That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. Theres been so much written about this controversial book that Im sure I dont have too many details to add that havent been covered before so instead Ill gather some thoughts that have been mulling around in my mind in the week since I finished reading it. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. It always amazes me that people, who have constructed their own paradigms, and have worked vigorously at maintaining it, can ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. 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. The book of Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners published in 1996, reflecting some an issue that concerned many Germans. "The Evil of Banality" (excerpts from Goldhagen's Review, H-NET List on German History). 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. [23] Other historians, such as the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, the Israeli historian David Bankier, and the American historian Aron Rodrigue, while differing from Kershaw over many details about German public opinion, arguing that the term "passive complicity" is a better description than "indifference", have largely agreed with Kershaw that there was a chasm of opinion about the Jews between the Nazi "true believers" and the wider German public, whose views towards Jews seemed to have expressed more of a dislike than a hatred. I read this years ago and was shocked at the implications of the author's premise, although not unwilling to accept it. 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 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. I am actually shocked that Goldhagen didn't end the book by suggesting that all ethnic Germans should be rounded up and executed to prevent future atrocities. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. Overall, this book is a scholarly work. | ISBN 9780679772682 [60] In a 1996 review in First Things, the American Catholic priest Father Richard John Neuhaus took issue with Goldhagen's claim that the Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany were genocidal towards the Jews, arguing that there was a difference between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism. [29] Goldhagen noted that the officers in charge of Battalion 101 led by Major Wilhem Trapp allowed the men to excuse themselves from killing if they found it too unpleasant, and Goldhagen used the fact that the vast majority of the men of Battalion 101 did not excuse themselves to argue that this proved the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture. This book is a massive oversimplification of history's worst genocide, and turns the Germans into 1 dimensional demons that stand around twirling their handle bar moustaches and laughing maniacally. Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen talked spoke about his new book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. The last and most dramatic event was the reception of Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. Their task was complicated by the way that "Goldhagen's book [had] neither a bibliography nor a listing of archival sources". In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. Abacus 1997 at the best online prices at eBay! [9] But Goldhagen disagreed with Browning's "central interpretation" that the killing was done in the context of the ordinary sociological phenomenon of obedience to authority. Free delivery for many products. LaCapra, Dominick. To redeem, copy and paste the code during the checkout process. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen that argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent " eliminationist antisemitism" in the German political culture, which had [55], Despite having a generally critical view of Goldhagen, Bauer wrote that the final chapters of Hitler's Willing Executioners dealing with the death marches were "the best part of the book. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. I was replying to my friend Mark when I remembered this embarrassment. The better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it? American writer Daniel Goldhagen viewed the very same unit as "willing executioners," sharing Hitler's vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary. 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. 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. [1], Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. Had there not been a depression in Germany, then in all likelihood the Nazis wouldn't have come to power. Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. "[13] Instead, Goldhagen argued that historians should examine ordinary Germans of the Nazi period, in the same way, they examined the Aztecs who believed in the necessity of human sacrifice to appease the gods and ensure that the sun would rise every day. 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. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.[7]. Until deciding to devote himself full-time to writing, he taught political science and social studies for many years at Harvard University. Goldhagen takes a very different view of Germans, Nazi or not, who actively helped in brutalizing and murdering Jews. Guttenplan argued that the Nazi theories about "Judo-Bolshevism" made for a more complex explanation for the Holocaust than the Goldhagen thesis about an "eliminationist anti-Semitic" culture. He asserts in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners that Germany enthusiastically welcomed the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the period 1933-39. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. [61] The Canadian historian Peter Hoffmann accused Goldhagen of maligning Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, arguing that Goldhagen had taken wildly out of context the list of Jewish doctors forbidden to practice that Goerdeler as Lord Mayor of Leipzig had issued in April 1935. Around the globe, there have been dozens of self-declared fascist movements (and a good deal more that go by different labels), and few of them have embraced Nazi-style genocide. Hitler's Willing Executioners was dismissed as fundamentally ahistorical in Commentary, of all places, and as a "bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews as an insidious, inherently. 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. [80] Influenced by the thesis about the Jews and Soviets as equal victims of the Holocaust presented in the American historian Arno J. Mayer's 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jrgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. A Conversation with Raul Hilberg". 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? 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. The anti-Christ of history - a truly shocking effort by a misleading author. Rather, those responsible were representative Germans conditioned by an ''eliminationist anti-Semitism'' so virulent and constant that it needed only the sanction of the Hitler regime to express itself . Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2. [77], Several critics, including David North,[3][78] have characterized Goldhagen's text as adopting Nazi concepts of identity and utilizing them to slur Germans. The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. But Hitler's exemplified and brought to an apotheosis the particular form of eliminationist anti-Semitism that came to the fore in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Jewish establishment has embraced Goldhagen as if he were Mr Holocaust himself All this is absurd, because the criticism of Goldhagen is backed up so well."[73]. Goldhagen arrived in Germany in September 1996 for a book tour, and appeared on several television talk shows, as well as a number of sold-out panel discussions. "[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". [50], About the long-term origins of the Holocaust, Browning argued that by the end of the 19th century, antisemitism was widely accepted by most German conservatives and that virtually all German conservatives supported the Nazi regime's antisemitic laws of 193334 (and the few who did object like President Hindenburg only objected to the inclusion of Jewish war veterans in the antisemitic laws that they otherwise supported) but that left to their own devices, would not have gone further and that for all their fierce anti-Semitism, German conservatives would not have engaged in genocide. [64], Goldhagen's assertion that almost all Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, as "patent nonsense". [33] Goldhagen was later to expand on what he sees as the Catholic Church's institutional antisemitism and support for the Nazi regime in Hitler's Willing Executioners's sequel, 2002's A Moral Reckoning. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. 1930, as a 16-year-old. [27] Contra Browning, Goldhagen argued that the men of Battalion 101 were not reluctant killers, but instead willingly murdered Polish Jews in the cruelest and sadistic manner possible, that "brutality and cruelty" were central to the ethos of Battalion 101. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. [6], In 1992, the American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled Ordinary Men about the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which had been used in 1942 to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland. Emellett ezek az egysgek jellemzen az idsebb korosztlybl verbuvldtak vagyis nem a Hitler-rezsim oktatsi viszonyai kztt szocializldtak. [28] In its turn, the "culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. "Cultural antisemitism," directed primarily against the Eastern Jews, was part of the "cultural code" of German conservatives, who were mainly found in the German officer corps and the high civil administration. 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. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. Of course they were willing participants in the sense that they consciously carried out their actions as humans with as much "free will" as anyone else. Where do I even start with how bad this thesis is? This book makes a powerful argument. [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". It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. 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? Open Preview. Finally, we learn that Germans overwhelmingly supported these measures because the Nazis didn't punish opposition like the Soviets did! There was something unique to Germany that made its fascism genocidal. 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. But in recent years, its primacy has been challenged: instead of offering a narrative of increasing efficiency and murderousness leading to gas chambers, historians have turned to the sequence of massacres that reached a crescendo in 1942 and continued, albeit at a reduced rate, into the postwar period. About Goldhagen's claims that the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 were reluctant to kill Polish Catholics while being eager to kill Polish Jews, Browning accused Goldhagen of having double standards with the historical evidence. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of eliminationist anti-Semitism that made Hitlers pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Goldhagen's one-dimensional view of German antisemitism also ignores the specific impact of the vlkisch antisemitism as proclaimed by Houston Stuart Chamberlain and the Richard Wagner movement which directly influenced Hitler as well as the Nazi party. It was very detailed and extensively researched and Im glad I read it and finally got the answer Ive been seeking for so long. Exceptionally wrong. [24], As such, to prove his thesis Goldhagen focused on the behavior of ordinary Germans who killed Jews, especially the behavior of the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland in 1942 to argue ordinary Germans possessed by "eliminationist antisemitism" chose to willingly murder Jews. Hitler's Willing Executioners is an extraordinary and original contribution to the mountain of literature on the Holocaust. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. By Clive James. [52], The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Goldhagen's thesis about a murderous antisemitic culture applied better to Romania than to Germany and murderous anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany as Goldhagen had claimed. [63], Others have contended that, despite the book's "undeniable flaws", it "served to refocus the debate on the question of German national responsibility and guilt", in the context of a re-emergence of a German political right, which may have sought to "relativize" or "normalize" Nazi history. Hitler soon became the dictator of Germany and started WWII. [] 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. Despite the fact that up to 70,000 Germans were killed for real or imagined opposition to the Nazis. In 1936, he joined the police force in Breslau and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. [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. That its erroneous to believe the Nazis were capable of brainwashing an entire nation that wasn't already predisposed to embrace a hatred of Jews. Did I mention most of the racial theories including the creation of the fictional "Aryan" race and the concept of killing the Jew race were developed outside of Germany? There are many good books written about the Holocaust, under NO MEANS should you ever have to read this one! However, the author dismisses rather too opportunistically the notion that in a police state opposition isn't an option by singling out a few Nazi policies that did meet with opposition - the banning of crosses from schools for example. This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. [] Goldhagen's book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary ones. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? [25] The 450 or so men of Battalion 101 were mostly middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg who showed little interest in National Socialism and who had no special training to prepare them for genocide. 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. Whatever the variations, I think Austrian and German anti-Semitism can be seen of a piece, where there was a central model of Jews and a view that they needed to be eliminated. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. [2] In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers. But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles. [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. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTORS EC GOLDHAGEN DANIEL JONAH ENGLISH PAPERBACK / SOFT at the best online prices at eBay! Would the German Royal family have kept marrying with people they considered subhuman? It's not that some of Goldhagen's ideas are wrong. [76] Their conclusions were that Goldhagen's analysis of the records: seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. [35], Goldhagen was awarded the Democracy Prize in 1997 by the German Journal for German and International Politics, which asserted that "because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public." Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. However, I began to have a problem with the author singling out Germans for antisemitism. "[91] Goldhagen replied: "If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. Most scholars assume that the German all but total elimination of European Jewry was Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei and his narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews . Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. Auschwitz long figured as the preeminent site of the Holocaust. Totally wrong. In a society where eliminationist norms were universal and in which Jews were rejected even after they had converted, or so he argues, the rise of this extreme form of assimilation of Jews would hardly have been possible. In May 1996, Goldhagen was interviewed about Hitler's Willing Executioners by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum. He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. Want to know what people are actually reading right now? [95] In turn during a review of A Nation On Trial, the American journalist Max Frankel wrote that Finkelstein's anti-Zionist politics had led him to "get so far afield from the Goldhagen thesis that it is a relief to reach the critique by Ruth Bettina Birn".[96]. [19] The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, a leading expert in the social history of the Third Reich, wrote, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference,"[20][21] that is, that the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by a vicious form of antisemitism on the part of the Nazi elite, but that it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was indifferent to what was happening. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews . [67] American historian Gordon A. Craig and Der Spiegel have argued that whatever the book's flaws, it should be welcomed because it will reinvigorate the debate on the Holocaust and stimulate new scholarship. For Goldhagen the Holocaust, in which so many Germans participated, must be explained as a result of the specifically German brand of antisemitism. Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) Raul Hilberg wondered. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust" he said. Nem vletlen, hogy a ktet jelents rszben nem az SS-szel, hanem a rendrzszlaljakkal foglalkozik ezeket az egysgeket ugyanis nem ncikkal, hanem a trsadalom legszlesebb rtegbl vlogatva tltttk fel, nem vizsglva a belpk prtllst, kvetkezskppen tagjaik kztt meglepen kevs politikailag elktelezett szemlyt tallunk. "[91] Rosenbaum asked Goldhagen about Richard Levy's 1975 book The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany which traced the decline of the vlkisch parties in the early 20th century until they were all but wiped out in the 1912 Reichstag election. It is precisely because this . 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. [49] Browning wrote: Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. To the Editors. [82] The most widely read German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published an eight-part series of opinions of the book before its German publication in August 1996. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents. guilty for failing to protest Hitler's murderous intentions and policies while there was still time, and for this, they should be ashamed. [93] Goldberg went on to state that Goldhagen was mistaken in believing that "eliminationist antisemitism" was unique to Germany, and Goldberg charged "eliminationist antisemitism" was just as much a feature of modern Palestinian culture as it was of 19th-20th-century German culture, and that in all essentials Hamas today was just as genocidal as the NSDAP had been. 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