Goldhagen's Theory Of The Holocaust

Throughout the twenty and into the twenty first century, the world has seen much academic and historical reflection on the subject of the Holocaust. Scholars have avidly debated both the motives of the perpetrators and the inaction of the Jewish race during the Holocaust. Both the offenders and the offended have been criticized in one way or another for s variety of reasons. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen specifically looks at the perpetrators, the Germans, and argues that in fact, the Holocaust could only have taken place in Germany because of the German peoples’ great anti-Semitism.

Goldhagen, a smart, cognitive and historically knowledgeable man strives to prove his theory in a three-pronged reasoning trident. He seeks, through his theory, to directly connect a country’s apparent anti-Semitism to the mass murder that directly succeeded it. The initial part of his argument is to look at the Police Battalions and the Einstadtzgruppen, and make the claim that the men committing the mass murder in these military ranks were in fact what Goldhagen calls “ordinary Germans”. Goldhagen looks specifically at their economic and social backgrounds to make this claim. (Handout; Police Battalion 101: Men’s Deeds) The second part of Goldhagen’s thesis is to equate the “ordinary Germans” coordinating the death marches to the entire German population: Golhagen takes a focus group and decides that in fact it is a distinct match for the whole population of Germany – something that I will cover later on. The third prong of the trident is the conclusion in which Goldhagen says that all Germans were in fact, Nazis and bought into Nazi ideals of eugenics and mass murder. Essentially, to wrap up the “trident of reasoning” metaphor into one simple sentence ...

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...explaining evil is just as difficult as preventing it, which is primarily the reason for so much debate on the subject of the Holocaust. Most of Goldhagen’s theories are intelligent, well articulated and backed up with evidence, but this doesn't mean that they are flaw-free. While on the surface his theory of the perpetrators being all ordinary Germans makes simplistic sense, it is slightly flawed. A, it is a generalization to group “all ordinary Germans” with a specific set of Germans who carried out the mass murder and B, Goldhagen comes to his conclusion and then looks for evidence to support his claim. Usually one finds specific evidence and then after piecing the evidence together one comes to a conclusion based on one’s evidence, not the latter. Regardless, what Goldhagen offers in his thesis is a totally unique look at who was responsible for the Holocaust.