Todorov's volume is well timed, coming as it does in the wake of an extraordinary argument that has been raging through academic circles about how keen the Germans and their allies were to simply rid Europe of Jews. Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners alleged that German society was riddled with anti-Semitism well before the war, and that the Germans were simply waiting for the opportunity to enjoy exercising their bloodlust for Jews, killing them with viciousness and pleasure. Christopher Browning, using largely the same evidence, disagrees. He argues that multi-layered circumstances turned "ordinary Germans" into killers, and that Goldhagen's explanation is both too simple and too forgiving of other groups who have become brutal executioners, such as in Cambodia. He argues that it was not wholly abnormal for the men of Battalion 101 to do what they did in the circumstances. So when one sets that against the story of what ordinary Bulgarians did in order not to have "their" Jews transported to their deaths, it begs many questions. Who wanted to save their Jews? And why are Denmark and Bulgaria the only countries under Nazi rule that collectively, as distinct from individual heroism, saved their Jews?
Todorov demonstrates that it required a few brave people, and the sacrifice of other Jews, from Thrace and Macedonia, for Bulgaria's Jews to be saved. Neutral Bulgaria sided with its traditional allies, the Germans. The "Law for the Defence of the Nation" stripped Jews of their civil rights. It met with considerable opposition from the Bulgarian Orthodox church authorities and others, but was still passed, and when Bulgaria assumed control of Thrace and Macedonia in 1941, it applied there as well.
By summer 1942, a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was established; the German ambassador to Sofia and his Gestapo attachΘ received assurances that deportation could begin at any time, but that the Jews were needed for internal tasks in Bulgaria for the time being. But when Dannecker, Eichmann's special envoy, arrived in early 1943 and demanded 20,000 Jews, it was agreed. 14,000 were to be deported from the occupied territories of Thrace and Macedonia, and 6,000 from the old Bulgaria. The Jewish deportees from Thrace and Macedonia spent several days crossing "old" Bulgaria, and eyewitnesses reacted with compassion and outrage. Politicians and churchmen criticised and pleaded with the king to save the Thracian Jews, to no avail.
Yet when the Jews of "old" Bulgaria were rounded up, their Bulgarian friends helped. In Kyustendil, not far from Sofia, the arrests took place on March 7th, and next day a delegation went to Sofia to plead the cause of their fellow citizens. They met a deputy from Kyustendil, DimitΓr Peshev, vice-chairman of the Assembly, who demanded a meeting with Prime Minister Filov. He met with the head of home affairs Gabrovski, who denied knowledge of the arrests. But as the delegates carried on their complaints, he picked up the telephone, ordered the cessation of the arrests, and the release of those already arrested. Similar, though less successful, actions happened in other provincial cities. Cyril, metropolitan of Plovdiv, sent a telegram to the King, vowing to lie across the railway lines of the first train transporting Jews from his diocese. Peshev pressed his advantage, and composed a letter of protest signed by 42 other members of the ruling party, and sent it to Filov.
The King ordered that Bulgaria's Jews should be moved to the provinces. This too was greeted with panic and dismay, and protests multiplied. Metropolitan Stefan sent Boris a telegram that read: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." (Matt 7: 1-2) The traditional Cyril and Methodius' day parade became a national day of protest. Jews were still taken to the provinces, but the deportations had stopped. They would not start again. On August 28th, Boris died. By late October the Jews were allowed home. In September 1944 the old regime collapsed. And the credit for saving the Jews of Bulgaria was thenceforth claimed by the communists.
Todorov makes it clear that Peshev, more than the others, should receive the credit. He used his position to make a fuss that could not be ignored. He paid for it by being stripped of his vice-chairmanship. After the communists came in, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But what stands out from the story is how the objectors prevailed for the sake of human decency.
Contrast this with Browning's ordinary men from Battalion 101, led by Trapp, who at least had the decency to weep when he told his men to be murderers in Polish villages and ghettos. Were they monsters? Certainly not. Were they moved by what they had to do? Certainly, if the records are to be believed. Browning argues that they became inured to it (though some of them suffered), that they showed compassion at times (Trapp took a 10-year-old girl survivor into his arms after the J≤zef≤w massacre and told her: "You shall remain alive"), and that they were damaged by it all. One commander, Hoffmann, had what he described as vegetative colitis, and went to hospital a few months on. His men remember him as having "alleged" bouts of stomach cramps, restricting him to bed when there was unpleasant or dangerous work to be done. Later, he, like many, refused to discuss his own anti-Semitism.
Browning argues that they could not bring themselves to admit that the peculiar and inverted world of the Nazis had made perfect sense at the time, even though it looked abhorrent by the 1960s, because it would make them out to be moral and political eunuchs. Yet that is precisely what most of them were. They obeyed orders. They drank themselves silly. They showed occasional signs of compassion. A few enjoyed themselves (Goldhagen is wrong in suggesting that most of them did so), and a few objected and refused to take part.
Contrary to what people feared, there is, of course, no evidence of anyone being punished for refusing to take part. Lieutenant Buchmann, who refused to take part in the J≤zef≤w massacre, argued that he could not shoot defenceless women and children. He also explained he had no careerist ambitions. He had a business back home, and "through my earlier business activities, I already know many Jews".
But not many did what he did. Most continued to murder, because that is what they had been brought there to do. Browning is right to cite Milgram's famous experiment showing that human beings will carry out orders which seem immoral and dangerous, even though they know that the victim might die, even without the fear of an external punitive force. This is not just a German problem. The reason Browning's book deserves close study, and his afterword challenging Goldhagen needs serious attention, is because it could happen anywhere. This disregard for ordinary decency and morality does not depend on German anti-Semitism. The Germans also murdered many with learning disabilities in their notorious T-4 programme. Racial purity, mental hygiene, preserving the physical stock of the nation - all these were terms in common parlance everywhere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If we do not talk about eugenics now, it is only as a result of what happened in Germany. But if we think we are morally better, we have to examine our attitudes to asylum seekers, foreigners, gypsies, and to others not like us. We may not be "willing executioners", but we are ordinary men and women, and Browning makes the case convincingly that many ordinary men and women can and do commit the most barbaric and unbelievable acts, carrying out orders, imprinted with disgraceful ideologies. None of us can claim it is impossible. That is why Browning is both so forceful and so compelling.
Read him, for goodness is indeed fragile.
Julia Neuberger is a rabbi and chief executive of the King's Fund, London