Germany and the Jews

“Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!” more than a thousand German women shouted at the Nazis outside the Berlin building that held their recently arrested Jewish husbands. It was late February 1943 and the prisoners’ deportation, which would ensure their deaths under Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution,” was imminent.

But after a week of demonstrations, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister and gauleiter of Berlin, had heard enough. On March 6, seventeen hundred imprisoned Jewish men were released and the deportation of German Jews in “mixed” marriages was suspended. Though many such Jews were soon re-incarcerated, some survived the war.

Other books more fully document the “Rosenstrasse protest” — perhaps the only street demonstration ever conducted against the deportations of German Jews during the Holocaust — but historian Eric A. Johnson vividly recreates this surprising episode in Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, a long and unrelenting attack on the widely held misperceptions of the Third Reich as an unrestrained police state and the German people as its prostrate victims. The picture he presents is far more complex and, ultimately, far more damning of the German people.

Focusing on Gestapo activity in Cologne, Krefeld, and Bergheim, three German cities of different size and population, Johnson analyzes more than 1,100 Gestapo and Special Court case files, together with German police personnel, Nazi party, and SS records, plus Interior Ministry files and many documents produced after the war (especially denazification and trial records). Finally, Johnson and a colleague surveyed, then conducted follow-up interviews with, hundreds of random Germans living in Cologne in 1993 who returned lengthy questionnaires about the Nazi era.

With his research, Johnson has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of day-to-day crime and punishment under Hitler’s reign. Detailed Gestapo case files (peopled by “local Eichmanns” and shadowy Kafkaesque figures named “K.” and “Frau T.”) conjure the urban milieu of 1930s Germany.

The picture that emerges is as chaotic as any group portrait of any city’s dwellers would be, but all of this enables Johnson to address many lingering questions about the Nazi era. Among them: How much did average citizens know about the deportations and mass murder of the Jews and other persecuted minority groups? How much Nazi terror — through the Gestapo and other organs — did ordinary Germans face? To what extent did ordinary Germans play active roles in the Final Solution?

Nazi Terror marks the first major treatment of such issues since 1996, when Harvard associate professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which provoked wildly polarized reactions among scholars and general readers. Indeed, Johnson poses as a critic of Goldhagen’s argument that “‘ordinary Germans’ were animated by . . . a particular type of anti-Semitism that led them to conclude that the Jews ought to die.” Goldhagen called this doctrine “eliminationist anti-Semitism” and argued that, over two centuries, it came to “reside ultimately in the heart of German political culture, in German society itself.”

But Johnson’s minor criticisms of Goldhagen seem almost trumped up, as if masking broader agreement. After all, Johnson’s debt to Goldhagen begins with his subtitle, a direct reference to Goldhagen’s — which itself tweaked a 1992 book by Christopher Browning, titled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Moreover, Johnson says Browning and Goldhagen “deserve credit” for producing “landmark books.” Both, he writes, “demonstrated chillingly that ordinary Germans were also more active than previously believed in the perpetration of the Holocaust.”

Johnson pointedly characterizes Nazi executioners as “not so ordinary men” — citing the SS training select squad members received — as if this represented a serious disagreement with Goldhagen. But Johnson admits it was “average citizens” who “formed the core of both the reserve police battalions and the German army.” The battalions, for example, contained

sizable numbers of ordinary, often middle-aged German civilians, with little or no ideological indoctrination or training, . . . called up . . . to shoot thousands of defenseless Jews at point-blank range and then allowed to return to their normal civilian lives.

Johnson echoes other views of Goldhagen’s. “The German people should not be regarded as having been passive pawns or terrorized victims of their own government,” Goldhagen wrote in 1996. Johnson agrees that “very few” ordinary Germans feared Gestapo arrest during the Third Reich. He estimates the Gestapo employed one officer for every ten to fifteen thousand citizens; thus, between 1933 and 1945, “only about 1 percent of the non-Jewish population was ever investigated by the Gestapo for any reason, and . . . a large percentage of those prosecuted belonged to one or another targeted group.” Johnson says Nazi terror “undeniably intensified in the war years, but relatively few Germans experienced it,” with most Gestapo investigations of ordinary Germans resulting in “nothing more than a warning.”

For all of Johnson’s new evidence, however, nothing in it supports his assertion that a “tradition of obsequious submission to authority” stilled the tongues of ordinary Germans during the Holocaust. If anything, this assertion represents a poor substitute for Goldhagen’s bolder, and far more logical, argument. As an explanation, “German obedience” seems to leave even Johnson unsatisfied. “Nevertheless,” he writes,

one wonders how so many people could find the courage to dance to forbidden swing music, listen to outlawed BBC and other foreign-language broadcasts, spread jokes and epithets about Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and communicate their discontent with their government and society in myriad ways, but could not summon the courage and compassion to register abhorrence and thereby break the silence about the systematic murder of millions of defenseless and innocent men, women, and children.

Readers may well wonder what Johnson is left “wondering” about. In abundant detail, his book shows how ordinary Germans rejected many Nazi policies — but not the annihilation of the Jews. Clearly, the Final Solution did not matter to ordinary Germans, did not arouse their discontent, as much as other Nazi initiatives. Wouldn’t that explain how so many people could “find the courage” to challenge one set of Nazi laws, but not another?

When a society tolerates — let alone applauds — the systematic impoverishment, torture, and murder of its every last Jew, surely it is the historian’s duty to acknowledge this society’s “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” to use Goldhagen’s term. Would we not rightly regard as “eliminationist racist” any society that mobilized vast resources to impoverish, torture, and murder its every last citizen of African or Asian descent? Johnson’s reasoning becomes counter-intuitive when he tries to explain ordinary Germans’ boundless tolerance for Jewish misery during those years as a function of something other than anti-Semitism.

If Johnson warily endorses the ‘obedience’ theory, he positively demolishes another oft-invoked alibi for mass German acquiescence: ignorance. The Final Solution, he establishes, was “no secret at all to most German people beyond childhood.” Among the author’s archival discoveries were transcripts of long forgotten BBC-produced German-language radio programs, broadcast for maximum propaganda value during the war to an illicit, but widespread, Reich audience. For example, huge numbers of Germans secretly tuned in at eight sharp on December 27, 1942, the first Sunday night after Christmas, only to hear a program entitled “The War Against the Jews,” which announced in plain German: “Hitler’s regime is murdering hundreds of thousands of completely innocent men, women, and children in cold blood only because they are Jews.”

Far from “making hash” of Goldhagen’s thesis (as a jacket blurb declares), Johnson’s pronouncements on the culpability of ordinary Germans sound as if Goldhagen had written them:

Collaboration and collusion characterize the activities of the German people much more than meaningful resistance and true dissent.

[The Holocaust] would not have been imaginable without the loyalty, complicity, and silence of the German population. . . . Most went along willingly, even if they did not condone all of Hitler’s policies.

Despite such steely observations, Johnson, an immensely gifted historian, never fully embraces the logical conclusion that his prodigious research demands. That would have meant defending the controversial Goldhagen — an act too many Holocaust scholars view as verboten.

James Rosen is a Washington correspondent for the Fox News Channel.