The German Genius

that, in connection with Daniel Goldhagen and his book, his sins of omission are considerable, evincing a serious disregard of inconvenient data.
    The first thing that professional historians pointed out was that Goldhagen’s theories were, despite his claims, emphatically not new. A central aspect of his book was an examination of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, mostly older German men who had moved through occupied eastern Europe carrying out mass shootings of at least 38,000 Jews over a considerable period of time. In 1992, not so very long before Goldhagen’s book was published, Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Ordinary Men , had studied this self-same unit, arriving at very different conclusions. Browning observed that “ordinary men” were indeed involved in the killing but went on to describe how these police reservists were shocked and surprised by their orders to kill Jews when they first received them. Their commanding officer, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was so unnerved that he allowed those who preferred not to take part to pull out of the operation; as a result, one of Trapp’s own officers obtained a transfer. 44
    Goldhagen’s further argument, that Germany had been deeply anti-Semitic since the Middle Ages, was also torn apart. As Richard Evans, one of Goldhagen’s sternest, best-informed, and fair-minded critics, wrote: “If the German population and elite were so deeply anti-Semitic, as Goldhagen says, why did Jews actually gain civil equality by legislative enactment all over Germany in the course of the nineteenth century?” Fritz Stern described “the ascent of German Jewry” in the nineteenth century as “one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history.” Before World War I, both France and Russia were more anti-Semitic than was Germany. In France, the Dreyfus affair sparked anti-Semitic riots in more than thirty towns and in Russia there were 690 documented pogroms with over 3,000 reported murders and 100,000 made homeless. In tsarist Russia, Jews were made to live in a “Pale of Settlement.” In contrast, Evans records one telling vignette—that the pub-and-inn surveillance reports from Hamburg in the late 1920s revealed “virtually no” anti-Semitic feeling by rank-and-file supporters of the Social Democrats. More to the point, anti-Semitism was not an important factor in generating votes for the Nazis in the elections of 1930–33. William Allen, who carried out an in-depth study of one German town, Northeim, found that, from 1928 on, Nazi propaganda actually played down the anti-Semitic aspects of the party’s ideology, for the very good reason that it was unpopular with the electorate. Why did Heinrich Himmler need to keep the “Final Solution” secret if ordinary Germans were as murderous as Goldhagen insists? Why did Himmler complain at one point that “every German has a Jew they wish to protect”? 45
    Goldhagen cites as compelling evidence for popular German anti-Semitism the recurrence of “ritual murder” accusations against Jews and quotes this sentence from Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany : “In Germany and the Austrian Empire twelve such trials took place between 1867 and 1914.” But this was not the complete sentence; Goldhagen leaves out the remainder, which reads: “eleven of which collapsed although the trials were by jury.” 46 Goldhagen referred to Thomas Mann who, he said, though a long-standing opponent of the Nazis, “could nevertheless find some common ground with [them]” when he wrote: “…it is no great misfortune…that…the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended.” Fritz Stern pointed out that Mann was married to Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, and in the very next sentence to that quoted above, which Goldhagen omitted, Mann expressed his distaste at his own thoughts, characterizing them as “secret, disquieting, intense.” 47
    No less damaging to Goldhagen’s scholarship was the fact that he had mistranslated some German passages—and in telling fashion. In one instance, he refers to a poem written by a member of an Einsatzkommando and writes that this individual “managed to work into his verse, for the enjoyment of all, a reference to the ‘skull-cracking blows’…that they had undoubtedly delivered with relish to their Jewish victims.” Although the verse was indeed extremely anti-Semitic, the