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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1999 13(2):252-271; doi:10.1093/hgs/13.2.252
© 1999 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Goldhagen and Sarte on Eliminationist Ant-Semitism: False Beliefs and Moral Culpability

Richard Kamber

The College of New Jersey

In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen advances the "cognitive" thesis that Germans who tormented and executed Jews during the Holocaust were motivated primarily by their mistaken beliefs that Jews, by their very nature, were harmful to Germany and thus deserved to be eliminated. This article contends that Goldhagen's "cognitive" thesis significantly mitigates moral culpability and fails to explain how "ordinary" perpetrators could sustain their mistaken beliefs in the face of horrific, contrary evidence. It also suggests that Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitism in terms of bad faith (a self-sustained passion to be deceived) provides a better explanation of how such perpetrators could sustain their beliefs and actions, and shows that Sartre's analysis, unlike Goldhagen's, preserves moral culpability.


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