The German Genius

during Vichy. As a result, a Foundation of Remembrance was announced in 2000, endowed with 2.4 billion francs ($342 million), the estimated total value of assets that have not yet been returned to their Jewish owners. It is the largest charitable foundation in the country. 39
    Finally, in Europe, we may mention Poland where, in the general election of 2007, the Second World War was an issue, or made an issue, by the Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, who, as president and prime minister, had set their country on an ultranationalist course, picking fights with both Germany and Russia and trying to use its new membership in the European Union to, as one observer put it, “mop up all the unfinished business of the Second World War.” In particular, they claimed that the Polish population would have been substantially larger had not the Nazis murdered so many people and that therefore Germany “had a moral duty to give ground” in regard to reparations claimed. 40 Likewise the massacre of several hundred Jews in May 1941 at Jedwabne in Poland by their fellow citizens, even classmates, which had been the subject of a trial in 1949, was brought to the attention of the world only in 2000, with the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbours . Again, the same memory pattern.
    As all of these recent events confirm, Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust have disobeyed all the normal rules of historical forgetting and assimilation. Official apologies, reparations, and trials of former Nazis have been more in evidence since 1990 than before.
    T HE E XECUTIONERS’ S ONG
     
    No better example of the muddy waters surrounding Holocaust remembrance is provided than by Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust , published in 1996. This title, a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, put forward what its author claimed was “an entirely new answer to the question of how it was that Germans rather than some other European people turned anti-Semitic prejudice into mass murder.” The Germans did so, he argued, “not because they were forced to, nor because German traditions of obedience enabled a handful of fanatics at the top to do whatever they liked, nor because they were succumbing to peer-group pressure from their comrades-in-arms, nor because they were ambitious careerists, nor because they were acting automatically, like cogs in a machine, nor because they faced death themselves if they refused to obey the order to do so.” 41 Instead, Goldhagen said the Germans killed millions of Jews because they enjoyed doing so and they enjoyed it because “their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past.” He identified a “simmering hatred” of the Jews as a “cultural norm” in Germany in the nineteenth century and found that it was given social expression “as a matter of routine.” He discovered nineteen publications produced in Germany between 1861 and 1895 that called for the physical extermination of the Jews and himself “reconceptualised” modern German anti-Semitism into a new framework that envisaged anti-Semitism as “deeply embedded in German cultural and political life and conversation, as well as integrated into the moral structure of society.” 42
    In a postscript written for the paperback edition of his book, published in 1997, Goldhagen set out some of the reactions to the hardback. He said his book had been the subject of vitriolic attacks, by both journalists and academics but that their arguments “consisted almost wholly of denunciations and misrepresentations of the book’s contents…The critics presented no serious argument and no evidence to support their contentions…They did not do so because such arguments and evidence do not exist.” On the other hand, he said, the public had embraced the book, it had become a number one best seller in Austria and Germany, and he maintained that on a series of panel discussions called to discuss his thesis his critics conceded many points. 43
    It is one thing to select the best sentences from reviews when seeking to embellish the cover of a paperback edition: the function of a jacket is to sell the book. It is quite another matter, when discussing the substantive issues in a serious argument, to ignore cogent and substantial criticisms that have been leveled. There is no question