Response

Stanley Coen's review and critique of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (JAPA 44/3) provides an excellent overview and psychoanalytic perspective on the genocidal catastrophe euphemistically termed “Hitler's final solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Germany—a problem which “ordinary Germans” experienced as the underlying cause for all of Germany's pre- and post-World War II difficulties, and the solution to which an overwhelmingly large number of German people subscribed for at least the duration of the war, if not longer. Coen highlights major aspects of Goldhagen's relentless documentation of the sadistic German atrocities against the Jewish people, both before and during the barbarous period of the Third Reich, and opens for discussion a number of complex dilemmas facing all of us who try to understand the hideous nature of the particular form that anti-Semitism was to take within the German populace under that government.

As psychoanalysts we are, by training and disposition, oriented to probe human nature to its depths. And as psychoanalysts we cannot help but agree with Coen's view that Goldhagen's cognitive perspective on the German “mind set” that permitted the genocide is limited and incomplete. A psychoanalyst would certainly want to integrate cognition with the “enormous appeal of sadism, domination, omnipotence, destructiveness of all kinds, which the Nazis encouraged ‘ordinary Germans’ to enjoy.” Further, as Coen says, “psychoanalysts would acknowledge universal human traits of destructiveness and of group psychology, which given certain freedom from civilization, can be liberated anywhere. Psychoanalysts would want to indict anti-Semitism by understanding it as human rather than by distancing ourselves from it as only a German aberration.”

Yet, while all this is true and sensibly stated, it still does not help me to understand why, at that particular time, and in that particular place, and among those particular people, the Holocaust