The Open Mind: More About Hitler’s Willing Executioners

continuing production of the open mind has been made possible by grants from the Rosalind P Walter Foundation the M weena Foundation of New Jersey the Thomas and Theresa Milwaukee foundation the New York Times company foundation and from the corporate community Rue de fin I'm Richard Heffner your host on the open mind and some months back we discussed a Harvard University Professors totally compelling and quite controversial book entitled Hitler's willing executioner's ordinary Germans and the Holocaust it's subject understanding the actions and mindset of the tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who became genocide old killers its conclusion that anti-semitism moved many thousands of ordinary Germans and would have moved millions more had they been appropriately positioned for slaughter Jews not economic hardship not the coercive means of a totalitarian state not social psychological pressure not invariable psychological propensity but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany and had been for decades induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed defenseless Jewish men women and children by the thousands systematically and without pity the perpetrators having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right did not want to say no well political scientist Daniel Jonah goal Hagan wrote this extraordinary study and when we spoke here there were no reservations about his presentation of ordinary Germans elimination ax stant ice emmett ISM is basic - they're often zealous actions as Hitler's willing executioner's but Professor Goldhagen told us that he was soon to face his German readers on their own turf and we promised and promised to report back on their reactions and in turn on his own indeed from Hamburg Germany in September 1996 reuters reported professor Joel Hagen as unexpectedly agreeing his hard-hitting work had floors and on Reuters television he said I skirted over some of this history a little too quickly now that I've had some time to reflect upon the book I think one thing I would devote more attention to and integrate into the analysis is the effect of the first world war in radicalizing German society Reuters also reported that several of the 400 Germans in the audience said they were disappointed the Goldhagen who was vehemently defended his book and blasted his German critics in print simply agreed with some key objections when discussing them in person so let me now ask professor dole Hagen whether we here need share that disappointment with those Germans well the first thing to be said is that the Reuters report was a thorough misrepresentation of what actually happened in Hamburg good the headlines in Germany were called hagen defends his book and his Reuters correspondent who when he interviewed me for Reuters television was thoroughly hostile was arguing with me even though he admitted he had only read portions of the book put out a report in which he twisted my words and presented it in some and as I said a thoroughly misleading way in no sense that I take back my book in fact I defended as thesis what I did say is that if I had written the many other books that people were asking me to have written if I ran an entire book on anti-semitism or if I'd written an entire book on the Nazi Revolution then I would have added more things amplified in certain points incorporate other things in its analysis but I adamantly said that evening and many times since then in Germany that none of this including a further discussion the First World War would have changed my argument in any way wishful thinking on the board of the Reuters person more than wishful thinking as I said the German media which covered my trip extensively had headlines again and again about I was defending my theses and by the way convincing many Germans of my point of view tell us about that convincing many Germans the trip to Germany lasted 12 days and it included many interviews with the media the cornerstones the many cornerstones of the trip were however six public panel discussions which took part before large audiences and which many of which were also televised nationally and regionally and it became clear early in the trip really a few days into the trip after the Homburg discussion where by the way the audience clapped and the clapped again and again overwhelmingly for the points I made not for the points of my opponents it became clear that many in Germany were being won over to the book to the discussion against the wisdom of the opinion-makers in Germany and so the story of the trip became not just is this book right how much of it is new are the conclusions valid but why is the German public accepting the book embracing it and a discussion which the book is produced what's your answer to that question the book I know it's most persuasive no no that's no independent of whether independent of whether people agree with my conclusions or not there are certain things the book does which I think people in Germany recognize are necessary the first is that it shifts the focus of attention away from abstract institutions and structures the Nazi Party the SS the terror apparatus which is where the attention has been on the Holocaust back to the human beings who were involved to the people who they were what they did it puts a human face on the perpetration of the Holocaust which has been absent in Germany until now so that's one thing it also tells people a great deal about these perpetrators and about Germany of the time provides them information that has been absent from the discussion in Germany if further explodes what has been the dominant myth in post-war Germany namely that Germans and Nazis were two separate groups beings apart with a group of people called Nazis decreasing with every passing year and finally and finally it provokes a discussion of these issues are most importantly it provokes a discussion of these issues that people in Germany consider to have be long overdue necessary and whether they accept my conclusions or not that's the point not all people do of course will produce good it will only produce more understanding the opinion leaders in Germany some of them wanted to quash the discussion and Germans made it clear so many at least that they want these issues finally to be discussed you know my experience since we did our programs together and they went on the air to very considerable response from the audience my observation has been that they have been a great many Jews who escaped from Germany who are rather hostile to your book this may not be numerically so it may not be statistically so but there are a number of those people I've been trying to understand mm-hmm that opposition you must have faced it my experience is that many more Jews many more survivors both from Germany and from other countries have been thoroughly supportive of the book and have said to me really quite frequently in almost in these words thank you for writing the book the finally accords with our experience they look that we've been waiting for for 50 years really many have said this I I don't mean to say or to imply that masses of people no survivors have called me and said or written me and said my goodness this is this is just not true I don't mean that but to me I would have thought to a person there would be the kind of reaction that you described and yet there hasn't been that unanimity right well of course I never say in the book that every single German shared this anti-semitic perspective only that the vast majority of Germans did they were German Jews who had friends non-jewish friends in Germany who lived in certain pockets of German society where there was not this hostility to Jew to to to them and to Jews and so it may well be and I can't speak with any certainty about people whom I don't know of course but it may well be that their own personal experience in their immediate circle seems to stand at odds with the general character society at the time that may be at the root of it but as I said there's so many German Jews who have who substantiate and support what I've said I rather thought that perhaps the question or the matter of the theory of denial entered into this strange thing to say denial after all these years denial after our knowledge of six million Jews slaughtered and yet denial of Germans ordinary Germans involvement as you have described it do you think there's something to that well there's no doubt that there are many in Germany and elsewhere who don't want to acknowledge the the truth of this of this period it's amount of victims and even even among even among some Jews from Germany who would like to believe that the Society was a far more hospitable place than it was for them after all they were very much attached to this country and it's far more comforting for people to believe that Hitler and the band of Nazis terrorized a society or turned it turned it around against itself and against its people then to believe that that the many of the people who made up the society share these views it may well be I'm hesitant to make these kinds of blanket statements and to psychologize about people whom I haven't met but there's no doubt that this kind of mechanism may come into play and well III appreciate your unwillingness to hypothesize about the motives of people you have not met but to me it brings back a question that is ancient now about the attitudes of many Jews in Germany as Hitler came to power and I'm saying it - it was Hitler who came to power as his ideas or as the ideas he expressed in mine Kampf came to be embraced and acted upon by ordinary Germans the unwillingness on the part of many people to recognize what was happening and to get out but so many did so many got if I so many recognized that Germany was becoming intolerable place to live that they are livelihoods and perhaps lives were certainly threatened and they left Germany and certainly after Kristallnacht in November 1938 the overwhelming majority of Jews who were still there would have liked to have left though they couldn't leave because it was hard to get entrance visas one has to remember though that however bad the Nazis were and Jews realized immediately that this was a terrible regime for them that it's not easy to leave one's homeland a homeland - which one is German Jews were very much attached it's very difficult to pick up to cut all one's ties to make a new life in a country where one might not even know the language and so we should have a little more sympathy I think for the predicament that many of German Jews for many German Jews found themselves in when the Nazis came to power oh I don't think it's a matter of having either sympathy or hostility I meant sympathy in the sense of more empathy rather try to put ourselves in their situation understand how difficult it really was what is the situation as you discovered it in Germany among Jews living in Germany in terms of your book oh well I had a fair amount though not extensive contact with with Jews in Germany and they expressed enormous satisfaction and and happiness that the book had been written that finally these issues were going to be discussed in Germany focused on in the way that they had not been before and they were also made the ones I came into contact with thrilled that so much attention was in the book when I was in Germany this was the talk of the country for a two-week period national television endless articles in newspapers radio television reports man on the street interviews the whole range of media coverage that you can imagine took place this is what people were talking about as the journalists themselves would tell me when they interviewed me well I want to ask you I don't want to beat a dead horse but I was pleased enormous Lee personally this I think the book is so great and you such a fine political scientist and if you don't mind historian but there are quotations here from you and I assume that they are not inaccurate you can tell me that they are now that I've had some time to reflect upon the book I think one thing I would devote more attention to and that's not repudiating your thesis one thing I would devote more attention to and integrate into the analysis is the effect of the first world war in radicalizing German society I presume you said it sure tell me to expand upon that if you would when you write a book that covers a long period of history you have to make all kinds of choices about what to describe and what not to describe and I think that and there are certain parts of German history which I couldn't describe as fully as as one might and when I say here that I would integrate into the analysis that's precisely it would be integrated into the existing analysis the First World War was asses or for European society and for German society and the enormous number of deaths the brutality of the war this opened up this led to a kind of radicalization of German society an unloosen of inhibitions which made the Nazis ascent to power and then what they did easier to easier to come about and so that's what I mean by it there was this with society which has already suffered a great trauma it made violence a more normal part of life more thinkable for people to undertake and so this made the the Nazi task somewhat easier it wasn't as I said it would only be integrating the analysis they should have been discussed and may have been discussed more if I had written instead of a 600 page book certainly if I written a thousand page book or an 800-page book but that's all I mean by it now one of the sticking points in our conversations when you were here before had to do with my and I shouldn't as a host my uncle at insistence but my pressing the notion of what you then rejected and you characterized it as a notion of national guilt and wanted to dissociate yourself totally from that and I find it a little bit difficult to and have thought about it a lot since we spoke at this table some months back not to see what you have written as an assertion when you talk about ordinary Germans you're talking about Germans then that what was done was done to such a much greater extent than we have understood before wanted to understand before by ordinary Germans how does this not add up to not your statement they were guilty but to a statement a factual statement of national and nations responsibility of people's responsibility for what happened so your insistence continues hear the term guilt and it means an guilt for a crime that was committed when we talk about guilt it has a legal thrust to it it's not a moral a sense of the moral conscience being activated and the only people who can be deemed to be guilty are those who as individuals committed crimes we no more hold we should no more whole Germans of the time guilty for things they may have believed or even believed to be right to be done then we hope people today guilty for harboring thoughts which we find reprehensible and so in this sense we cannot speak of collective guilt or a whole nation being guilty we can only speak of individual guilt and people can disagree on this but this is my view now what we may say is that there's some national responsibility in Germany for making amends to the victims for the victims as best as can be done for coming to terms for facing this path for changing their society in ways in which they have done to a great extent in ways so that this can not reoccur and so there is a certain kind of national responsibility but that's different from saying people or the whole nation is guilty why do you become legalistic at this point why because this is what the thrust of the notion of guilt means I think when it is being used and particularly in the German context because in Germany the subject of collective guilt has been bandied about ever since the war ended immediately after the end of the war and it's all it's really understood in this legal sense that people are guilty so it's not for me to redefine words I use in the sense that the term is really the the real force of the term if I were wiser mmm-hmm my vocabulary larger I sure I could pick some words out and ask whether you would accept them and I wonder whether you have thought if you reject the notion of collective guilt because you say that is a specific it involves a specific constellation of facts and ideas guilt guilt by legal terms what would you say what would you what phrase would you use what would you use to describe in the Old South let's say in our own country attitudes toward chattel slavery though we know that a tiny tiny then a percentage of whites in the Old South owned slaves yet it was a slave accuracy right I think it's a good comparison because it opposes the issue in terms that are quite comprehensive all that get away from specific history of the Holocaust the truth is I'm not a moral philosopher and in this book I don't address explicitly issues of guilt and innocence for the German edition actually I wrote a new forward to address this issue because it becomes such a topic of discussion in Germany before the book came out in which I laid out my views which are essentially and I essentially wrote what I just said here about individual guilt how people cannot be deemed guilty merely because of their membership in a community which is what collective guilt means and I don't I'm not a moral philosopher whether we talk about the American South before the Civil War or about Nazi Germany Mike I what I understand to be the most useful task is to try to understand what people believed what they supported and what they did and why they did sell what and say you're not a moral philosopher what does it mean well means that I'm not professionally engaged in I'm not professionally engaged in trying to in trying to understand how we assess the morality of other people hell's you're the son of a survivor you're a college professor but it's not that's not to say that I don't have my views on the subject but just is not my professional competence my professional competence is to be a social scientist to work like an historian to try to explain why things happen and if I shut the book okay and said let's not talk about this book for a moment let's just talk person to person where would you I would say that Germans of a time the view is ahead of Jews which I've described here calling them to be evil and necessary to eliminate in one way or another that these were reprehensible views these were reprehensible views and they issued in the in the person's of many people in deeds that we would call evil deeds what kind of moral categories we apply to that I it's quite clear it's reprehensible are they guilty well what are they collectively were they collectively involved I'll eliminate the word guilty and I'll tell you why I ask you as a political scientist I'm sure would would would be sympathetic not just empathetic to this point of view for the future for the 20th century for the post-civil war period we needed to know what we were dealing with in terms of southern attitudes using that we need to know now 50 years not a very long time we need to know now with whom we are dealing yes but what we need to know is who has done what and why they did it you take the ordinary German or ordinary Germans did it and they did it because they were mobilised by the state but their motivation was primarily one of inner ascent they believed it was right to do that's what we need to know and we need to know why these people came to hold these views and we need to understand all the processes so that if we want to if we want to try to work to prevent such things and not just things like the Holocaust but but other forms of harm that people do too to other people because of the prejudices they hold that we can learn from this the moral categories are not are not the moral evaluation of the sort are people guilty or not don't help in this enterprise there was a fascinating piece that William F Buckley wrote the National Review talking about the about the book and about the response to it and if I remember correctly at the very end and if I could I dig it out right now he said if what you're writing is correct god help us because if we can then move that too he didn't say the Old South to Bosnia can move that capacity of ordinary human beings to act as these ordinary Germans acted then perhaps were in more trouble than we believed and you as a political scientist I would think you would want to know forget the word guilt because that's what I'm and but you see I disagree with Buckley here I don't think it's all that easy to inculcate these kinds of views into people and to have and then to be able to move them to commit mass murder and to do all the other things which the German perpetrator has to be there it has to develop over some period of time through complex processes it's not something in fact the god helpless should be if a Nazi dictatorship could come to power internal people around so that they people who had no prior enmity towards others would be willing to do they know that is the really that's the more fearful prospect well maybe the more fearful question would be and let me ask you with just a couple of minutes left where do you think the ordinary German is today in terms of this constellation of feelings attitudes hates mm-hmm Germany today is a very different society from what it was in 1945 or 1933 it's been substantially almost completely transformed one can say politically and culturally it's a genuine democracy anti-semitism is decline and been transformed in character whew hold nazi-like views of jews but this is explicable he was actually using the same framework i used to explain the rise of anti-semitism by understanding that how people derive their views the world mainly from what they learn in the in society what can be called a public conversation which in the post-war period has been democratic universalistic there have been no public images of jews institutionally supported which hold them to be evil and so people have been transformed in their views of jews and we know this from the survey data so and one of the reasons the book has been so well-received in germany and really that it's being bought it's being read it's being discussed but it's because so many germans look upon the past the way you and I look upon the past as the past yes no it still has ramifications for their society but they want to know about this past and so many Germany particularly the younger people who can be called the grandchildren of the perpetrators they can say this was then it's about our heritage but it's not about us we are different and they're right the young people are right to say they are different it's not about them and so they really want to learn about what happened I don't know why I as an old man should be quite as pessimistic about all of this but maybe in particularly sitting we're here with you whose father his family experienced what you are writing about here ah read I'm not as sanguine if that's the right word as you are but I do know that when the book is published in Japan and you go there you've got to come back again and talk about its reception there professor girl delighted - thank you so much for joining me again today thanks for asking for having me back and thanks to you in the audience I hope you join us again next time if you would like a transcript of today's program please send four dollars in check or money order to the open mind P o box seven nine seven seven FDR Station New York New York 101 five Oh meanwhile as another old friend used to say good night and good luck continuing production of the open mind has been made possible by grants from the Rosalind P Walter Foundation the M weena Foundation of New Jersey the Thomas and Theresa Milwaukee foundation the New York Times company foundation and from the corporate community ruder Finn

Channel: CUNY TV

Views: 34,136

Keywords: Cuny Tv, The Open Mind (TV Program), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Holocaust (Film Subject), Richard Heffner, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Adolf Hitler (Military Commander)

Id: mBj-mYNyBmo

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 24 2014