One scholar’s blurb on the jacket of Eric A. Johnson’s Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans (636 pages. Basic. $35) says the book makes “a complete hash of Goldhagen’s thesis.” Johnson himself, a historian at Central Michigan University, disagrees with Goldhagen more respectfully, though just as firmly, on the prevalence and uniqueness of German anti-Semitism, and actually credits him (and Browning) for emphasizing that hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” Germans participated in the Holocaust–and were free to opt out. He shows that the Gestapo was no all-seeing Orwellian presence terrorizing citizens into compliance. Only 1 percent of non-Jews were ever investigated; most Germans’ experience of the Third Reich was “entirely unlike that of [the Nazis’] targeted enemies.” In this context, Johnson says, Germans’ silence about the Holocaust–which many knew about–was “deplorable” but “in some ways understandable… More than from active anti-Semitism, the silence resulted from a lack of moral concern about the fate of those… perceived as outsiders and from a tradition of obsequious submission to authority.”
