If Hannah Arendt's quote about Adolf Eichmann is to be of value in our understanding of the Holocaust then it must be applied more generally, to others who share responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. That their deeds were horrific is part of historical canon. The question remains, however, over whether the perpetrators were, as Browning stipulates and Arendt implies, ordinary men doing extraordinary things or whether, as Goldhagen appears to conclude, they were monsters, products of a rotten society, taking Germany's inherent anti-Semitism to its logical conclusion. These are, of course, polarised viewpoints. The truth might actually lie within the grey areas, where Browning's ordinary men became Goldhagen's monsters over time.

The danger in all historical study - but particularly that of the Holocaust - is that it is all too easy to miss the point. Studying, interpreting and psychoanalysing men like Hitler and Eichmann may go some distance to explain how the circumstances in which the Holocaust took place came about, but that does not explain why so many anonymous men decided to kill other human beings. It is easy to get caught up in the big events, the politics and the celebrities of history, but it is important not to allow history to become divorced from what it is: the sum of the actions of individuals. Each perpetrator was an individual who made his own choice to do what he did, and it is no more appropriate to apply the Goldhagen model of innate murderous propensities to them all than it is to apply Hannah Arendt's evaluation of Eichmann to men who had a far more involved role in the deeds of genocide than one of the architects of its policy.

But to claim any of them, from Adolf Hitler down to the lowest concentration camp guard were wholly ordinary to begin with is denigrating to truly ordinary human beings. Whilst its important not to demonise these men to the point where we stop thinking of them as our forebears, it is equally as important not to go to the opposite extreme and normalise them to the extent where we can no longer appreciate the social, political and historical context in which the Holocaust occurred. This way, it becomes possible to see whether, as Goldhagen argues, the Holocaust was a phenomenon unique to Germany or whether Browning and Arendt are closer to the truth: that the Holocaust was he product of unexceptional men in extenuating circumstances.

One of the most important single dates in the history of the Holocaust is November 9th 1938: Kristallnacht. On the night of the 9th, continuing into the morning of the 10th, SS soldiers smashed Jewish shops, set fire to synagogues and beat up Jews, assisted by hundreds of willing civilians and watched by thousands more. 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 deported to concentration camps. This is an important date because on the surface it appears to be the turning point from restrictive prejudice to hostile persecution, yet it is neither a traditional pogrom nor one of the eliminationist operations that was to follow.

A traditional pogrom is an emotional public outburst in reaction to events beyond the control of the participants. It was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 in which Jews were implicated that led to one of Russian's largest anti-Semitic pogroms and the spark for Kristallnacht would appear to be the murder in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Hirsch Grynszpan, a Jew living in France whose parents had been deported from Germany. However, whilst the civilian participants may have joined in out of an emotional reaction, Kristallnacht was actually instigated and orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, a fact which negates it from being a traditional pogrom.

However, it was no an obvious precursor to genocide either. Most of the 30,000 imprisoned were later released. It was hoped they would be frightened into leaving Germany. Murder charges were also brought up against some of those responsible for killing Jews, though most of these were later dropped on the grounds that they were acting in self-defence against resistant Jews. Despite this, the systematic brutality later associated with the regime remains evident - 62 Jews taken to Sachsenhausen were beaten on arrival for half an hour.

The important issue to note, however, is the involvement of ordinary people in the actions. Kristallnacht did not pass without criticism, even within Germany, but there had been no such public outburst two years earlier when a Jewish student killed the Nazi representative to Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff. The obvious distinction between 1936 and 1938 is the active role of the state in proceedings on the later date.

Superficially this could be interpreted to mean that Goldhagen is right: that ordinary Germans did have latent hatred for Jews and all they needed was someone to give them permission to act on those feelings. With the state not stopping the civilian uprising and people not standing up against the SS operation, there arose a circle of mutual affirmation. So even if ordinary people were not directly responsible for the deeds of the Holocaust, they retain a degree of responsibility for allowing it to happen. Despite the fact that in this instance it was only a minority of civilians who joined in, it must have been clear now what the Nazi regime stood for. There could be no denial of its open persecution, and no more indifference - indifference amounts to passive support.

There were so many eventually involved in the Nazi murder machine that attributing it to simple perversion does not satisfy. The logical place to start to assess just how ordinary the perpetrators were is the background environment from which they came, to see if they were a product of that society, or whether that society was a product of them. Anti-Semitism is as old as Judaism itself, but it evolved in the 19th century. With increased secularism, it ceased to be a solely religious prejudice and with the rise of social science and racial theory became more about culture and race instead. In interwar Germany, however, it evolved even further and this development can be said to be unique to Germany, if not unique to Germans themselves.

The end of the First World War led to a national identity crisis over what it meant to be German. Whilst Germany lay a defeated and reduced newly-democratic republic, the Soviet Union had risen to be a major European power, despite many Germans believing they had defeated the Russians in 1917. The rise of the thinking man's anti-Semitism can be attributed to an old myth that dies hard: that conspiratory Jews are trying to take over the world. Karl Marx, founder of socialism, was Jewish, as was Trotsky, the second most important of the Communist revolutionaries after Lenin, who himself had a Jewish grandmother. Lacking the island mentality of Britain or America, Germany was surrounded on all sides by potential enemies, most potently the Soviet Union, where Bolshevism and Judaism now appeared interchangeable. Further links could be made between the two because a faction of the SDP who wanted to bring Bolshevism to Germany was largely Jewish.

The new German anti-Semitism did not arise out of scapegoating the Jews for the Great Depression of the early 1930s, though that did help the cause. By that stage it was already a reasoned and rationalised dogma based on patriotic concern, something that could appeal to educated people, plus ordinary people who couldn't understand their own defeat and the apparent Jewish takeover of the world's largest country. It ceased to be an emotional response to external events. This intellectualisation of prejudice proved to be dangerous in many ordinary people - if there was an emotional detachment from hating Jews, then there could be an emotional detachment from acting on that hate against them.

To talk of attitudes and beliefs quickly becomes academic, however, because the Holocaust was about actions not thoughts. Germany was not demonised for its widespread anti-Semitism by other countries until it ignited the Second World War. At this point, ordinary Germans became galvanised behind the Nazi cause. It is no coincidence, the war essentially being a race war, that when the war took off, so did the Holocaust. The early successes against the Soviet Union in mid-1941 were a crucial time because it proved the apparent accuracy of Nazi ideology - Germany stopped undefeated and unstoppable because of the superiority of the Aryan race. In those heady days of victory, ordinary Germans would have no call to doubt the Nazi dogma. The anti-Semitic activities that occurred in this period were not the actions of a nation under threat defending themselves. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen murder squads in occupied territory were not glorified pogroms. This was the start of an official policy of orchestrated genocide - the Final Solution.

In a certain way, however, the routine slaughter of Russian Jews bears an abstract resemblance to Kristallnacht. The civilian volunteers who participated in the 1938 assault felt free to because the state's involvement was tantamount to giving permission. Once the war had started, the SS firing squads who went around killing innocent Jews did so because war had made killing similarly acceptable, and success thus far had made it seem justifiable, if not justified. It is unlikely that the Nazis who killed thousands of Russian Jews in the summer of 1941 thought they were evil men doing evil things. Nazi indoctrination had led these men to believe that what they were doing was for the greater good of mankind (as the Nazis themselves defined it). Self-belief in our own good intentions is something everyone has at a subconscious level. In this sense, the perpetrators were ordinary, and it was the invasive indoctrination, something outside the human psyche, that caused them to behave as they did.

Hannah Arendt would have us believe this of Eichmann, but Eichmann was one of those behind the influence of propaganda, not one of those on the receiving end. What further calls the idea of blind, brainwashed propaganda into doubt is the interesting case of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, which both Browning and Goldhagen devote a disproportionate amount of coverage to compared to other perpetrators of atrocities. These days we assume racism appeals to the poor and disenfranchised, and that most of the men who took part in the Nazi genocide campaign were very young recruits fresh out of the Hitler Youth. Neither of these arguments is entirely inaccurate, but Police Battalion 101 is interesting because it consisted mainly of lower-middle class, middle aged men. These were people who had grown up in an era before the virulent form of anti-Semitism perpetuated by the Nazi regime, yet they still went on to kill thousands of Jewish civilians in 1942.

It helps Goldhagen's argument no end that before the first massacre at Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942, battalion major Wilhelm Trapp offered anybody unhappy with their orders the choice of opting out. Of the 500 battalion members, only 12 took him up on that offer, so the rest willingly chose to kill the women, children and elderly that remained after the men had been deported. Browning argues that the men only took part in the belief that everyone else was going to do it, and for them to not would risk isolation and accusations of cowardice. He also notes that some members took part initially but opted out after the first few kills, whilst others deliberately aimed past their victims just to keeps up the appearance of taking part. This argument does not explain why the victims were stripped naked prior to execution, nor does it account for those men who carried whips, who took photos of themselves tormenting Jews, or who beat Jews with clubs during the second massacre, at Lomazy.

Ordinary men would indeed by repulsed by blood, bone and brain (as was copiously spilled by these inexperienced killers) but ordinary men would not be able to return to the task once they had settled their stomachs. Their emotional reactions were to the gore, not to the slaughter itself. Ordinary men would not be able to make that distinction so coldly. The ordinary men within Reserve Police Battalion 101 were those who opted out, the passive members who might have thought that by not taking part, the end result would be different. The old adage goes that for evil to triumph it is only required that good men do nothing. In this way, those ordinary men in battalion 101 represent most of the ordinary people in Germany.

If there is anywhere that Arendt's comment can not be even remotely applied, it is to the camp system. Beside the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands each day, the routine cruelty of beatings, starvation and forced slave labour made the camps sadistic places by their very nature. Sadism was not just in the actions of the people running these places, it must have been in their characters too. It is tempting to continue to argue that these were still ordinary men at heart simply because there were so many of them, but they were not. They might have been, had Nazi dogma and a brutalising war not effected and transformed them as it had.

In survivor testimonials of life in the camps, we get a glimpse at the implied humanity of the perpetrators. That they felt the need to shave the heads of prisoners, brand them with numbers and dress them all alike (or not at all) shows their need for the dehumanisation of their victims. To put several hundred people in a gas chamber is easier than to shoot them, but to recognise mutual humanity in their victims would have made even that too hard for most people. Yet whilst we look for the shadow of a human being in these men, it can not be found in the likes of Joseph Mengele, with his barbaric experiments on live patients, or those men who liked to whip women, or urinate on people as a punishment. These are not the impulses of ordinary men, nor are they the orders of the Nazi state. These are the choices that people made for themselves, and because of that, it is impossible to apply any definition of ordinariness to them, let alone Hannah Arendt's.

Despite this difficulty in accepting the Nazi perpetrators as human beings at all, it is no less dangerous for us to dehumanise them than it was for them to dehumanise the Jews in the first place. Whilst we can not do anything to them now, dehumanising generates a sense of remoteness that inevitably hampers attempts to understand them. The resulting impressions we would have would be caricatures and not representational. The stories of Jews being drowned in manure, Jews being killed so that their tattooed skin could be made into lampshades or book covers, and having their decapitated heads shrunken at Buchenwald certainly makes the Nazis look like the baddest of the bad. On the one hand we are moved to wonder if there are no limits to human perversion given the free reign of the camp system. But on the other hand it might seem like revisionism to wonder if these atrocities are apocryphal. There's also the question of whether this is missing the point, anyway, saying they were 'this' bad, but not 'that' bad.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen concludes Hitler's Willing Executioners by painting a picture of the German people as crazed individuals whose obsession with the Jewish question led to their ultimate downfall. He is missing the point too. It needn't have been the Germans committing genocide anymore than it needed to have been the Jews on the receiving end. The Nazis persecuted gypsies and the handicapped just as summarily, but hatred for these didn't have the traditional root in the German psyche that Goldhagen argues anti-Semitism did. The racial purity obsession that encompasses modern anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was a product of people who were themselves a product of the circumstances in which history had left them. We have seen similar official policies of genocide appear in the world several times since 1945, but not by Germans, and not against Jews. If Hannah Arendt's comment has any particular value, it is in reminding us that whilst it takes a degree of extraordinariness to commit such atrocities, that extraordinariness can be found anywhere, even amongst ordinary people.

At the end of the day, though, she only speaks for Adolf Eichmann. She gives us food for thought, but no reasons, explanations or answers. Some of the men involved in the Holocaust appeared ordinary, and perhaps for the most part were, but many were also clear cut monsters. Her comment could be a call to judge actions, not the people who committed them, despite the inextricable link. It is difficult for anybody to understand the motivations behind the crimes of the Holocaust, especially as, the further we get from that time, the less appreciation we have for the context in which it happened, and the less perpetrators there are to explain why they did it. When they are gone, we will be left only with subjective judgements, just like Hannah Arendt's.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Browning, C. Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Penguin, 1992, 2001 edition

Friedlander, S. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933-39, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997

Gilbert, M. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana, 1986, 1987 edition

Goldhagen, D. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Abacus, 1996, 2001 edition

Hoess, R. Commandant of Auschwitz, Pan, 1959, 1974 edition

Lengyel, O. Five Chimneys, Mayflower, 1972, 1973 edition

Lindemann, A. Anti-Semitism before the Holocaust, Longman, 2000

Liverpool, Lord Russell of. The Scourage of the Swastika, Corgi, 1954, 1973 edition

Novick, P. The Holocaust and Collective Memory, Bloomsbury, 1999, 2001 edition

Smolen, K. (eds) From the History of K.L. Auschwitz, Panstwowe Muzeum W Oswiecimiu, 1967

NOTES:
Taking full advantage of the requirement to take a unit outside the School of English, I looked to the School of History and found this interesting little unit on the Holocaust led by Ian Farr and Cathie Carmichael. Of course, then I remembered I never really was that good at history anyway (my A grade History A-Level surprising none so much as myself). The result was this hodge podge mish mash of an essay which I'm still not sure answers the question correctly. It got 60%, my lowest mark this year, which lowers my average beneath a First. It was criticised for being too rhetorical, which I can only assume refers to the fact that I wrote an English essay answer to a History essay question.