1. With print runs reminiscent of a best-selling novel, and numerous re-editions just a few months after being translated into all the major European languages, Hitler's willing executioners has become a veritable cause célèbre in the publishing world, with a distribution and resonance far beyond the disciplinary field to which it belongs. For the first time, in fact, a study on the extermination of the Jews, presented as a doctoral dissertation in comparative politics at the University of Harvard, and structured according to traditional scientific canons, has become a media success of staggering proportions, attracting the interest of a vast public of non-specialists, and inviting comparison with Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List more than with other scholarly works on the subject, even the most authoritative [1] . The amount of media attention given to the author, who was invited to participate in countless TV talkshows, round-tables, debates and interviews, particularly in the United States and Germany, surpassed anything experienced even by those historians of the Shoah who are specially committed to reaching the largest possible audience, in order to keep the memory of what happened alive.
The extraordinary success of Hitler's willing executioners was bound to make its effect felt also on debate about the book, and in fact attention soon shifted from the historiographical plane to the Goldhagen "phenomenon", and to the consequences his theories would have among such a vast international readership both as regards the way that Germans are perceived (not only those of the Third Reich, but also those of today), and the way contemporary Germans perceive themselves. A cursory glance at the titles of the articles written about the "Goldhagen Controversy" in the German Federal Republic is enough to give a clear idea: A nation of "final solutioners"? ; A nation of murderers? ; "The Germans" - a nation of willing Jew-killers? ; A nation of anti-semites? ; Demonization explains nothing [2]. Other commentators preferred to see the book's success as a manifestation of the barely concealed disapproval and distrust with which American public opinion views the increasingly authoritative role played on the international scene by a newly reunited Germany [3] .
Even in the specialist reviews written by historians, great attention was paid to those passages in the book which could most easily be seen as relevant to present-day Germany as well, although these were only minor parts of the enterprise as a whole. A typical example is the interest aroused by note 38 on page 582, where the author stresses that his arguments should not be taken as implying the existence of a timeless German character, and admits that the character structure and cognitive models of present-day Germans have changed dramatically compared to those of their counterparts during the Third Reich. This comment, no more than an incidental aside and quite irrelevant to Goldhagen's theories about the principal causes of the genocide, was taken by several critics as proof that his book was not based on a solidly scientific approach [4] .
2. What I would like to do here, however, is to focus on two questions more specifically historiographical in nature which are raised by Hitler's willing executioners:
a) the book's place in the historiography on National Socialism;
b) the new elements it contributes to historical research on the extermination of the Jews.
With regard to the first point, some critics see Goldhagen's work as representing "a step backwards of nearly fifty years" in the historical research on Nazism, since in postulating the existence in Germany of a kind of "permanent" eliminationist antisemitism, the author is reproposing the theories put forward in the forties and fifties by the British historian A.J.P. Taylor about the unbroken continuity of German history "from Luther to Hitler" [5] . This is the line taken by Omer Bartov, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Eberhard Jäckel, with only minor differences in approach and emphasis [6].
Other historians have preferred instead to emphasize that Goldhagen's approach places him among the so-called 'intentionalists' [7], the only difference being that he tries to extend the category of those whose intention was to exterminate the Jews, from Hitler to the vast majority of the German population.
Both attempts at pigeon-holing are rather unsatisfactory, since they are based on external criteria of a formal nature. The comparison with A.J.P.Taylor is wrong because his theories are based on an evaluation of National Socialism in which the genocide of the Jews is not the defining feature. According to Taylor's reconstruction of events, the crucial factor was the aggressive, expansionist militarism of the German-Prussian state, of which National Socialism was only the most recent and radical manifestation. This conception, shared by the most influential political figures on the Allied side, was to have important consequences for the post-war configuration of central Europe, and for the dismemberment of Prussia, seen as the "original cause" of the devastation of Europe brought about by Nazi Germany [8]. The idea of placing Goldhagen among the intentionalists is problematic too, since their theories revolve around the fact that Hitler's role was central to the extermination of the Jews, in opposition to the paradigm of a "progressive radicalization" set in motion by various factors, both central and peripheral, common to the Third Reich. If the intentionalism were extended to include the German people as a whole, the result would be to deprive of any meaning a category created specifically to highlight the crucial role of individual personalities (in this case Adolf Hitler) in shaping the course of history.
In reality, the most fruitful and stimulating parts of Goldhagen's work link up with recent studies about the role of "ordinary men" in the dynamics of the extermination. They belong to the same field of inquiry as the works of Christopher Browning [9], have certain similarities with Raul Hilberg's monumental study [10], and connect up with the recent exhibition documenting the crimes of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe [11] and with the work of Omer Bartov on the "barbarisation" of the German soldiers at the Russian front [12]. Although Daniel Goldhagen's declared aim is to propose a new general interpretation of the extermination of the Jews (see pp. 375-406 in particular: Explaining the perpetrators' actions; assessing the competing explanations), his work actually provides us with some important evidence about a crucial problem of a more limited nature, which was the direct participation of hundreds of thousands of Germans in performing the extermination.
3. Another category which might usefully be applied when attempting an analysis of Goldhagen's work and which has been ignored until now is the dilemma between the universal meaning of National Socialism and the specifically German one. This dualism was already present in the interpretations of Nazism emerging immediately after Germany's defeat. German historians in particular, such as Gerhard Ritter [13] and Friedrich Meinecke [14], placed great emphasis on that "general crisis of European civilization" of which Nazism was the most radical symptom. Whereas one of the most significant contributions to the historical reconstruction of the more specifically German aspects of the Nazi phenomenon was George Mosse's work on The Crisis of German Ideology.
Of all contemporary scholars of National Socialism, Goldhagen is probably the most convinced supporter of the theory that the extermination of the Jews was a specifically German product, although he points out that it was only partially the result of Nazi policy, since he argues that eliminationist antisemitism was deeply rooted and widespread in German society before Nazism and cannot simply be ascribed to Hitler's rise to power. In his opinion, in fact, all Nazism did was to give political expression and practical application to a general wish for extermination which was already part of the collective (German) consciousness. In this sense, there is a kind of parallel with the theories of Taylor who, though starting from a different conception of Nazism, believed that the objectives of Hitler were almost identical to those of the German people [15].
The book is divided into three main sections, two of which are devoted to analysing the specific nature of German antisemitism from the Reformation to the rise of Nazism; the third describes the consequences of what he defines as "eliminationist antisemitism" during the implementation of the so-called "final solution".
In this third section, the part of the book which contains the empirical research, Goldhagen analyses three "case studies" connected to three different aspects of the history of the genocide. He examines the treatment of Jews in concentration camps, the behaviour of Battalion 101 of the Order Police in Poland, and the story of one of the many "death marches" enacted in the last six months of the war. His reconstruction of these situations leaves little room for doubt: in the camps, in the activities of Battalion 101, and in the course of the death marches, the Jews were singled out specifically as the victims of a global genocidal plan far more radical than the forms of enslavement and oppression envisaged for those races simply deemed "inferior" (like the Russians and the Poles) or the political persecution to which German anti-Nazis were subjected.
There is nothing new about this fact: indeed, most of the historians who have studied Nazi racial ideology and its implications for the new configuration of Europe have reached the same conclusion. But before Goldhagen, no-one had drawn such a close parallel between the underlying principles of Nazi racial policy and the day-to-day behaviour of the people Goldhagen provocatively calls "ordinary Germans".
4. His reconstruction of events shows that there was a frightening correspondence between the eliminationist antisemitism of men like Hitler and Himmler and the routine practice of the genocidal slaughterers (the camp guards and members of the police battalions, but also the Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians and "ethnic Germans" who took part).
Taking as his starting-point the argument that the prime motive force behind the extermination of the Jews was the "eliminationist antisemitism" with which Germans had been imbued at least since the nineteenth century, and to which National Socialism merely the provided the opportunity to make manifest, Goldhagen manages to put together an impressive amount of evidence showing that many Germans did behave as if they were motivated by a complete acceptance of Hitler's vision of the Jew as the "poisoned mushroom" (Giftpilz) of mankind.
Numerous examples are provided, including the humiliation of the victims which preceded the killing operations (such as forcing elderly orthodox Jews to dance, cutting off their beards, urinating on them), the gratuitous acts of brutality, the search-and-destroy missions performed with zeal and dedication, the slaughtering of women and children and the old and infirm, even in their beds. The documentation also provides evidence of various cases of Jews being killed through personal initiative, in isolation from the group actions and without any specific order to do so.
Of particular interest is the "decoding" of language which Goldhagen performs, having established his basic theory (that the majority of Germans approved of Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews). In this perspective, statements which at a first glance might seem to denote ethical or principled opposition the slaughter, are interpreted as mere expressions of disgust for the more unpleasant aspects of the task of killing. As Goldhagen puts it: "As such, the decision to kill or not to kill was a matter of taste and not of principle" (p.250). This theory finds indirect support in the conclusions reached by Christopher Browning, in his pioneering work on Police Battalion 101 [16] for which he used the same archive sources subsequently consulted by Goldhagen. Although Browning's overall interpretation of the men's behaviour is less drastic than Goldhagen's, he too remarks that the motivations given in court by that minority of men who refused to participate in the killing part of the operations do not denote a moral disapproval of their comrades' behaviour: instead, these men tend to stress their own "weakness" [17] .
5. The same sources [18] provide further important evidence pointing to the extenT to which eliminationist antisemitism was almost the universal "cognitive code" of the individuals involved in the killing, and was accepted as such. Lieutenant Buchmann, for example, a Hamburg businessman who was one of the few who refused right from the start to take part in the killing of the Jews, explained his attitude with the fact that he had travelled abroad on business and had also come into contact with many Jews through his commercial activity. For this reason, his perception was different from that of his fellow-soldiers. Another defendant stated that not only many years later did he become fully aware of what he had done during that time.
In his analysis of the three different situations, Goldhagen also lays great emphasis on how Jews were constantly treated much worse than non-Jewish victims. In the concentration camps, for example, both working and living conditions were such that the death rate among Jews was far higher than among the other prisoners. Only for the Jews were those camps tantamount to death camps, which nobody was supposed to leave alive. In the case of Battalion 101, men who already had the murder of thousands of Jewish women and children on their consciences, suddenly showed scruples about carrying out the usual reprisals against the Polish population following a partisan ambush in which a German soldier had been presumed killed [19].
Finally, in the most shocking case study, concerning the little-known episode of the death march from the Helmbrechts work-camp to Prachatice, in Czechoslovakia, the genocidal practice continued against the Jewish women prisoners even after Himmler had expressly forbidden that any more Jews be killed (April 1945). In the course of this march, at least 178 out of a total of 580 Jewish women died, corresponding to 30% of the total. According to the American doctor who examined the survivors, half would have died within twenty-four hours if they had not received immediate lifesaving measures. None of the non-Jewish prisoners - German women imprisoned for political motives - died during the march.
Some of the most brutal scenes of the massacres perpetrated by Battalion 101 were actually photographed by the perpetrators themselves (see the photographic documentation contained in the book); we are told, furthermore, that the photos were hung on the wall of the barracks and that copies could be ordered. It seems that many were, indicating that the men were particularly eager to preserve images of the events they had taken part in. The inscriptions on the back of these photos reveal the same mixture of cynicism and linguistic euphemisms which can be found in the reports written by the Einsatzgruppen employed to exterminate Jews in the Soviet Union. The photo of a German soldier shooting a Jewish woman who is holding a child in her arms bears the inscription: "Ukraine 1942, Action against Jews, Ivangorod".
6. Goldhagen's work belongs to that line of historical investigation into Nazi crimes which in recent years has shifted attention from the SS and the death camps onto the massacres perpetrated by men of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), of the Secret Police (Geheime Feldpolizei) and of the Wehrmacht itself, in Poland and the Soviet Union.
These studies have provided us with evidence and information about these other institutions of killing which obliges us to rethink the dynamics of the Holocaust. Here are some of the elements which have emerged:
a) The extermination of the Jews did not take place exclusively or for the most part in the gas chambers of the death camps. The Jews in the Russia occupied by the Wehrmacht were exterminated by being lined up and machine-gunned by the thousands. It has been known for some time that this killing was not only done by the Einsatzkommandos controlled by the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) under the command of Reinhard Heydrich [20] , but also by auxiliary units like the Ordnungspolizei and the Feldpolizei [21], by non-German auxiliary forces, and on numerous occasions, even by units of the Wehrmacht itself [22].
b) As well as the gassings and other forms of mass extermination performed in the death camps in Poland, numerous mass executions took place as part of Aktion Reinhard, evidently due to the fact that the gas chambers failed to keep up with demand. In the light of these facts, we must reconsider the central role hitherto assigned to the gas chambers in the process of exterminating the Jews of Europe, and we must ask ourselves to what extent this central role was due to the symbolic force of the inescapable association between modernity and death which the gas chambers represented then, and still do now [23].
Most of the killing operations made use of methods much less sanitized and rationalized than those in the Zyklon B facilities [24], although in these mass slaughters too, grotesque forms of rationalization were introduced, based on experience, and lacking in any technological infrastructures.
c) If the historical analysis is extended to the people involved in the killings in Poland and the Soviet Union, using the techniques proper to microhistorical investigation, then the number of "perpetrators" increases dramatically. Goldhagen estimates that several hundred thousand "ordinary people" (whether Germans or not) were directly involved in the massacres.
d) From the first attempts at comparison, it would seem that the psychological reactions of the "ordinary Germans" on receiving the order to kill tens of thousands of Jews (including women and children), were not very different from those of the "death-head" SS units serving in the extermination camps or the Einsatzkommandos busy behind the Eastern front.
7. As mentioned previously, Goldhagen traces the criminal, genocidal behaviour of these "ordinary Germans" back to their "eliminationist antisemitism", which induced them all to perceive themselves as Weltanschauungskrieger (ideological warriors), as soon as they were given the chance. Rightly, this interpretation has been strongly contested by historiographical criticism. Goldhagen fails to show that German antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century presented the unique "eliminationist" features that attributes to it. Indeed, the concept of "eliminationist antisemitism" is extremely imprecise in itself; of necessity perhaps, since Goldhagen contends that all the political forces of the Second Reich had this attitude towards the Jews, including even the assimilationist liberals, whose views were shared by many German Jews as well. The book provides no convincing explanation, however, for the behaviour of the Latvians, Estonians and Ukrainians who served in auxiliary units, and who were guilty of crimes just as terrible as those committed by the Germans, and seemed to be equally untouched by moral qualms. How exactly do the bloody pogroms against the Jews of Latvia, and the slaughter of thousands of Jews by the Croatian Ustachies [25] fit into Goldhagen's scheme of things? These actions were no different in kind from the actions of the "ordinary Germans". The fact that Goldhagen should contend that German National Socialism was the motive force behind the extermination is not wrong in itself, but it does not quite resolve the problem.
But the crucial question which must be tackled, in my opinion, is to what extent the perpetrators themselves saw the extermination of the Jews as of a different nature from other types of extermination. To give an example, what was the subjective attitude of the guards on surveillance duty in those prison camps where three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war met their deaths, mostly from starvation [26] ? It seems reasonable to assume that these guards were faced with a situation that contradicted all their acquired beliefs regarding soldierly ethos, which had laid down very clear rules about the treatment of prisoners of war long before the signing of the Geneva Convention. This was a massacre of immense proportions, perpetrated on the basis of beliefs, stereotypes and prejudices which could only have been of recent origin. In fact, throughout the period of the Republic of Weimar, relations between the Red Army and the "illegal Reichswehr" (known as the Schwarze Reichswehr) were idyllic. Nor can it be said that the Russian people were the "historical enemy" of Germany. On the borders to the east, it was the Poles who had that dubious distinction. This example offers cause for reflection upon the speed with which a stereotype can gain credit, especially in extreme circumstances [27] and in situations in which the perpetrators have complete power over their victims. Another more general question is whether there is a causal relationship between the negative stereotype and the atrocities committed, or whether the stereotype is not a surreptitious form of self-justification.
8. What was the attitude of those German army soldiers in Russia and Jugoslavia, for example, who carried out reprisals against civilian populations and took thousands of lives (and here too, many were women and children)? These were numbers out of all proportion to the incidents that provoked the punitive action. How would the "ordinary German soldiers" have behaved if Moscow and Leningrad had fallen, since Hitler had ordered that they should be "razed to the ground" (in the Siege of Leningrad alone, a million civilians lost their lives)?
Goldhagen provides a long list of examples in which Jews were discriminated against more than Poles and Russians. However we still lack similar material about killing operations in which the principal victims were not Jewish.
Both Goldhagen's book and the essays accompanying the exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht, not to mention Bartov's work on the barbarization of warfare on the Russian Front, describe the existence of cognitive structures in which Judaism was inextricably linked to Bolshevism (so much so, as to provide partial confirmation of Ernst Nolte's controversial theories in Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945), alongside the perception of Jews as being a source of disease [28]. Often, the mass executions were justified by 'resistance activity', 'sabotage behind the lines', and suchlike. These motivations, however far they may have been from any factual reality, offer some useful insight into the mindset of the perpetrators. The projection of 'absolute evil' which the Germans had been called upon to free humanity from, was made up of a symbiosis between Judaism and Bolshevism, in which the former constituted the biological basis for the latter. This explains the need to motivate the mass killings of the Jewish population with non-existent acts of resistance: clearly, there would never be peace behind the lines as long as the element from which Soviet communism [29] originated continued to exist there. The other side of the equation, the "Soviet Untermensch" , was to be defeated in a "war of extinction", in which all of the conventional rules ceased to apply; the conquered populations of Russia were not doomed to complete extermination (with the exception of the Communist party elite), but were to be decimated.
Approached from yet another angle, the problem posed by Goldhagen's book could be formulated in the following way: given that for the Nazi leaders, the genocide of the Jews was to be total, and was one of the main priorities of the regime, and that in this sense it was different from the other kinds of extermination planned and implemented, is it possible that this point of view was shared by the men who were the material executioners? Might not almost every German have belonged, at least potentially, to the 'perpetrators' category?
Two of the 'case studies' Goldhagen presents refer to concentration camp situations, or in other words, to situations in which the racist, genocidal logic of Nazism is presented, as it were, in vitro. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the male and female guards working in these institutions had fully internalized the values (and non-values) of Nazi racism. Moreover, a sample taken from the guardroom of the concentration camps can scarcely be considered as representative of "ordinary Germans", as Goldhagen repeatedly claims.
9. But it is undeniable that although he takes some rather debatable historical premises as his starting-point, Goldhagen does manage to reconstruct the mental world of the material perpetrators of the final solution, in a way that had never been attempted before. Of course, this study is not sufficient to give a clear answer to the question of whether the mass execution of the Jews was a priority for 'ordinary Germans' too, and whether that was one of the principal reasons for their approval of Hitler. As we have already said, in order to investigate that question, we would need similar studies to Goldhagen's, relative to other groups of perpetrators, which analyse their mental attitude towards non-Jewish victims too. However, Goldhagen's book has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist antisemitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Further studies are needed to decide to what extent these mental structures can be extended to include more numerous sections of the German population in the years of the Second World War.
[1] - For instance, Raul Hilberg's book, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, London 1985), considered by many to be the standard work of reference on the genocide of the Jews, did not enjoy anything like the success of Hitler's willing executioners.
[2] - See Julius H. Shoeps (ed.), Ein Volk von Mördern? Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust, Hamburg 1996, for a collection of the most important reviews appearing in Germany and the United States.
[3] - See for example Volker Ullrich, Hitlers willige Mordgesellen, in Schoeps, cit. pp. 89-92. Cfr. also the comments by Giovanni Gozzini in "Carnefici e tedeschi", Passato e Presente, 42, (1997) pp.5-16, and in particular pp.6 foll.
[4] - See for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler's review "Wie ein Stachel im Fleisch", illuminating in many other ways, which was originally published in "Die Zeit", and then republished in Schoeps, cit., pp. 193-209.
[5]- See especially, A.J.P.Taylor, The course of German history, London 1945.
[6] - With regard to Wehler, see note 4. Cfr. Omer Bartov, "Ganz normale Monster", in Schoeps, cit., pp. 63-80; Eberhard Jäckel, "Einfach ein schlechtes Buch", in: ibidem, pp. 187-192.
[7] - See for example, G.Gozzini, "Carnefici e tedeschi"; Jerry Adler, "Geschichtsstunde", in Schoeps, cit., pp. 81-86.
[8] - See Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, Berlin 1986. As is well-known, Hillgruber's article was at the centre of a heated debate in the course of the "Historikerstreit". Throughout this debate, however, no attention was paid to the interesting new elements in Hillgruber's theories, regarding the way in which Nazi Germany was perceived by the English political class in general, and by Churchill in particular.
[9] - Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland, New York 1992.
[10] - See note 1.
[11] - Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (ed.), Vernichtungskrieg, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1945, Hamburg 1996.
[12] - Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, London 1985. See also, for a micro-historical approach to the extermination of the Jews in Galicia, Thomas Sandkühler, "Endlösung" in Galizien. Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941-1944, Bonn 1996.
[13] - See Gerhard Ritter, "The Historical Foundations of the Rise of National Socialism", in The Third Reich, London 1955, pp. 381-416. In this analysis, Nazism is seen as a manifestation of modern totalitarianism produced by mass society, irrational currents and the worship of violence. In Die Dämonie der Macht, too, which only touches on the problem of National Socialism in the last few pages, Ritter takes Rankian categories as a starting-point and gives pride of place in his analysis to the disparity between power politics and ethics, a disparity which is seen as being a general problem.
[14] - See Friedrich Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe, Berlin 1948. In this complex analysis, specifically German features such as Prussian militarism, power politics, and so on, are inserted into a "universal" context whch includes the rise of modernity, the triumph of technology and political Machiavellianism applied to mass political society.
[15] - See, in particular, A.J.P.Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, London 1961.
[16] - Cfr. note 8.
[17] - For a comment on the interpretative criteria adopted by Browning with regard to the behaviour of the members of Police Battalion 101 involved in the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians in Poland, see Marina Cattaruzza, "Il ruolo degli 'uomini comuni' nello sterminio degli Ebrei europei", Storia della Storiografia, 30 (1996), pp. 141-150.
[18] - The material relative to the legal investigations into the activities of Battalion 101 is to be found at the Zentral Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, in Ludwigsburg.
[19] - Browning seems to be much more sceptical about the scruples that are supposed to have bothered the men of the 101 during the reprisals against Polish civilians. Cfr. Christopher R. Browning, "Dämonisierung erklärt nichts", in Schoeps, cit., pp.118-124. This difference in Browning's and Goldhagen's interpretations of the emotive attitude of the Germans when atrocities were committed against non-Jewish victims touches one of the main problems raised by Hitler's willing executioners: to what extent did the perpetrators's attitude towards their Jewish victims extend also to the other forms of extermination practised by the Nazis?
[20] - Cfr. the groundbreaking work by Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen. Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938-1942, Frankfurt 1985.
[21] - For an estimate of the numbers involved, see Christopher R. Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered", in The Path to Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge 1992, pp. 86-121.
[22] - In Serbia, units of the Wehrmacht killed numerous Jews, Gypsies, and Serb civilians using methods identical to those of the Einsatzgruppen. In just two weeks, in October 1941, they slaughtered 9,000 people. In White Russia, too, from September to December 1941, companies of the 727 Infantry Regiment took part in the shooting of thousands of Jews from the ghettoes. Cfr. Vernichtungskrieg. Verbtrechen der Wehrmacht. As regards the non-German volunteers active in genocidal operations, see Raul Hilberg, Carnefici, vittime, spettatori, Milan 1994 (First American edition 1992), pp. 87 foll.
[23] - See for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Oxford 1989.
[24] - For an excellent summary of the use of gas chambers in the extermination operations, see Israel Gutman (ed.) Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Berlin 1993, vol. I, pp. 504 foll. (under "Gaskammern").
[25] - For the pogroms in Latvia, see Margers Vestermanis, "Der lettische Anteil an der 'Endlösung'. Versuch einer Antwort", in U.Jackes, E.Jesse, R. Zittelmann (eds.), Die Schatten der Vergangenheit. Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 426-449. For the killings in Croatia, in which the majority of Croatian Jews lost their lives, see Holm Sundhaussen, "Jugoslawien", in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, München 1991, pp. 311-330; only a minority of Jews were handed over to the Germans to be sent to the concentration camps.
[26] - For the most complete documentation of this terrible massacre, see Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, Stuttgart 1978.
[27] - With regard to the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, Omer Bartov has pointed out that the German soldiers belonged to age-groups which had known nothing but National Socialism and had received their early socialization in the Hitler Youth movement. From the letters written from the Front, diaries and other material, it would seem that almost all of them accepted the stereotype (constructed deliberately in the event of an attack on the Soviet Union), of the Russian as a merciless foe, diabolical and 'non-human', who would inflict far worse cruelties upon the German people than the Wehrmacht was inflicting upon civilians and soldiers in the occupied zones. Cfr. Omer Bartov, "The Conduct of War: Soldiers and the Barbarization of Warfare", The Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), pp. 32-45.
[28] - See for example Christopher R. Browning, "Genocide and Public Health: German Doctors and Polish Jews, 1939-1941", in The Path to Genocide, pp. 145-168.
[29] - This blending together of the two concepts 'Jew' and 'Bolshevik' is particularly evident in the language used in the messages and reports of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union. See in particular Hannes Heer, "Verwischen der Spuren, Vernichtung der Erinnerung", in Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, pp. 160-176; B. Boll, H. Heer, W. Manoschek, H. Safrian, Das Eiserne Kreuz, in: ibidem, pp. 177-182.