THE thousands of well-heeled shoppers who stream out of Berlin's smartest department store every day are confronted by a huge, permanent billboard listing the death camps where millions of Jews were murdered half a century ago. A Sunday afternoon stroll through the idyllic Grunewald forest will often end at the little railway station where hundreds of thousands of Jews began their journey eastwards to the gas chambers, death marches and mass graves. Even the city's top hotel, the Kempinski, bears a plaque explaining, that it was owned by Jews until the present owners acquired it at a knock-down price during the Third Reich.
Today's Germans are painfully aware of their past, zealously commemorating every Holocaust anniversary and dutifully watching an endless succession of television documentaries cataloguing the horrors perpetrated in Germany's name. Almost all Germans regard the Nazi era as an unspeakable, shameful period in their nation's history but few feel personally responsible and many believe that the time has come for Germany to move out of the shadow of the Holocaust.
German reunification accelerated the process of normalisation and there were few protests last year when German soldiers were deployed in a combat zone abroad for the first time in 50 years. Chancellor Helmut Kohl personally oversaw the ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the War, making sure to highlight Germany's present role as a stable, democratic pillar of the Western alliance.
But the new normality is now under fire following the publication of a book claiming that the Germans have yet to confront the true nature of the Holocaust.
In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues that the mass murder of the Jews was not perpetrated by a small elite of Nazi Party members and SS, men but by tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. He maintains that, far from being an aberration in German history, the Holocaust was the logical conclusion of centuries of virulent anti-Semitism in Germany.
The book will not be published in Germany until August but extracts in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit have already created a sensation. Hitler's Willing Executioners was praised by such historians as Gordon Craig and Simon Schama when it was published in America but it has been savaged in Germany, with many critics accusing the author of reviving the concept of "collective guilt" for the entire German people.
Goldhagen is a professor of political and social science at Harvard University and his approach to the question of why Germans killed Jews is more anthropological than historical. His main focus is on the perpetrators of the killing, people he describes as ordinary Germans who carried out the orders of the Nazi leadership.
"Non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the genocide, and they did not supply the drive and initiative that pushed it forward. To be sure, had the Germans not found European (especially, eastern European) helpers, then the Holocaust would have unfolded somewhat differently, and the Germans would likely not have succeeded in killing as many Jews. Still, it was above all a German enterprise; the decisions, plans, organisational resources, and the majority of its executors were German," he writes.
It is Goldhagen's insistence on referring throughout his book to "the Germans" that has caused most offence in Germany, recalling the crude anti-German histories of the second World War that appeared during the 1950s. In fact, Goldhagen goes further than these earlier historians in arguing that the Germans killed the Jews not because they were ordered to but because they wanted to. He claims that German anti-Semitism had always been unique in its "eliminationist" tendency and that most Germans were eager to remove the Jews from their midst forever.
"Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenceless Jewish men, women and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity," he writes.
To illustrate his argument, Goldhagen examines in detail the activities of Police Battalion 101, a unit of reservists made up of farmers, merchants, factory workers and clerks. In June 1942, the battalion was stationed near the Polish city of Lublin with orders to systematically shoot Jews who had been rounded up in the ghettoes. Soldiers who did not wish to participate in the killings were assigned to other duties and none were punished, yet most continued to take part. One of the soldiers described a typical killing duty as follows:
"They were largely women and children around 12-years-old... I had to shoot an old woman, who was over 60-years-old... Next to me was the policeman Koch ... He had to shoot a small boy of perhaps 12-years. We had been expressly told that we should hold the gun's barrel eight inches from the head.
"Koch had apparently not done this because while leaving the execution site, the other comrades laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brain had spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked, why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the brains on my sidearm, said: `That's from mine, he has stopped twitching.' He said this in an obviously boastful tone . .
The German reaction to Goldhagen's book began gently enough, with Die Zeit predicting that it would spark a reopening of the Historikerstreit, the historians' debate over the origins of the Holocaust which electrified academic life a decade ago. But the tone soon became sharper, with the liberal Frankfurter Rundschau describing Hitler's Willing Executioners as "an outrageous provocation" and Rudolf Augstein, the veteran publisher of Der Spiegel, dismissing it as a historical nonsense.
"We do not dispute the horrors, we have never disputed them since we have known about them. But we dispute the idea that in pre-Hitler Germany, the undoubtedly existing anti-Semitism was so maliciously orientated towards elimination. We do not only dispute it. We regard the suggestion as ignorant, if not malicious," he wrote.
With four months to go before a German translation is published, the debate over Goldhagen's book is likely to intensify. It has already ensured that Germany's soul-searching over the Holocaust will continue for a long time to come and that Dr Kohl's much trumpeted "era of normality" will have to wait.
