[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? 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. [16] The violent antisemitic "cultural axiom" held by Martin Luther in the 16th century and expressed in his 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, according to Goldhagen, were the same as those held by Adolf Hitler in the 20th century. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. [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. 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. 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. "[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. His approach would be anthropological, treating Germans the same way that an anthropologist would describe preindustrial people who believed in absurd things such as trees having magical powers. Goldhagen replied that voting for or against the wildly antisemitic vlkisch parties had nothing to do with antisemitic feeling, and that people could still hate Jews without voting for the vlkisch parties. I don't think that Goldhagen even allows for this. Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House, Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network. Hitler s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, 601 pp. You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. The book strives to explain why this genocide happened where and when it did. It will make you think, it will make you cringe, it will make you wonder - not only about history, but also about yourself, about what you'd have done, about you'd do if similar circumstances were to happen again. [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. [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. My rating is a split verdict: the author has an interesting yet poorly written argument; neither element should be decisive in convincing potential readers to take up the book or ignore it. Goldhagen's thesis is that no one was coerced, they had the possibility to refuse to take part, yet few did Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a richly detailed and provocative history of the Holocaust. [80], Goldhagen has said that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. 'Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond", in LaCapra, D. Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds. Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. Firstly, the notion of unique German evil is utter BULLSHIT! [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. "[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". I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why. [2][65][66] Common complaints suggest that Goldhagen's primary hypothesis is either "oversimplified",[67] or represents "a bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews" turned back upon the Germans. They follow orders just like everyone else, which is why MANY other peoples have committed hateful genocides including: Turks, Mongols, Japanese, Hutu, Serbs, Belgians, Russians, and too many more to even count. The details are grim but it is worth reading. [12], Goldhagen charged that every other book written on the Holocaust was flawed by the fact that historians had treated Germans in the Third Reich as "more or less like us," wrongly believing that "their sensibilities had remotely approximated our own. [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. [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. These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." In 1936, he joined the police force in Breslau and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. Clendinnen, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics", Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" p. 105-126 from Confront! [26], Using Geertz's anthropological methods, Goldhagen argued by studying the men of Battalion 101 one could engage in a "thick description" of the German "eliminationist antisemitic" culture. Goldhagen replied to his critics in an article Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics: What is striking among some of those who have criticized my book against whom so many people in Germany are openly reacting is that much of what they have written and said has either a tenuous relationship to the book's contents or is patently false. Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. That doesnt mean it wasnt a great book. Whatever its weaknesses as causal model, it is first-rate history that has transformed the way we look at the Holocaust. 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. Free shipping for many products! 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. Abacus 1997 at the best online prices at eBay! The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. At the same time it should be understood that it was the created genus of Hitler and his party in capturing with total control such a country in the first six months as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2. Hitlers Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. These are the average German citizens of the early 20th century. [46] In 1997, the German historian Hans Mommsen gave an interview in which he said that Goldhagen had a poor understanding of the diversities of German antisemitism, that he construed "a unilinear continuity of German anti-semitism from the medieval period onwards" with Hitler as its end result, whereas, said Mommsen, it is obvious that Hitler's antisemitic propaganda had no significant impact on the election campaigns between September 1930 and November 1932 and on his coming to power, a crucial phenomenon ignored by Goldhagen. 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. ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. 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. I ask myself if I would like to have a conversation in person with that author. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. So, yes the author makes some important points in helping us to understand the incomprehensible but he does tend to make the same point over and over again and with increasing vehemence, like a man bringing his fist down continually on his desk. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. petrators, who made willing choices.5 In comparison with other explanations of the Holocaust, Goldhagen's argument combines aspects of the older intentionalist school, which argues that it was Hitler's plan all along to murder the Jews, with what Omer Bartov calls the "common sense" school, especially influential among orthodox Jews. The second and third case studies of Hitler's Willing Executioners are aimed at meeting the burden of proof on these two points. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. While Goldhagen's outrage is natural, (especially given that he is the son of Holocaust survivors) his scholarship is poor and his methodological work is sloppy at best. [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. In his review of Ordinary Men published in July 1992,[8] Goldhagen expressed agreement with several of Browning's findings, namely, that the killings were not, as many people believe, done entirely by SS men, but also by Trawnikis; that the men of Unit 101 had the option not to kill, and a point Goldhagen emphasizes that no German was ever punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. [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. As a teenager Hitler served in WWI and years later was thrown in jail, where he wrote his book Mien Kampf. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. 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. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of #1 international bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997), published in fifteen languages, which. The last and most dramatic event was the reception of Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. He focuses a lot on the police battalions, often middle aged men who didn't belong to the Nazi party but who had no problem murdering Jews, even women, children and the infirm elderly. 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. None of these is true.[75]. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. [65][83], The book had a "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3][84][85][86] who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical. When Rosenbaum asked Goldhagen about scholarly literature that contends that Austrian anti-Semitism was far more virulent and violent than German anti-Semitism, and if the fact that Hitler was an Austrian had any effect on his thesis, Goldhagen replied: There were regional variations in anti-Semitism even within Germany. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. [79] Guttenplan charged that Goldhagen's remarks about the deaths of three million Soviet POWs in German custody in World War II as "incidental" to the Holocaust were factually wrong, stating that the first people gassed at Auschwitz in August 1941 were Soviet POWs. It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. Finally, we learn that Germans overwhelmingly supported these measures because the Nazis didn't punish opposition like the Soviets did! 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. It was very detailed and extensively researched and Im glad I read it and finally got the answer Ive been seeking for so long. Buy, This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. 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). Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) posits that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German identity that had developed in the preceding centuries. Would the German Royal family have kept marrying with people they considered subhuman? [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. 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. I read this years ago and was shocked at the implications of the author's premise, although not unwilling to accept it. 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. Racial hatred is unfortunately a widespread virus that is always awaiting an opportunity to break out. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. 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. 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. The New Yorker, April 22, 1996 P. 44. [92], In 2006, Jewish American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. Finally, Mommsen criticizes Goldhagen for errors in his understanding of the internal structure of the Third Reich. On the other hand, given what is going on in Iraq today, or in Darfur today, in Rwanda a few years ago, or Bosnia a decade ago, I think we are living proof ofsomething. [58] Clendinnen ended her essay by stating she found Browning's account of Battalion 101 to be the more believable. These are relatively few, though, and are dealt with nicely in Brownings scholarly work, "Ordinary Men." 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 provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? 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. 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. When they started invading other nations, they would kill or imprison every Jew they found men, women and children. By Clive James. 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. [18], Hitler's Willing Executioners marked a revisionist challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy surrounding the question of German public opinion and the Final Solution. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978--679-77268-2; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978--679-44695-8. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. 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. [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. THIS is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." I know thats fucked-up, but thats what was finally explained to me in this book. [62] On 11 April 1935, Goerdeler ordered the end of Haake's boycott, and provided a list of "non-Aryan" physicians permitted to operate under the existing laws and those who were excluded. Some of the outright falsehoods include: that little is new in the book; that it puts forward a monocausal and deterministic explanation of the Holocaust, holding it to have been the inevitable outcome of German history; that its argument is ahistorical; and that it makes an "essentialist," "racist" or ethnic argument about Germans. Goldhagen takes a very different view of Germans, Nazi or not, who actively helped in brutalizing and murdering Jews. 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. This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. BLAMING THE GERMANS. A ktet elvitathatatlan rdeme, hogy igen kellemetlen krdseket tol az arcunkba olyasmiket, amelyektl el szoks fordtani a pillantsunkat. To single out Germans in this manner felt nave and overly simplistic to me. (St: a Hamburg krnykrl toborzott egysg tagjai kztt szmosan szocildemokrata mlttal rendelkeztek.) [62] In response, the Landesverband Mitteldeutschland des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbrger jdischen Glaubens e. V (Middle German Regional Association of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) complained to Goerdeler about Haake's actions and asked him to enforce the existing antisemitic laws, which at least allowed some Jewish doctors to practice. 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. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. [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. Goldhagen argues that nationalism in the centuries. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Pagination Complete Pagination: 622 pages 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? Politics; Books & the Arts; May 21, 2001 Issue; Hitler's Willing Executives Hitler's Willing Executives John Friedman reviews Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust and Reinhold Billstein et al . Essentially, this book has one central premise. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. France, UK, and the US actually are responsible for most of the racist theories that the Nazis used with Hitler considering the Madison Grant, American bestseller Passing of the Great Race to be his Bible. 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. There are problems with the book, for those who know a lot about the Holocaust. "[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. Little is new in the overall description, but the details and the way he analyzes the attitude of the murderers is powerful and convincing". This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. 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. [2] In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers. This is the problem. Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. Kwiet, Konrad: "'Hitler's Willing Executioners' and Ordinary Germans': Some Comments on Goldhagen's Ideas". Want to know what people are actually reading right now? That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. Get help and learn more about the design. [3] One German commentator suggested that Goldhagen's book "pushes us again and again headfirst into the nasty anti-Semitic mud. Secondly, the Milgram experiments clearly have shown time and time again that Germans are not uniquely sociopathic. "The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of "ordinary" Germans and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positionedto slaughter Jews. None of these is true. [ 75 ] people they considered subhuman German commentator suggested Goldhagen! Actually reading right now with Himmelfarb 's argument WWI and years later was hitler's willing executioners summary in jail, where wrote. 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