Hitler's Willing Executioners

On the genocidal mindset

Hedwig Höss, played by Sandra Hüller, in The Zone of Interest.

Increasingly, I find that the more I admire a film, the less I have to say about it. Good art is just more resistant to explication than bad art. Or to put it another way, “The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about it,” (John Ashbery). I had plenty to say about Saltburn. I won’t say much about The Zone of Interest, other than, go and see it. It’s very good, I think, although I’m not sure I could say why without diminishing it, somehow. It is itself a film about what isn’t said or shown, about silences, lacunae, muffled horror.

If you haven’t seen it, what I will say, without spoiling it for you, is that you’ll spend much of it wondering how people who are cultivated, intelligent, and even - in certain circumstances - kind, can also be diabolically callous. The film takes place in a beautiful house next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The house is home to the commander of the camp, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children. (The house really existed, as did the principal characters). They live an impeccably bourgeois existence. Every day, Rudolf kisses Hedwig and their children goodbye and takes a short walk to work. He loves the job. She loves the lifestyle. In the picture above Hedwig admires herself in a fur coat she knows has been taken from a Jewish inmate.

Although we don’t see the Hösses talk about or even mention what is happening in the camp, we can tell that the Jews are not people to them.¹ They are un-people, or something worse. Their extermination is not an unspeakable crime which Höss is being forced to carry out, or even a regrettable necessity, but a task in which he takes great pride. The Hösses were not exceptional. I’ve been reading Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and it has helped me understand the mindset of the Hösses and their ilk - or if not to understand it, then to put it in historical context.

Goldhagen wrote his book as a response to one of the periodic attempts by historians and commentators to claim that the majority of Germans participated in genocide with reluctance. On this telling, Nazism was a top-down phenomenon, enforced from above. The soldiers who carried out the killings of Jews, or the civilians who assisted them, did so for the most part because they were terrified of the consequences if they did not do so, and felt ashamed of their actions. Douglas Murray recently revived this argument in an attempt to draw a contrast with the ardour displayed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Goldhagen believed this interpretation of German history was delusional. In his book, he makes a meticulously argued, well-evidenced case that the German people were willing and enthusiastic prosecutors of Hitler’s war on the Jews.

Goldhagen first of all shows that what he calls the “cognitive model” of Nazi antisemitism long predated the Nazis. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, antisemitism was part of the base code of German society - its common sense. Contempt for Jews was shared by working class and middle class Germans; by soldiers, priests, politicians and intellectuals. It wasn’t just mild or casual anti-Semitism, either: there was an obsessive quality to it. In earlier eras of European history, Jews had been regarded as malevolent but peripheral. Modern Germans saw them as the diseased source of all the country’s troubles.

The German strain of antisemitism was always violent in imagery, rhetoric and action: pogroms of Jews were carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Crucially, it always tended towards the idea of elimination, by whatever means necessary. There would be no peace in Germany, it was claimed, until the Jews were destroyed. In 1932, before Hitler came to power, the writer Theodor Lessing said what many Germans believed: that “it would be simplest to kill the 12 or 14 million Jews”.

Hitler, who openly expressed a desire to eliminate the Jews from his earliest days in public life onwards, merely weaponised what were widespread and longstanding public attitudes. When the Nazis came to power and organised brutal attacks on Jews, non-Jewish Germans were for the most part happy to either look the other way, or help out the persecutors. They gave consent to the exclusion of Jews from civilised society and to Jews being hounded from their homes, beaten and murdered. In the wake of this violence, Hitler only became more popular. Finally, someone was getting a grip on ‘the Jewish problem’.

Dissenting voices were very rare, even among men of the cloth. After it became clear that total elimination of the Jews was the government’s goal - either by deportation, induced emigration, starving or violent destruction - German clergy offered wholehearted support for the Nazi project. Goldhagen quotes a vexed letter from the head of an American church to an official in the German Protestant Church, from 1933: “Colleagues of mine were assured this summer in Berlin by official representatives of the churches that the policy could be described as one of ‘humane extermination’…Frankly speaking, the Christians of American cannot conceive of any extermination of human beings as ‘humane’.”

Under Nazism, the Jews were not even slaves. Slavery, evil as it is, depends on slaves to create economic value, and thus slaves are kept healthy, and in some circumstances considered virtuous or honourable by their oppressors. Jews under Nazism, on the other hand, were “socially dead people”: evil, destructive, less than worthless. They deserved only to suffer and die. Hence the major institutional innovation of the Nazi era, the concentration camp. The Germans established, maintained and staffed more than ten thousand camps, an infrastructural undertaking of quite staggering scale and complexity.

Poland, where Auschwitz is located, was made the primary site for this genocidal slaughter, but there was a vast network of camps within Germany too, and the authorities made no effort to hide what was going on from the German people. The camp, writes Goldhagen, was “a world without restraint”. Every German guard was an absolute ruler over the inmates, with no checks whatsoever on his or her power. Guards could assault, degrade, torture or kill prisoners on a whim. They could gratify their darkest impulses and indulge in orgiastic displays of cruelty. They frequently made the most of this license.

Beyond the camps, police battalions went hunting for Jews in the German and Polish countryside and either took them to camps or rounded them up and shot them en masse. These policemen were not elite Nazi officials, but ordinary Germans: farmers, civil servants, craftsmen, shopkeepers. The police were never short of volunteer executioners. Many of these men were married and had children. They would enter a town like Józefów in Poland, and shoot every Jew they could find, including old women, children, and babies. There’s no evidence that they did so under compulsion, and although some of them found the actual act of killing wearying and unpleasant, they didn’t seem to think it was wrong. Goldhagen finds an example of a well-liked and trusted battalion commander who gave his men the option of not taking part in the killing, if they did not wish to. Nobody took him up on it.

Vera Wohlauf

While the killing of Poles was seen as an unfortunate and sober necessity, the killing of Jews was carried out with gusto, even jocularity. There was certainly no shame in it. In an echo of The Zone of Interest, Goldhagen writes about two battalion commanders, Lieutenant Paul Brand and Captain Julius Wohlauf, who invited their wives to join them while they carried out these killings. Wohlauf, who oversaw the slaughter in Józefów, returned to Germany just before it, to get married, before coming back to Poland. His wife Vera joined him a few days afterwards. She stayed with him during several subsequent killing operations and participated in one or two of the larger ones.

To win a war you must make yourself, at least to some extent, indifferent to killing. It is a necessary means to an end. To carry out a genocide, you must see the act of killing as an end in itself: a source of purpose, pride and joy. Goldhagen quotes an air force sergeant, writing in 1943, who tells proudly of the destruction of the largest Jewish population in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto, once home to 450,000 Jews. He sounds as if he’s congratulating a sales team on a particular strong quarter: “We flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognise the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job.”

The Nazi genocidal operation is, obviously, appalling to be confronted with, either in a history book or in a fictionalised film. It is confounding, too. Even when analysed and explained, the events and people of that period remain cloudy and mysterious to us, impossible to fully comprehend. The Holocaust throws into question some of our fundamental beliefs and assumptions: for instance, the idea that culture is civilising, or that a multitude of people is always basically good with evil always confined to a minority. One reason The Zone of Interest is so powerful is that it is not interested in explaining, merely in showing, in a manner which is subtle and oblique, though no less horrifying for it.

Reading Goldhagen’s book made me think about the horrific accounts of October 7th. While Douglas Murray was wrong to suggest that German soldiers were mostly reluctant perpetrators of genocide, he was right to highlight the zealous joy with which Hamas’s killers went about their work. I don’t know how widespread or how deep antisemitism is among the Palestinian and Arab populations, but we certainly saw its most virulent manifestation on October 7th.

The book also made me reflect on the claim that Israel is bent on genocide. It seems clear to me that the Israelis do not take symmetrical pleasure in killing Palestinians. It can certainly be argued that Israeli indifference to Palestinian lives is morally appalling. But I do not believe that Israelis are killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians. For one thing, if they are, they would have already dealt with the Palestinians in their midst. Around 20% of Israelis are Palestinian and although they face discrimination and exclusion, they are not treated anything like the Jews in pre-war Germany.

The attitude of Israelis to Palestinians seems nothing like that of Germans to Jews in the 1930s. As for the other side, Hamas do not have the means to carry out an eliminationist program of destruction against Jews, and thank goodness. I’m not an expert on the legal argument over whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, but the genocidal impulse is most clearly instantiated in the actions of Hamas on October 7th: the hunting expeditions to catch those who escaped from the carnage at the music festival, the mass rapes followed by murders, the demonic glee with which Hamas’s killers mutilated the genitals of their victims - and the sharing of such atrocities, via video, with the folks back home; pride in a fantastic job.

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1. Only once in the film does Hedwig refer to what is going on next door. Her mother asks her if the servants are Jewish. “No, all the Jews are on the other side of the wall,” says Hedwig.