EDITH KURZWEIL
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of their own wives and children. Goldhagen has upset many "Holocaust
experts," either because he is overturning their own theses, or because
much of what he writes is not new. (The meeting at the Holocaust Me–
morial Museum in Washington, D. C. on April 10, 1996, I am sure, was
not the last.)
Goldhagen relies heavily on testimony by perpetrators, admittedly
hard to come by. Among them is Christopher Browning's documentation
in
Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Po–
land.
Like Browning, Goldhagen examined the profiles and records of
these "middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class
backgrounds ... [who] had been drafted into the Order Police
(Ordnungspolizei) and .... (had gone on] to perform a frightfully un–
pleasant task." Goldhagen emphasizes the fact that these men could have
refused to become cold-blooded murderers but, instead, considered kill–
ing as "work." He recounts, for instance, that "Papa Trapp," the
commander of Police Battalion 101, was overcome with horror when, on
June 20, 1942, he received instructions to have his men slaughter the
Jews of Bilgoraj, a small community south of Lublin, including women
and children - while they were asleep. Trapp even offered to excuse those
who felt squeamish, and about ten percent of the men said they did. But
soon they all more or less fell in step. One witness, in testimony gathered
between 1962 and 1972, recalled an assignment to round up the Jews
from the ghetto ofJozefow:
I knew that this order was carried out, because as I walked through the Jewish
district during the evacuation, I saw dead old people and infants. I also know that
during the evacuation
all
patients of a Jewish hospital were shot by the troops
combing the district.
These men, for the most part, had been drafted into the Ordnung–
spolizei because they didn't meet the criteria of the army or of the SS.
Goldhagen contrasts their obedience to kill Jews with their unwillingness
to sign a declaration that they would not steal or plunder from Poles.
They refused on moral grounds, even though by then they already had
been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands ofJews. According to
Goldhagen, this indicates that these men might have at least attempted to
protest murdering Jews, and thus might not have turned into such willing
genocidal killers. By then, however, they already had been persuaded that
the Jews were at the roots of what ailed German society; that by elimi–
nating the ''Jewish problem," they were performing a patriotic duty. Why
else would they have been so proud of their heinous deeds, have taken
