WHAT DID THEY KNOW?

By John Elson

IT IS THE COMMON VIEW OF HITLER'S Germany that the mass murder of 6 million European Jews was primarily carried out by Nazi zealots. Ordinary Germans, we like to think, knew little or nothing about the Holocaust; if they participated in the killings, they did so under duress, subject to orders that could not be disobeyed. Utter nonsense, argues Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard. In an explosive new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf; 622 pages; $30), he contends that the perpetrators of the Final Solution were, by and large, ordinary men and women, workers, merchants and so on, who, millions strong, ravaged the ghettos, brutally supervised the death camps and enthusiastically carried out Hitler's plan to destroy world Jewry.

Based in part on German archives that have been neglected or ignored by other scholars, Hitler's Willing Executioners is as relentless as a trip-hammer, sometimes irritatingly repetitive and loftily dismissive of contrary judgments that Goldhagen believes lack sufficient evidence. The book will be published this month in the U.S. and Britain, and in Germany in August; it will be the subject of a symposium at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on April 8.

Goldhagen's indictment focuses on the citizenry's complicity in three specific "institutions of mass killing": Germany's police battalions; the so-called work camps in which Jews were incarcerated; and the death marches from those camps by prison guards and their charges near the end of the war. The police battalions, which played a major role in rounding up the Jews of Eastern Europe and shipping them to death factories like Auschwitz and Treblinka, were mostly composed of military reservists. Of the 500 or so officers and men who served in 1942 with one typical unit that Goldhagen details, Police Battalion 101, only 21 belonged to the Nazi elite force known as the SS. That year the battalion participated in a roundup of Jews from the Lublin region of Poland. Thousands were hunted down and slaughtered in execution orgies that left the police splattered with the blood and brains of their helpless victims.

Were the men of Battalion 101 cowed or coerced into taking part? No, insists Goldhagen. One of the battalion's commanders, Trapp by name, offered to excuse the squeamish from killing duty. Only a handful of guards took up the offer. Far from hating their work, the men of Battalion 101 even took pictures of the roundup, which they proudly mailed to wives or girlfriends, who would not have been too surprised by evidence of such brutality. Germany, Goldhagen writes, was "saturated" with prison camps where Jewish inmates were in essence worked to death under conditions scarcely better than those of the Eastern European killing fields. In the small state of Hesse alone there were 606 such camps, or one every 35 sq. mi.

By 1944, with the war lost, German troops gradually abandoned the prison camps in Eastern Europe. SS chief Heinrich Himmler decreed that even Jews should be treated decently--presumably to erase the evidence of war crimes. Instead, camp guards embarked on the notorious death marches, forcing emaciated, sickly Jewish prisoners to walk barefoot, sometimes through snow, for 15 miles a day or more. "Jewish survivors report with virtual unanimity German cruelties and killings until the very end," Goldhagen writes.

It's a pretty sweeping indictment, one that Goldhagen supports by noting that from medieval until modern times, German culture was suffused with what he calls an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that demonized Jews as the source of all social ills. For instance, the church-inspired vision of Jews as "Christ killers" fueled countless pogroms over the centuries. Thus, in Goldhagen's view, the Final Solution represented the logical fulfillment of ordinary Germans' own long-standing dreams. He quotes one 19th century anti-Semite as predicting that "the German Volk needs only to topple the Jews" in order to become "united and free."

Hitler's Willing Executioners is bound to be severely criticized--at least in Germany--since it confronts the postwar alibi that average citizens of the Third Reich either did not know about the Holocaust or disapproved of it. Some historians may also question whether anti-Semitism, while prevalent in pre-Hitler Germany, was as viciously eliminationist as the author argues.

The 19th century English writer Lord Acton believed that historians should be hanging judges, exercising their right to condemn the sins of the past. By this stern standard, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has done his job with a pen in one hand, a noose in the other.