It was controversial at the time of publication but the author argues, convincingly in my opinion, that ordinary Germans were willing participants in the persecution and murder of Jews, based on the premise that European culture was imbued with anti-semitic sentiment for hundreds of years before Hitler came along .Learning the details of just how bad the Nazi years were for European Jews rips away the abstraction of the number Six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Introduction On April 8th, 1996, the United States Holocaust Research Institute hosted an evening of dialogue to examine the issues raised by Daniel Goldhagen's deliberately provocative book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which the author seeks to challenge the canons of Holocaust scholarship and to directly confront its acknowledged masters. Just for joining youll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. Only elderly Poles, mostly women, remained in the village, as the younger Poles had all fled. Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. [2], Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. [] Using Goldhagen's method of handling evidence, one could easily find enough citations from the Ludwigsburg material to prove the exact opposite of what Goldhagen maintains. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion.Hitlers Willing Executioners is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to theliterature on the Holocaust.New York Review of BooksThe most important book ever published about the HolocaustEloquently written, meticulously documented, impassionedA model of moral and scholarly integrity.Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust" he said. Some of his critics have agreed with him that his thesis is "not intrinsically racist or otherwise illegitimate", including Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein (A Nation on Trial). You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. Goldhagen argues that the case of the Lipowa and Flughafen Jewish labor camps in Lublin demonstrates that in contrast to other victims, only Jewish labor was treated murderously by the Germans without regard for and indeed counter to economic rationality. De brutalitsa nem ncl, hanem eszkz, amivel Goldhagen sajt lltsait bizonytja ezzel, a npirts gyakorlatnak brzolsval, s a gyilkosok kzelkpeivel teremti meg azt a kognitv keretet, ami szerinte az egsz holokauszt kulcsa. This book finally gave me the answer. At a forum held at the University of Michigan on November 8 an international panel of historians concurred that the bestselling book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, was a . Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. [10] They were not ordinary men as we usually understand men to be, but "ordinary members of extraordinary political culture, the culture of Nazi Germany, which was possessed of a hallucinatory, lethal view of the Jews. Of course, they also thought Slavs being put into workhouses and being their slaves was the right thing, too. [94] From a different angle, the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein charged that the book was Zionist propaganda meant to promote the image of a Gentile world forever committed to the destruction of the Jews, thus justifying the existence of Israel, and as such, Goldhagen's book was more concerned with the politics of the Near East and excusing what Finkelstein claimed was Israel's poor human rights record rather than European history. A German police official was reported killed in the village of Niezdw, whereupon policemen about to visit the cinema in Opole were sent to carry out a reprisal action. [9] Goldhagen instead contended that "for the vast majority of the perpetrators a monocausal explanation does suffice". When they started invading other nations, they would kill or imprison every Jew they found men, women and children. The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. Ganz gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (published as Hitler's Willing Executioners in the United States). All the drama of the 60s and 70s have shown us that rebellion and protest make absolutely no difference in the end, so where does that leave us? Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. [70], In 1996, the American historian David Schoenbaum wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review of Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and its difficult to stand out among the sea of words. It was. [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. Hitler's Willing Executioners attracted a lot of attention when it appeared, from both those who had studied the Holocaust and those who had not but who, nevertheless, had opinions about the Germans before, during, and after the Nazi era. [54], Formally, at least, the Jews had been fully emancipated with the establishment of the German Empire, although they were kept out of certain influential occupations, enjoyed extraordinary prosperity Germans intermarried with Jews: in the 1930s some 50,000 Jews were living in mixed German-Jewish marriages, so at least 50,000 Germans, and presumably parts of their families, had familial contact with the Jews. [15], Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz. However, this ideological goal blinds him to any other rational to the causes of the Holocaust. Auschwitz long figured as the preeminent site of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot all the elderly Poles and set the village on fire before returning to the cinema for an evening of casual and relaxing entertainment. It strikes me, though, looking through the various reviews left by other readers, that those who rated Goldhagen's book with a 1 or a 2 were most likely those who either do not have the scholarly background to appreciate this work or who simply skimmed through it and never really read it for biased reasons. [3] These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. Guttenplan, author of The Holocaust on Trial (about the David Irving libel case), also dedicated to Hilberg, wrote that the only difference between Goldhagen's claims of an eliminationist culture and those of Meir Kahane was that Goldhagen's targets were the Germans, whereas Kahane's targets were the Arabs. Start earning points for buying books! Ugyanolyan embertelenl viselkedtek, mint az SS*. I don't feel qualified to review this book about the horrors of the Holocaust..not because I haven't read much about that unbelievable event but because the author puts forward a very controversial approach to the "why" of the slaughter of the Jews that is at odds with most history. If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. Totally wrong. (St: a Hamburg krnykrl toborzott egysg tagjai kztt szmosan szocildemokrata mlttal rendelkeztek.) Reviewed by Stanley Hoffmann May/June 1996 Published on May 1, 1996 A challenging, powerfully argued, and morally passionate account of the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. Another problem with the historic anti-Semitism thesis is that it doesn't explain the genocide of 9.5 million Slavs, when the concept of Germans considering Slavs subhuman is totally alien to German culture and history before the Nazis, and ever since as well. Goldhagen argued that it "strains credibility" to imagine that "ordinary Danes or Italians" could have acted as he claimed ordinary Germans did during the Holocaust to prove that "eliminationist" anti-Semitism was uniquely German. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis. We also learn that only the Germans could commit a genocide of this scale due to their unique evil. I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. In this book we learn that not only did the average German know the full details of the Holocaust and General Plan OST (despite both being highly classified), but supported these measures with glee. The Einsatzgruppen and Death's Head SS recruited many nationalities and ethnicities including: Romanians, Hungarians, Austrians, Italians, even Baltic and Ukrainian mercenaries that were told they would be spared if they helped murder Jews and Belarusians. It has no nationality. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Some church leaders have wondered aloud why there has been no nationwide, popular outrage over the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug personalities (addicts, pushers, drug lords) in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's so-called "War on Drugs.". ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. Free shipping for many products! He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. Abstract Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners has sparked an outpouring of controversy in the international and scholarly press. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. I think not. Little is new in the overall description, but the details and the way he analyzes the attitude of the murderers is powerful and convincing". It's one of those books. The book argues that many more German citizens were involved . In his effort to prove the exceptional nature of German hatred and bigotry, he ignores the wealth of evidence from a variety of social scientists pointing out the general cruelty and inhumanity of humanity in general. That Germany as a nation was murderously antisemtic long before the Nazis came to power, dating back in fact to Martin Luther's hate-spewing speeches and beyond and that it's erroneous to single out the Nazis instead of making culpable the entire German population as being responsible for the Holocaust. In May 1996, Goldhagen was interviewed about Hitler's Willing Executioners by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. This isn't the first book I've read on the subject and I have to say it's depressing how widespread racial hatred for the Jews was in Germany even among so called intelligent, sophisticated people. [32] Goldhagen used antisemitic statements by Cardinal Adolf Bertram as typical of what he called the Roman Catholic Church's support for genocide. [45] Some historians have criticized or simply dismissed the text, citing among other deficiencies Goldhagen's "neglect of decades of research in favour of his own preconceptions", which he proceeds to articulate in an "intemperate, emotional, and accusatory tone". [22] In several articles and books, most notably his 1983 book Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Kershaw argued that most Germans were at a minimum at least vaguely aware of the Holocaust, but did not much care about what their government was doing to the Jews. A CRITIC AT LARGE about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's new book "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which holds . In 1932, at eighteen, he became a member of the Hitler Youth. Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust", Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. Kwiet, Konrad: "'Hitler's Willing Executioners' and Ordinary Germans': Some Comments on Goldhagen's Ideas". Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. [76] Their conclusions were that Goldhagen's analysis of the records: seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. [71]:545 Furthermore, Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread antisemitism. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of the killing form. [51] Browning also contended that the antisemitism of German conservative elites in the military and the bureaucracy long prior to 1933 meant that they made few objections, moral or otherwise to the Nazi/vlkisch antisemitism. [39] Many media commentators observed that, while the book launched a passionate national discussion about the Holocaust,[40] this discussion was carried out civilly and respectfully. [5] Yehuda Bauer was similarly condemnatory, questioning how an institute such as Harvard could award a doctorate for a work which so "slipped through the filter of critical scholarly assessment". "[68] Eberhard Jckel wrote a very hostile book review in the Die Zeit newspaper in May 1996 that called Hitler's Willing Executioners "simply a bad book". His doctoral dissertation, The Nazi Executioners: A Study of Their Behavior and the Causation of Genocide, won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. That doesnt mean it wasnt a great book. Most Germans considered Jews to be parasites and not even human. Ruth Bettina Birn and Volker Riess recognised the need to examine the primary sources (the Police Battalion investigation records) Goldhagen had cited and determine if Goldhagen had applied the historical method in his research. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". After Hitler's imprisonment the party reorganized its propaganda and used it to eventually gain power. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. The New Yorker, April 22, 1996 P. 44. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves. Ive read a lot of books about WWII looking for the answer to one question why did the German people ever allow the Nazis to attempt to exterminate Jews? Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. Krautz,F., The German Historians: Hitler's Willing Executioners and Daniel Goldhagen (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2003), p. 2 Summary In this essay, the author Analyzes the historiography of the 'ordinary germans' during the third reich years and the legacy of goldhagen controversy. For Goldhagen the Holocaust, in which so many Germans participated, must be explained as a result of the specifically German brand of antisemitism. 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