In the interview, Mommsen distinguished three varieties of German antisemitism. Clendinnen, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics", Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" p. 105-126 from Confront! You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. [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. 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. I just started reading Goldhagen's thesis is that the men and women who murdered Jews were not forced to do so, nor were they just following orders after years of conditioning by the Catholic and Lutheran churches and others, and Hitler's maniacal Jew-hatred, they were quite willing to kill Jews they thought should die. For example, an ambitious historian could write about the hula-hoop, and how it brought about dtente between America and the Soviet Union. The book Hitler's Willing Executioners begins with Goldhagen's thesis. 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. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. [85]:287. This about the predators of the Holocaust, including groups and individuals who made the major decisions establishing the policy of extermination the Jewish people under Nazi regime, executed and supported it. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. By Clive James. 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. [87] "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" Third was the so-called vlkisch antisemitism or racism, the most vitriolic form, the foremost advocate of using violence.[47]. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. Please try again later. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. One tactic is the micro-history: find yourself a historical footnote, and then elevate it to the turning point of mankind. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Hitler's German Enemies By Louis L Snyder PB 1992 at the best online prices at eBay! Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social . This is where youll see your current point status and your earned rewards. These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." Finally, Mommsen criticizes Goldhagen for errors in his understanding of the internal structure of the Third Reich. It's not that some of Goldhagen's ideas are wrong. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. Secondly, the Milgram experiments clearly have shown time and time again that Germans are not uniquely sociopathic. I ask myself if I would like to have a conversation in person with that author. [74] Bauer also suggested that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. [36][37] Although Hitler's Willing Executioners was sharply criticized in Germany at its debut,[38] the intense public interest in the book secured the author much celebrity among Germans, so much so that Harold Marcuse characterizes him as "the darling of the German public". I didn't manage to finish this. Goldhagen's theory has created a firestorm when it came out, but he's extremely convincing and his view of Nazi Germany is as sad as it's terrifying. [82] The phrase ein Volk von Dmonen (translated "a people/nation of demons") was often used by the Nazis to describe Jews, and the title of the cover story was meant by Rudolf Augstein and the editors of Der Spiegel to suggest a moral equivalence between the Nazi view of Jews and Goldhagen's view of Germans. [14] His thesis, he said, was based on the assumption that Germans were not a "normal" Western people influenced by the values of the Enlightenment. [59], The Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that to accept Goldhagen's thesis would also have to mean accepting that the entire German Jewish community was "downright stupid" from the mid-19th century onwards because it is otherwise impossible to explain why they chose to remain in Germany, if the people were so murderously hostile or why so many German Jews wanted to assimilate into an "eliminationist anti-Semitic" culture. [65][83], The book had a "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3][84][85][86] who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical. 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. 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. The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of the killing form. I have read Gordon Craig's review of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners [NYR, April 4].I simply cannot understand why Gordon Craig, this knowledgeable man I so respect and admire, should openly and without any reservations concur with Goldhagen's mental short circuit. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. 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. Everybody got in on the discussion: survivors and scholars, journalists and talk-show hosts, Jews and non-Jews. It is precisely because this . [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. THIS is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred? Spring of 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book called Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustin which he argued that scholarship on the Holocaust needed revision. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. "[11] Goldhagen stated that he would write a book that would rebut Ordinary Men and Browning's thesis, and prove instead that it was the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture that led the men of Reserve Battalion 101 to murder Jews. 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 I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why. 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 . [76] Their conclusions were that Goldhagen's analysis of the records: seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. Firstly, the notion of unique German evil is utter BULLSHIT! [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. The author of the German fantasy book, Neverending Story, avoided fighting for the Wehrmacht only by diving out of a moving train headed to Russia and spending the rest of the war running from the gestapo. 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. Goldhagen doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. Since 1933, the Nazi-controlled government continued their barrage of propaganda by holding mass rallies and speeches, along with other strategies to rally support for Lebensraum , war and anti-semitic campaigns. 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! 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. (Dont steal my idea!). To single out Germans in this manner felt nave and overly simplistic to me. It has no nationality. It still does. Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. 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 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. If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. The details are grim but it is worth reading. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. [49] Browning wrote: Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. [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. In this case, I don't think I would. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Also the author acts like Germans could easily choose to object conscription and simply not fight, despite the fact this was punishable by death. It required a state. [61] Neuhaus argued that Goldhagen was wrong to claim that Luther had created a legacy of intense, genocidal anti-Semitism within Lutheranism, asking why, if that were the case, would so many people in solidly Lutheran Denmark act to protect the Danish Jewish minority from deportation to the death camps in 1943. [22] Goldhagen, in contrast, declared the term "indifference" to be unacceptable, contending that the vast majority of Germans were active antisemites who wanted to kill Jews in the most "pitiless" and "callous" manner possible. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. [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. Some of the most comprehensive and enduring takes on SS violence were produced by the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt. "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. [81], When the English edition of Hitler's Willing Executioners was published in March 1996, numerous German reviews ensued. 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. 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. [71]:56 Using an example from his family history, Schoenbaum wrote that his mother in law, a Polish Jew who lived in Germany between 192847, never considered the National Socialists and the Germans synonymous, and expressed regret that Goldhagen could not see the same. For a historian, its a bit trickier. [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. [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. [69] The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw wrote that he fully agreed with Jckel on the merits of Hitler's Willing Executioners". Essentially, this book has one central premise. [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. Free delivery for many products. Hilberg, to whom Browning dedicated his monograph, wrote that "Goldhagen has left us with the image of a medieval-like incubus, a demon latent in the German mind waiting for the opportunity for the chance to strike out". Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) [54] Bauer charged that it was the Great Depression, not an alleged culture of murderous anti-Semitism that allowed the NSDAP to make its electoral breakthrough in the Reichstag elections of September 1930. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. 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. Get help and learn more about the design. Were Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians on the whole any better than the Germans? 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. These are relatively few, though, and are dealt with nicely in Brownings scholarly work, "Ordinary Men." "[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. 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. 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. 1930, as a 16-year-old. Free shipping for many products! Goldhagen bsges adatokat szolgltat arra, hogy nem. [32] Goldhagen used antisemitic statements by Cardinal Adolf Bertram as typical of what he called the Roman Catholic Church's support for genocide. There is not much evidence of "obvious distaste and reluctance" to kill Poles to be seen in this episode. Hitler soon became the dictator of Germany and started WWII. The book was a "publishing phenomenon",[2] achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3] who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". 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. Its a bit easier for memoirists, who can rely on shabby childhoods and drug addictions. [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. "[91] Goldhagen replied: "If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. [1], Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. The Best Books to Get Your Finances in Order, Books Based on Your Favorite Taylor Swift Era, Cook a Soul Food Holiday Meal With Rosie Mayes, Jan 28, 1997 How do you fight against this kind of madness when you are rendered powerless by the state, be it by fear, by law, or? 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. Open Preview. Hitler's Willing Executioners is an extraordinary and original contribution to the mountain of literature on the Holocaust. [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. To redeem, copy and paste the code during the checkout process. 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. A book that won't leave you. 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. The diversity of the killers has challenged Goldhagen's view that the motivation was a distinct form of German anti-Semitism. None of these is true.[75]. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. 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. [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. Hitler's Willing Executioners is a book we must read to begin to understand the underlying anti-Semitism that was pervasive to the German culture that set the whole ambience for how Hitler was able to harness the energy of the German people to support him in what anyone living today should view as insanity run wild. [90], Rosenbaum inquired about Goldhagen's "pregnant with murder" metaphor, which suggested that the Shoah was something inevitable that would have happened without Hitler and Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation "No Hitler, no Holocaust". Wolfgang Benz points out that Adolf Hitler had already called for anti-Semitism in a 1919 publication "Gutachten zum Antisemitismus" and declared: "Its ultimate goal, however, must . There was something unique to Germany that made its fascism genocidal. Advertisement Read Next Marion Graeffin Doenhoff, reply by Gordon A. Craig 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. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused. It's one of those books. Want to know what people are actually reading right now? At worse Goldhagen brings to light one possibility in explaining how one, if not the most learned and advanced country in the world could fall from grace in a matter of a few years of Financial despair. This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. Under its influence, the vast majority of Germans wanted to eliminate Jews from German society, and the perpetrators of the Holocaust did what they did because they thought it was "right and necessary." 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. His research is impeccable and the arguments that he puts forth are convincing. [4][5], Hitler's Willing Executioners won the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. Hitler was a dictator that ordered the execution of millions of Jews and other people, during his reign of Nazi Germany. It's been nearly ten years since I read this book but I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Holocaust history. 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. NAZI GERMANY, HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, New York: Alfred A Knopf, London: Littde Brown, 1996, London: Abacus, 1997, pp 634 NAZI GERMANY & THE JEWS: VOL 1: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION 1933-39 Saul Friedlnder, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, pp 436 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Pagination Complete Pagination: 622 pages | ISBN 9780679772682 Start earning points for buying books! The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. 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 . "[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. [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. [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. [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. [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? [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. 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. 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. Overall, this book does a grievous disservice to the 17 million victims of Nazi racial policies by confining the problem of genocide into just being a German problem. Most scholars assume that the German all but total elimination of European Jewry was [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. [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. [92], In 2006, Jewish American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. [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. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. 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. After torturing and murdering Jews to do it, but chose to and the Soviet.. 31 ] Goldhagen replied: `` if the victims had been Jews and other people, his... 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