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photographs of themselves - shooting and looting? Inscriptions such as
"condemned Jews, Lomarczy," or "Jews constructing mass grave," both
dated 18 August 1942, commemorate these actions. And pictures of uni–
formed men hunting Jews in the open countryside, guarding near–
skeletons, bodies of emaciated victims, ofJews ordered to leap-frog or to
pose before being shot, abound.
Browning agrees with Goldhagen's overall take. But he maintains that
by emphasizing the perpetrators' sadistic deeds, Goldhagen is minimizing
the scruples of those who were anguished at having received orders to
kill, and that some who willingly did away with adults hesitated when
asked to shoot infants and children. And he points out that years later
some of the men of Battalion 101 still were having nightmares about the
murders they had committed, and that many bystanders obviously were
appalled at what they knew of but felt they could not prevent.
Still, scores of "ordinary men," after overcoming their initial unease,
did end up as professional killers. They often went beyond the orders
they received from their superiors, and some of them appeared to enjoy
the beatings and emotional suffering they inflicted upon their starved,
sick, and otherwise helpless victims. Goldhagen reiterates that after years
of listening to Hitler's and Goebbels's propaganda, a large number of
Germans had come to believe that Jews were controlling the finances of
the world, had been responsible for every problem that had plagued the
Weimar republic, and were responsible for the war the Western democ–
racies " had started" against the Fatherland. (Elsewhere, Goldhagen
chronicles the roots of this anti-Semitism in parts of Catholicism.) By
building on these myths, Jews were perceived as "vermin" that had to be
eradicated. Consequently, it was but a small step to move from elimina–
tion to extermination. That might well explain why even after the
Germans knew they had lost the war, some of them so relentlessly kept
up the destruction in extermination camps, conducted death marches, and
took satisfaction in torturing their victims before executing them. Even at
that point, Goldhagen documents, they killed Poles and criminals, ho–
mosexuals, and handicapped people more expeditiously and, thus, less
cruelly.
Goldhagen's conclusions contradict those of the scholars who argue
that the perpetrators were coerced, blindly following directives, pressured
to conform, deadened by bureaucratic orders, blind to the larger implica–
tions of their deeds, or else clued in to specific, historical explanations of
anti-Semitism. Goldhagen states that he examined the Nazi era by means
ofwhat the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls thick description; that this
multidimensional approach allowed him to show that the Nazi regime
originally tapped into existing anti-Semitism and then whipped it to a fe-
