Goldhagen Speaks: Finally Blame the Germans! Number of Killers Do Matter. German Documents Falsely Blame Locals for German Killings of Jews: Implications for Jedwabne.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. 1996. Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Goldhagen Speaks: Puts Holocaust Blame Squarely Where it Belongs–on the Germans

This famous (or infamous) book differs from most Holocaust presentations that variously dichotomize Germans and Nazis and dichotomize German leaders and German commoners. Most Holocaust presentations also confuse German antisemitism and ordinary European antisemitism, and blur German conduct and that of “collaborators”.

Throughout this work, Goldhagen speaks, finding a profound antisemitism everywhere among the German masses (e. g, p. 419), and that long before Hitler. In doing so, he lives in a Judeocentric echo chamber. What of the pronounced anti-Polish and anti-Slavic sentiments that also permeated the German masses long before Hitler! No one asks.

GOLDHAGEN SPEAKS: NUMBERS OF KILLERS PERTAINING TO GERMANS (IMPLICATIONS FOR JUDGING POLES THAT KILLED JEWS)

The German-Austrian population, on the eve of WWII, was about 78 million. Goldhagen attempts to gauge the degree of German involvement in the later Holocaust as follows, “If ten thousand Germans were perpetrators, then the perpetration of the Holocaust, perhaps the Holocaust itself, is a phenomenon of one kind, perhaps the deed of a select, unrepresentative group. If five hundred thousand or one million Germans were perpetrators, then it is a phenomenon of another kind, perhaps best conceived as a German national project.” (p. 11).

Much the same can be said about the oft claimed but undefined “Polish complicity in the Holocaust.” If 1 in 1,000 Poles denounced or killed Jews specifically out of solidarity with Hitler (as opposed to other reasons), then Polish individuals are complicit in the Holocaust, but the Polish nation as a whole is in no sense complicit in the Holocaust! That is precisely the distinction specified by the much-misrepresented 2018 Polish Anti-Defamation Law. Yet the Jewish accusations of complicity keep coming fast and furious.

GOLDHAGEN SPEAKS: THE GERMANS DID THE HOLOCAUST. IT IS NO MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT

One good thing about Goldhagen is that he places the blame for the Holocaust squarely where it belongs–on the Germans. He does not equivocate, but states what should be obvious, “While members of other national groups aided the Germans in their slaughter of Jews, the commission of the Holocaust was primarily a German undertaking. Non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the genocide, and they not supply the drive and the initiative that pushed it forward…Still, this was above all a German enterprise; the decisions, plans, organizational resources, and the majority of its executers were German. Comprehension and explanation of the perpetration of the Holocaust therefore requires an explanation of the Germans’ drive to kill Jews. Because what can be said about the Germans cannot be said about any other nationality or about all of the other nationalities combined–namely no Germans, no Holocaust–the focus here is appropriately on the German perpetrators.” (p. 6. Emphasis added).

Amen! “Collaborators” have been monstrously overemphasized in standard Holocaust thinking. There should, at very least, be an unambiguous and unbridgeable chasm between the conduct of Germans and the conduct of non-Germans towards the Jews. All too often, there is none, and the two are blurred together.

GOLDHAGEN SPEAKS: GERMAN DOCUMENTS SHIFT BLAME FOR GERMAN CRIMES AGAINST JEWS: IMPLICATIONS FOR JEDWABNE.

Consider the “Holocaust by Bullets” (of which Jedwabne is a part). As pertaining to the murders of Jews at Lutsk (Luck), Goldhagen comments, “The Einsatzgruppen ‘Operational Situational Report USSR No. 24,’ July 16, 1941, states incorrectly that the Ukrainians did the shooting (Einsatzgruppen Reports, p. 32). The information contained in these reports is often misleading or incomplete…In composing them, the Germans often had purposes other than the truth guiding them. Paul Zapp, the commander of Einsatzgruppen 11a, testified at his trial that the Einsatzkommando commanders had received instructions to disguise their genocidal operations in their operational reports because of the danger that they might fall into enemy hands…In this Lutsk killing, the Germans wanted to present the slaughter as being Ukrainian revenge for the crimes that the Jews had allegedly perpetrated against Ukrainians, so the Germans substituted for the facts the fiction that Ukrainians had done the killing…the Germans’ willfully and substantially distorted record of what transpired.” (p. 518. Emphasis in original.)

The Germans obviously had a vested interest in getting their crimes against Jews variously blamed on Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, etc. The Nazi German murderers must be rolling in their graves with delight that Poles were successfully blamed for the Jedwabne massacre.

The lesson from what Goldhagen speaks is clear. Even German documents that allege locals’ complicity in killing Jews should not be believed, at least not uncritically.

The foregoing adds to other smoking-gun evidence, from German documents, wherein they admit that they deliberately sought to portray the German killings of Jews as the work of locals. See:

Jews and Poles Equal Victims: Poles and Not Only Jews Were Subject to a Final Solution. Mass Sterilization. Poles Not Exterminated: Why? Bad Publicity. Jedwabne a German-Disguised Crime. Breitman

Full article here: https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/10/12/goldhagen-speaks-finally-blame-the-germans-number-of-killers-do-matter-german-documents-falsely-blame-locals-for-german-killings-of-jews-implications-for-jedwabne-goldhagen/

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