not in you or you hope it's not in you to torture other people, it's still it's hard to fully comprehend why people are doing it. For me, it's not very hard to understand why people kill other people the in the kinds of situations I look at. If you believe that other people threaten your family and your people and they're at war with you and they want to stop. I mean, after all, this is why wars are fought. It's not that hard to understand why people would act upon those beliefs and in what they consider to be an act of self-defense, even if it's not by any objective measure defensive or and there's no threat at all and it should be you'd think it'd be obvious to anyone. Um, so that's not that hard at least for me to understand the brutality, the cruelty, the celebrations. I mean, some of that I think I understand and but there remains a kernel of incomprehension just because it it's hard to for me to understand how people could be gleeful in such agony of other people. Um, but the triumphalism of vanquishing an enemy. Um, the the pleasure of vanquishing an enemy, the sense of self-righteousness of teaching someone who has harmed you or you think has harmed you, the you know a a terrible lesson. You see the you know you see this happening in our society in different ways. You see kids doing it. There's an element of you know the the how ju how adolescents sometimes treat each other which we see um is how these these adults were acting too um how conscience can be turned off in the face of some people and leading to these so so it's harder to understand the cruelty and and and the real sources of it some of it is explicable or we can say things about it that seem to make sense of why it can happen on a widespread basis. Um, passions unleashed. You have an opportunity to vent your hatreds and all of your frustrations and anger on the victims or not the victims but the people who were turning you into a victim. So, it's a displacement of all kinds of human aggression and personal trauma and what have you that happens too. So, the killing to me is easy. It's clear to it's easy and to explain. The other elements are harder, but we can say a lot that helps us begin to understand or understand a fair amount of it. But still, like you, some of it I look at and I just shake my head and I can understand it.

Yes. Go ahead. Um, I'm wondering with so many genocides in even just the 20th century, we see uh people who are willing to do things that you would normally not think they're capable of doing on a normal day-to-day basis. Um, I think of the Japanese attacks on China and the Philippines and Korea and so forth. The pictures, the the footage was well documented. uh similarities between the way they prosecuted their uh their crimes against populistes in Asia just the same as uh as Germans and their uh their people that cooperated with them in other countries did against Jews and Russians and so forth in uh in Europe. But my question is that you you say that basically Hitler helped Germany along in a course that they were pretty much already progressing on. Basically just gave them an extra push, helped them along, gave them maybe was even a catalyst in a path that they had already uh began down. Um, it seems to me though that with so many genocides that we've seen, it seems that many people are ready, given the right social and economic and political conditions, are willing to do things that we would consider inhuman. So it seems to me that it's not as good to focus on the fact that someone's willing as what makes them willing. In in Africa, in South America, in the US, even in centuries past in Europe and Asia, people there's always something that's makes someone willing to do something that normally they might not do. Would it not be uh perhaps more constructive and more uh beneficial to focus on what makes someone will as opposed to just understanding that if they were willing, right?

Um I I I think both are important. I fully agree with what you're saying. Um and I simply in this talk this evening established or tried to establish you can judge for yourselves um that there was this willingness because this has been a hotly contested uh issue in the study of the Holocaust. Um in my book and elsewhere I discuss a great deal as to why they were willing and how it came about. And in fact, as you were told, I'm finishing out a book on genocide in general. That's one of the things that I write about quite extensively, not for about genocide more generally. And and so I I applaud what you say and I think you're correct that um that we need to establish what they're will what makes people willing to do it. But to do that you first have to recognize the willingness because if you don't recognize that then your analysis goes off in a different direction and then you don't look at this aspect of it and instead you start trying to explain why the state could coers people or force people or organize people and I'm not and again in some instances it's appropriate to talk about some of those factors. So that's why you have to start with establishing that you've you know there's always this question do people think it's right or wrong to kill the people they're killing and depending on how you answer that question then the analysis goes in very different directions and you have to collect information try to figure out the answer to that question and and it's not always exactly the same.

Let's take two more questions one on each side and then afterwards uh Dr. Goldhagen will be out and be willing to talk with you a little bit further and significant earlier in your talk that um Germany wasn't at that time sort of painting this picture of it not being a totalitarian terror state and that the perpetrators didn't have a large fear of retribution including the conformity of intellectuals um universities but um what would you say about um Sophie Schaw for instance? who was um not you know in a military unit was a student um who was executed for speaking out and in that sort of broader context of such fear of retribution um how do you think that that sort of influences okay the average German um there are different issues here um one is when I say it's not a totalitarian terror state there's totalitarian then there's terror and then there's the third issue of what about happens to those who are actively resistance. So it's not totalitarian in the sense that it normally that has conventionally been portrayed to be in the sense that the Soviet Union was or East Germany was where where there were agents of the regime everywhere that really actively control social life and would and would report on people and the reporting would systematically lead to the punishment of people. There were actually there was actually very little penetration of German society of this kind. the Gestapo this feared and quasy mythical it existed and I don't mean mythical in that sense but this organization of I should say of quasy mythical power um was actually a grossly underman institution that had very few agents around the country and was totally incapable of policing the country and monitoring it in the way that the model of totalitarianism has told us happened in Nazi Germany as it did elsewhere. Um, and in fact we one of the things one of the reason we know as much as we do about social life in Nazi Germany is that there were agents around the country country collecting information and reporting to the security services what they found and this material was collected but it wasn't used to it wasn't used against the people it wasn't used to arrest people to incarcerate them and so on. Um, and what this information reveals is how much disscent there was. It basically it's an endless reporting of disscent against the regime. People grumbling about this, they don't like that, they don't like when they didn't like Hitler's speech, they think that this economic policy is bad, they wish this and so on and so forth. It's remarkable how much of it there is. So, it wasn't totalitarian in that sense and it wasn't a terrorist in the sense that the regime regularly or even used terror broadly and regularly to try to keep the population in check. The difference between Nazi Germany or rather the Nazis and the Bolsheviks was was fundamental and easy to to conceptualize and convey. The Nazis viewed themselves, or rather the Bolsheviks, viewed themselves as governing a recalculant society, an immature recount society that needed to be brought kicking and streaming and with a handmaiden of violence to the promised land. The Nazis view themselves as tribunes of the people who if shorn of the confusing and polluting notions of Jews and Marxism would naturally embrace them. Their sense of legitimacy was derived from different sources from the Bolsheviks. Their sense of their relation the people were different from the Bolsheviks. They didn't think they needed to terrorize the people. it would have undermined their own legitimacy and they only began to do so in this way to some extent when the whole thing was falling apart in the very end of the war. So it wasn't totalitarian, it wasn't terrorizing or terroristic in the way that that this totalitarian model holds it to be. Um, but there was an exception. You couldn't stand up and say down with the regime. There were limits to what you could do. It wasn't a pluralist democracy. it wasn't they didn't respect freedom of speech or or the celebration of descent. You could stand up and say what you're doing to the Jews is a crime. There were limits and that's what Sophie Schaw and the others ran up against. Um, and so I don't mean to suggest that this was like Hyde Park in London or that people had first amendment protections as they generally do in this country. It wasn't like that. but for for individual and collective disobedience and even resistance if done in the proper manner. There was an a lot there was an an awful lot of room for that. And so that's I think a much more accurate account of Nazi Germany than the conventional one that's been handed down to us.

Yes. Um, my question is one of naive dictatorship. By which I I'm sorry I didn't hear you. Naive dictatorship. Um, by which I mean the people in the countryside could have been asking or saying if Hitler knew this wouldn't be happening. And the two um examples I have to support that come from the twisted road to Ashvitz by Carl Schlenus. Um he says that the regime, not Hitler specifically, passed just between the years of 1933 and 39 over 400 anti-semitic laws. And that uh the def the definition of a Jew took a really long time to create because Hitler kept asking for drafts and drafts and drafts of what a the definition of a Jew should be. and then when called upon to announce that to the public, he didn't decide until right before he announced it. So it seems that Hitler is sort of a secretive almost micromanager in that he really doesn't let anybody know what he's deciding on until the last minute so that he can sort of say, "Oh, I didn't know it was going to go that way." So can you really say that there wasn't in the country that sort of um, oh well, we didn't know that Hitler had decided upon this, that's why we still support the Nazis or we didn't know or he didn't know that um, or Hitler didn't know that this was going to go ary, so it's not really his fault.

Um there there were Hitler was a greatly admired figure in Germany. I think it's pretty fair to say that he was the most popular politician in German history at least from let's say 1939 to 1942. Um and it was a it was one of the common tropes in Germany to say the the bad party officials are doing this. Hitler doesn't know about it. People often said this when they didn't like what was going on and didn't want to think that their deeply admired leader Hitler um believed these uh was responsible for these things. If one speaks about the Jews, however, there was no one in Germany who could who could be mistaken about where Hitler stood on this. After all, he fulminated quite publicly and repeatedly in the most viciferous terms about the evils of Jews and jewelry and about the need to eradicate Germany of their influences, not the people themselves. Um, and so uh and so this was to say the this was to say the least not a secret and not even an open secret, but but something that was was manifest and unmistakable. Um, just to give you a sense of how different the times were. Um, if you've ever seen a speech by Hitler, you if you've never have, you should, or if you have, you should think about it. Think of this guy who looks like a raving madman up there shouting, frothing at the mouth. I mean, he makes, you know, the most impassioned screaming American politician look tame. Frothing at the mouth, screaming shaking his fist and the stuff he says or read my comp is just completely bonkers by any sane person's standards today. Um talking about how there are subhuman races or less or races of less lesser values and all this stuff about Jews and so on. And you know he even said I forget the year in 1929 or 1931 that perhaps all German children born with physical defects should be killed. Now imagine if a politician in this country imagine if a politician in Germany today would act the way he does say the things he did make a statement about killing German children born with physical defects. Um, and so imagine he would be seen as being an utter lunatic, not not fit to be part of the ordinary political spectrum and would seem to be mad and potentially dangerous, assuming anybody would pay attention to him or assuming that anybody but those in the lunaric fringe would pay attention to him. But this person who was doing this and he was saying other things about how Germany need to be strong and things that made a lot more sense to Germans of course. Um but this person won millions and millions and millions of votes in Germany and eventually became the chancellor of Germany and the most popular politician in German history. Again, what does this tell you about the overall mindset and mental moral universe of Germans of the time? Um so on on Jews and the peoples of the east and the need for Germany to conquer the east and all this um everybody knew that Hitler was was behind this. They didn't know whether he where he stood on particular policies and and the whole issue then of Hitler's position or decision-m style and his role in different decisions is a very complicated one and we have to go issue area by issue area decision by decision. Um the but that too is a long discussion for another day and so I'll end here and thank you for your patience.

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