Hitler's Baby Picture, the Comfort of Goldhagen's Thesis About the Holocaust, and the Problem of Everyday Evil

In my last post, we discussed how the Ku Klux Klan can now be easily mocked and ridiculed as an example of a type of throwback racism that signals how White Supremacy is a largely a thing of the past in the United States of America. There, I tried to sufficiently complicate such a conclusion, arguing that a focus on a cartoon version of racism is chaff, blinding folks to the reality of institutional white racism that exists even in the Age of Obama.

One of our occasional guest contributors here at WARN, Werner Herzog's Bear, very intelligently and sharply--as he often does--pointed out how the public misunderstands the dynamics of Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. 

In that earlier post, I had alluded to the work of historian Daniel Goldhagen and his much discussed thesis about how everyday Germans were complicit with the Nazis and the Holocaust. 

Werner is an expert on modern German history. As such, he offered up a very helpful corrective: it was not that Germans were possessed of a maniacal and pathological amount of Antisemitism as Goldhagen had suggested in Hitler's Willing Executioners; no, the majority were self-interested actors who took advantage of anti-Jewish racism pushed by a small percentage of ardent Nazis for their own personal gain. 

We have discussed how contemporary racism is driven by selfishness, indifference, and personal gain here on WARN on earlier occasions. I have also suggested that it is easier for folks to come up with demonic caricatures of white slave owners as rapine beasts than it is to accept the more disturbing notion that White Supremacy was just a day-to-day way of doing business and becoming "middle class", and no small number of white slave owners were "good people." 

These people are still evil. But white slave owners were not necessarily the flat two dimensional characters that some would prefer in order to feel safe and secure in their own personhood through a belief that the "bad guys" are "over there", as opposed to living right next door to them.

Our discussion of Daniel Goldhagen's work reminded me of what has been described as "the problem of Hitler's baby pictures." 

As discussed by Ron Rosenbaum, the human psyche wants monsters and bogeymen for its vision and the face of evil; it would seem that human beings have a very hard time reconciling human evil with the mundane and the banal.

He wrote about this dilemma with great insight and authority as he observed the following:

A lot of valuable work was done under the rubric of "follow the money." Exposing political corruption, exposing the hidden financial agendas, it's still valuable and I wouldn't want to deter anyone, if that's your kind of talent, if that's what you're good at. But the assumption that money is the root of all evils is, I think, a limited one. One thing I turn away from in the ten years I've spent researching my book on the origins of Hitler's evil, is that bad ideas is the root of a more dangerous evil. And on a more mundane level, bad ideas can be the root of routine stupidity, bad public policy, bankrupt conventional wisdom about human nature, human society.  

So I tend to think that the future of investigative journalism, the future of great journalism, is not "follow the money" but "follow the ideas." Examine, challenge the origin of conventional wisdom, the hidden agendas and unexamined ideologies of supposed impartial experts, the thinking behind think tanks; expose the corruption, the sloppy thinking, the supposedly objective and scientific ideas that help shape not just policy but culture, behavior, belief of who we are.  

There's a world of fat targets awaiting those who are willing to go after them.  

Let me just give you an example of unchallenged conventional wisdom that I've found in my research on Hitler theory...Well, there are a lot of theories about Hitler's abnormal sexuality- very little evidence to support it- why people attach themselves to it? I think it has to do with- if we can think of Hitler as abnormal, as a pervert and distant from ourselves, its comforting, its consoling. Hitler's not like us; he's a monster of some sort. And in some ways, it’s a lot more frightening to think of a Hitler that is normal in some respects, or like us in some respects.
On the cover of my book I put Hitler's baby picture, and I put it there because there's a big controversy over Hitler's baby picture. (Garbled)  

But what I also found was that is raises a question of Hitler's normality- I mean, this is a very normal looking baby picture. (Garbled)  

… this normal looking baby was really kind of threatening. My book was translated into ten languages by five publishers, and none of the foreign publishers wanted to put Hitler's baby picture on the cover. They put a picture of Hitler shaking his fist or Hitler in a military uniform, Hitler scowling as an adult, but certainly this child, this baby was more threatening because it somehow implicated us more, it implicated normality.  

I'm not patting myself on the back for critiquing Hitler theories but I'm suggesting a skeptical attitude toward sweeping theories and a little investigation on your part can bring a lot of great theories crumbling down. There's just too much uncritical reliance on designated experts in American society, whose theories are quoted in newspapers- I mean, my beef with newspaper stories is that always in paragraph four they call some expert at a university and you know, all their experts are their experts, and usually, newspapers feed their readers expert testimony, expert quotes that are not very well examined. 

These paragraphs speak directly to Werner's concerns regarding Daniel Goldhagen's thesis about the Holocaust and Nazi-era Germany. How are laypeople and outsiders to understand and arbitrate complicated matters of history, politics, science, and the like, if what seems to be an imminently logical and compelling claim, does not pass the scrutiny of experts with inside knowledge, proper training, and empirical consensus?

However, knowledge and understanding as recognized by the academy and the learned professions is not static. Knowledge must grow, evolve, be unsettled, sometimes shattered, and recontextualized if it is to remain beholden to "the truth" and relevant.

Sincere and proper intellectuals and students intervene against standing norms as necessary, and by doing so unsettle the standing consensus. Unfortunately, such moves are unpopular and can ruin lives and young careers. But, and if one is lucky, said person can make themselves known in their profession by staking out such a position and being right--and having no small amount of luck, good timing, and well-placed advocates who are ensconced within a broader regime of knowledge.

Surprises are good things. Some surprises about the scale of human indifference, and our capacity to exploit others, are utterly disturbing.

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945. 

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington...When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500. 

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. 

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites. 

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

What events occurring right now are Americans (and others) ignoring, happenings that future generations will be shocked and disgusted by in hindsight? 

The phenomenon of social distance is real. I wonder, how much is social distance just a function of self-delusion and/or self-interest? 

Coming full circle, for centuries America was a slave society. Slavery was not something out of sight and out of mind. It was central to how white Americans and others understood democracy and freedom. Likewise, the lie of outliers and mouth-frothing wicked white racists, slavers, and members of the KKK brings comfort. 

The truth of White Supremacy for most of American history as something both non-controversial and "normal" scares so many because just as in Germany, they do not want to imagine their neighbors turning on other people, and judging them less than human based on some arbitrary type of distinction made about groups of human beings judged to be the Outsider.

Moreover, I would also suggest that so many people of color, young folks especially, would like to believe that such a decision would make most in dominant White society either disturbed or unable to sleep at night. The history of the colorline and White Supremacy in the United States reveals just how normal and not-upsetting such sentiments were for white folks in mass.

Scary isn't it? As it should be...