Perhaps on the whole Jews are better in business than other groups, but why are Jews who are businessmen seen as Jews rather than as simply businesspeople who do what businesspeople do – which is to try to make a profit, make goods, sell goods, and expand their markets? Why are they seen as Jews? What about what they do is Jewish as opposed to being just business?
And anti-Semites don’t just say Jews are good at business. They say Jews have too much power in business. What does that mean? How could one demonstrate this? And if you say they have too much power in business, obviously you think they’re doing something bad with that power. What exactly is that? What can anybody show that Jews do that’s bad with their alleged power in business?
So we have to make a clear distinction between appropriate sociological generalization and prejudice.
Turning to your first – and most famous – book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: One of the criticisms leveled against it is that it’s anti-German. In other words, while it’s true that many Germans willingly followed Hitler, the case can be made that a Hitler-like figure would have been just as popular in Poland or Romania, for example.
I’m happy to answer this critique, but it would be nice for it to [address] what the book is about. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I showed that ordinary Germans acted or supported actions against Jews because they were anti-Semites – not because they were coerced, duped, or just following orders, which is how it had been represented before.
I show this by studying the perpetrators of the Holocaust and drawing on their own words. Their prejudice was deep, their prejudice was broad, and they actually looked upon Jews as devils in human form who needed to be exterminated. One of the things I showed is they didn’t just follow orders; they often did more than they had do. They acted with the zeal and energy of true ideological warriors.
Now, when this book came out in 1996, it turned the field of Holocaust studies upside down, and of course there was pushback from a lot of people. In Germany it was seen as a political issue and produced a societal conversation that lasted months and months. One of the things people said was that I argued that only Germans are anti-Semites. Well, I never said that. I focused on Germans because it was Germans who initiated the Holocaust. I have no doubt that a leader in any number of other countries who would have been dedicated to eliminating the Jews could have found many willing helpers.
So that criticism simply did not speak the plain truth about what my book said. They were attacking me for a position I never held.
Your book argues that ordinary Germans supported the Holocaust, but if so, why was Hitler so careful not to talk publicly about exterminating the Jews? Also, isn’t it true that the Nazis opted for gas chambers because many German soldiers on the Eastern front felt uncomfortable shooting vast numbers of Jews?
To take your points one by one: That the Germans were killing Jews on a large scale was an open secret in Germany. We have a lot of evidence that shows that. The Nazi leadership did not want to broadcast this over the radio or print it in newspapers because it made people uneasy. It was a radical thing to do, it would have led to questions of “What if we lose the war, what will happen to us?” and it also would’ve handed the Allies a propaganda coup.
