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 | | Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ISBN-10: 9780679446958 ISBN-10: 0-679-44695-8 ISBN-13: 9780679446958 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-44695-8 Hardcover 1996-03-19 Knopf Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description A work of the utmost importance--as authoritative as it is explosive--Hitler's Willing Executioners will fundamentally change our perception of the Holocaust and of Germany in the Nazi period. Goldhagen reaches conclusions that are both uncompromising and savage, rejecting as inadequate the conventional historical explanations for how an entire country could allow the Holocaust to happen, and gives the first detailed, broad-ranging account of the actual killers of the Jews. 31 photos. | ||
Amazon.com Review In a work that is as authoritative as it is explosive, Goldhagen forces us to revisit and reconsider our understanding of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, demanding a fundamental revision in our thinking of the years between 1933-1945. Drawing principally on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen marshals new, disquieting primary evidence that explains why, when Hitler conceived of the "final solution" he was able to enlist vast numbers of willing Germans to carry it out. A book sure to provoke new discussion and intense debate. | ||
Reviews | ||
A Study That Can't Be Ignored -- but the Kindle Version Needs Work "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is without doubt a highly important work that no one wishing to understand 20th-century history can afford to ignore. In this review, however, I will focus on the Kindle version. The Kindle version has significant problems. First, the footnotes are not linked (i.e., you can't click on a footnote number and be taken to it from the main text). Every serious non-fiction book really should have linked footnotes. Second, the conversion to ebook form is one of the worst I've ever seen. It appears that somebody scanned the book and then just put it on the market without even glancing at the text. Numerals are sometimes in superscript, sometimes in subscript; frequently the number 1 is a capital I; almost every occurrence of footnote 11 is a quotation mark. Sometimes superscript and in-line digits appear within the same number (such as years). This may sound like a small matter, but believe me, it becomes extremely distracting after about 200 pages without a let-up. Even so, I'm very glad that this book is available in a Kindle version (especially considering that it's over 10 years old). I just hope that the publisher will clean it up soon. | ||
Nice Try Daniel I rarely trash a book on here but this one is just plain wrong. Goldhagen essentially argues that the German people were culturally hard-wired to kill Jews, thus the Holocaust was simply an inevitable result of this "eliminationist anti-Semitism." Not only was this virulent anti-Semitic attitude a uniquely German phenomenon, Goldhagen would have us believe, but apparently the Holocaust was a fulfillment of every German's deep-seated desire. Even though only a small percentage of Germans were actually involved in the killing, Goldhagen claims not only that the majority of the population wholeheartedly supported it, he even goes so far as to suggest that most ordinary Germans would have happily taken part in genocide if only they had been given the opportunity. He denies claims that Nazi ideology or coercion can explain the genocide, to him; Germans have just always wanted to kill Jews. He goes on and on about medieval anti-Semitism and how it was passed on through the generations, yet he fails to mention that this applies to virtually all of Europe, not just Germany. Historically, the Germans were no more anti-Semitic than their neighbors and in fact, many would argue that countries like France were historically more anti-Semitic. It should also be noted that 19th century Germany was considered one of the most "Jew-friendly" countries in Europe. Germany was not a monolithic entity either. Certain regions, like Cologne, were much less anti-Semitic than places like Berlin. I don't think anyone would deny that a certain amount of anti-Semitism has always been present in Germany, but to imply that this was somehow uniquely German, or that anti-Semitism inevitably leads to genocide, is just flat out rubbish. And as a writer, Goldhagen is very jagged and repetitive, making this even more of an excruciating read. In one attempt to prove his point, Goldhagen spends an entire chapter on Police Battalion 101, a group of ex-policemen that were responsible for the mass killing of Jews in Poland. Apparently, these men were mostly "ordinary" men with no special training or indoctrination by the Nazis. While this is admittedly an intriguing case that would seem to justify Goldhagen's position, it seems that the author of the book used as a primary source for this section, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland disagrees with Goldhagen's thesis, as do most serious historians. Bottom line, the truth of what the Nazis did is bad enough. There is no need to slander the entire German people with this nonsense. That being said, I give Goldhagen 2 stars for effort. He clearly put a lot of work and research into this so I would feel remiss at not at least giving him credit for that. | ||
very doubtful claim. I hardly have any experience that a book has so full of redundancies , repetitions and self-contradictions. Why three vices ,any writer or scholar should absolutely avoid in order to unfold logical and lucid argument,are conspicous every page of this book? Because Goldhagen's so-called thesis has an immanent problem;It is too simplistic. His main thesis is centered on the very ontological problem of German anti-semitism. According to him, Nazism, modernity, brutalization of population and a decade long propagada full of hatred did not influence Germans at all. It's pure and simple .It is German's innate and perverse anti-semitism that explains the cause of Holocaust. The trouble of his logic begins with the title "Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust". Obviously , Goldhagen tried to target Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" and tried so hard to rebut what Browning asserted in the book. It's no wonder that Goldhagen trashed Browning's book repeatedly and called it as a book with "no Scholarly value" . The funny thing is that Browning's study only focused on specific group of people , namely Ordnungspolizei(Order police) reserve battalion 101 recruited from Hamburg area ,whereas Goldhagen's "ordinary" Germans are , as it says" entire German people. then, what is Goldhagen's definition of "Ordinary" Germans? reactionary Baltic Germans? generally conservative Bavarians? or People from Ruhr ? or Schleswig Holstein? . In spite of more than distinctive characteristics and attitude to Jews and non-Germans of each regions, Goldhagen make unique and unhistorical entity "Ordinary Germans". Based on his elementary knowledge in Germany and poor thesis, he keeps churing out his criticism toward other historians and insisting his "Scholary" thesis; How naturally sadistic Germans were. Then, real comedy repeatedly performs . He self contradicts very next sentence. for example He argued how ordinary germans were a horde of sadist and enjoyed harrasing inmates when they had to forced march at the end of 1944 after evacuated from a camp. He mentioned the incident how people of a certain town (ordinary Germans)was warned by authority , when they tried to feed inmates. Maybe these ordinary Germans wanted to poison inmates According to Goldhagen's thesis! The most serious fault of his so-called thesis is that it innately contains the possibly lethal path for further study of Holocaust. Mere condemnation of entire nation doesn't enlighten anyone.therefore, Goldhagen's much hyped work impedes rather than clears the true cause of the monsterous crime committed by one of the most industrialized pillar of the western civilization. The purpose of Holocaust is not only remember what happened but find the exact cause and prevent further ethnic cleasing and genocide. In that vein , Goldhagen's study is totally useless. | ||
Extraordinary! A novel approach to the Holocaust brings to the forum a whole new set of interpretations of this fateful event. This book explains how most adult Germans of the Nazi era (1930's and 1940's)were capable of embarking themselves into the genocidal project that with time became known as the Holocaust. Antisemitism was the precursor of genocide. The author mentions how Christianity, sometimes, have been associated with hate against the Jews (portraying them as the killers of Christ and resenting the Jews' "rejection" of Christianity as the True Faith). Later on in History (mainly during the 19th century), antisemitism gained a pseudo scientific status when Jews were labeled a distinct Race (and an evil and inferior one at that).This new "approach" prevented even converted Jews from escaping persecution. Several European countries did embrace antisemitism; in Germany it became pervasive, infecting all strata of the German society. This widespread German antisemitism defied reason and moderation and it allowed Hitler's genocidal dreams to become a reality. Because a great deal of Germans were willing to torture and kill Jews, Hitler was able to slaughter six million Jews. The author is very methodical while pressing his points.I learned a great deal from this book. The only reason I did not give this book five stars is my impression that the author could have accomplished the same results with a hundred or one hundred and fifty pages less. Other than that, it is required reading for any one interested in World War Two. | ||
Written by a Prosecutor, not a Scholar There is a difference between a scholar doing research and a prosecutor doing research. The scholar seeks to find the truth, whereas the prosecutor looks to prove a preconceived conclusion - a guilty verdict. Goldhagen could have been a scholar, but he wasn't. Nobody doubts the ghastly events of that terrible time, which the author describes in detail. Yet, that was not the purpose of the book. The purpose was to show the guilt of the entire German nation. If a naïve outsider were to read the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", he would conclude that the Germans, lock, stock, and barrel, have been guilty ten times over since antiquity and that nothing short of a death penalty would suffice. Alright, then, consider the Germans awaiting their just fate on death row and ask me whether or not there is anything to reverse the sentence. My answer would be, indeed, there is. It would be comparable to DNA profiling so much feared by overly zealous prosecutors. I am aware of two books, which I recommend Goldhagen to study in detail. One is titled "I Will be Witness", 1942-1945, Random House, 1999. It consists of the diary of Prof. Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of German literature at the University of Dresden. He was exempted from the Holocaust, because his wife was not Jewish and thus survived the war as a German civilian. From his entries, one can elicit the knowledge of events among ordinary citizens and how long it took before he concluded that major killing of Jews had been taking place in Poland. I know he spoke the truth, because I lived there as well and have the same memories. The other book is "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" by Bryan Mark Rigg, University Press of Kansas, 2002. That author had interviewed 430 Jewish and mostly part-Jewish men who had for one reason or other been spared apprehension and served in the German armed forces in WW II. While having close Jewish relatives who had been sent to the camps, none of them knew of the Holocaust and all of them expected at war's end to be reunited with them. I could have told much the same stories from my own experiences. Some years back I wrote it all down in a story called "Boyhood", only that I am, of course, burdened with the suspicion of being biased and self-serving. But here are two texts of Jewish witnesses whose testimony should be impeccable. I recommend that Mr. Goldhagen read them and then go away in shame of having let his rage get the better of him. As I said, he has the stuff to be a true scholar. Who knows, he may become one yet. | ||