Anti-Semitism and Nazism: Reconciling Fromm and Goldhagen

Erich Fromm's The Working Class in Weimar Germany relates political party affiliation to attitudes; some findings imply that many German workers circa 1929-1930 were not anti-Semitic. Contrariwise, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners Posits uniformly high levels of eliminationist, racially based anti-Semitism among the Germans who perpetrated the mass killings of Jews circa 1941 and thereafter. Because these killers were ordinary Germans, Goldhagen believes that almost any German would have willingly conducted the genocide. By explicating the process of Nazification of Germans, this article aims to reconcile these seemingly contradictory observations. The Germans' anti-Semitism increased over time because of the Nazis' threat of coercion, the public's perceptions of the regime's economic and international achievements, and anti-Semitic propaganda. By 1941, many Germans had internalized the Nazi worldview, which included eliminationist anti-Semitism as an intrinsic component. Had such Nazified Germans been called upon to serve in the killing units, many would have—some with enthusiasm and some with reluctance. Their anti-Semitism and the cohesion of their killing units would have directed them to kill Jews.