Wood, Nancy. Narrating Perpetrator Testimony

In this chapter, Nancy Wood presents a comparative reading of two famous approaches to perpetrator testimony: Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which received acclaim from the media but was received hostilely in academia, and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. To explore how these two historians deal differently with the same materials, Wood reads the section about Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Goldhagen’s book comparatively against Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. Browning, according to Wood, emphasises that the men from the battalion were dehumanised by their circumstances – their conformist behaviour was defensive. Goldhagen conversely argues that Germans felt an eliminationist anti-Semitism and the men would desire rather than be forced to inflict humiliation on their victims, whom they would massacre remorselessly. Wood argues that while Goldhagen was attacked over narrativizing events in such a way that allows for ‘psychological projection’ onto the perpetrators, Browning does the same, albeit in a more restrained manner.

Wood points out that both Goldhagen and Browning are interpreting the little material they have about the perpetrators; they both use the same set of testimonial material, but arrive at different conclusions about the battalion members. Wood argues that “much of the burden of demonstrating whether battalion members fulfilled their genocidal duties with reluctance or zeal hangs on the meaning and significance ascribed to . . . statements [made by battalion members]” (85). Both Browning and Goldhagen are struggling with “regarding the status of the [battalion members’] testimony as memory” (86). The practice of interpreting historical data can lead, as Wood’s discussion of Goldhagen and Browning shows, to two essentially different understandings of the perpetrators’ psyche. This chapter provides a useful entry into thinking about interpreting perpetrator testimony and the resulting judgment such interpretations can lead to.

Author of this entry: Nynke Hartvelt

Wood, Nancy. 1999. “Narrating Perpetrator Testimony.” In Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe, 79-111. London: Bloomsbury.