I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. The diversity of the killers has challenged Goldhagen's view that the motivation was a distinct form of German anti-Semitism. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. "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. [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. [71]:55 Finally, Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933, was relatively ineffective or why the Kristallnacht needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular antisemitism. Goldhagen (Government and Social Studies/Harvard) offers irrefutable proof that will force us to reconsider our previous understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? 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. Avoid this book, in my opinion. As of December 1997, more than 150,000 copies have been sold in Germany. [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. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. In ''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' he argued that not only Nazis were the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. 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. Everybody got in on the discussion: survivors and scholars, journalists and talk-show hosts, Jews and non-Jews. Exceptionally wrong. Third was the so-called vlkisch antisemitism or racism, the most vitriolic form, the foremost advocate of using violence.[47]. It SHOULD be a "must read" for all people, especially those in school, but the author is dry and academic and the book could be cut by at least 1/3. I didn't manage to finish this. This book really has pissed people off. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. [92], In 2006, Jewish American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. "[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. Little is new in the overall description, but the details and the way he analyzes the attitude of the murderers is powerful and convincing". The New Yorker, April 22, 1996 P. 44. [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. Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. LaCapra, Dominick. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of Ordinary Men in the July 13, 1992, edition of The New Republic titled "The Evil of Banality". [4][5], Hitler's Willing Executioners won the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. 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. It's main thesis is that the vast majority of Germans during and before WWII had antisemetic beliefs that were of such power and scope, that they led many ordinary Germans to perpetrate and support the destruction of the Jewish people. Hitlers Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House, Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network. The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. [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 other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. 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. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. 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. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978--679-77268-2; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978--679-44695-8. Firstly, the notion of unique German evil is utter BULLSHIT! Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. [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. And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week. 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. [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. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. x + 622 pp. It was. In doing this Goldhagen makes breathtaking generalities and grossly misinterprets a lot of evidence that would help disprove his idea of German exceptionalism. 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). And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves. To redeem, copy and paste the code during the checkout process. In April 1996, before the book had appeared in German translation, Der Spiegel ran a cover story on Hitler's Willing Executioners under the title "Ein Volk von Dmonen?". 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. [26] Despite their very different interpretations of Battalion 101, both Browning and Goldhagen have argued that the men of the unit were a cross-sample of ordinary Germans. [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. ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. "[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. 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. I read this years ago and was shocked at the implications of the author's premise, although not unwilling to accept it. The last and most dramatic event was the reception of Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. 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. It's difficult to think of more than a few European countries where the general population harboured a decent humane view of the Jews. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. However, I began to have a problem with the author singling out Germans for antisemitism. Hitler's Willing Executioners is an extraordinary and original contribution to the mountain of literature on 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. Ugyanolyan embertelenl viselkedtek, mint az SS*. Steve Crawshaw writes that although the German readership was keenly aware of certain "professional failings" in Goldhagen's book, [T]hese perceived professional failings proved almost irrelevant. Abstract Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners has sparked an outpouring of controversy in the international and scholarly press. 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. [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. [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. [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. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. We also learn that only the Germans could commit a genocide of this scale due to their unique evil. Clendinnen, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics", Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" p. 105-126 from Confront! 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. 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. 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. Just for joining youll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members. 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. [15], Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz. [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. [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. [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. Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. BLAMING THE GERMANS. [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". [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. 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 reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Everyone knows its hard to get published. These are the average German citizens of the early 20th 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]. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. 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