This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. 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 A ktet elvitathatatlan rdeme, hogy igen kellemetlen krdseket tol az arcunkba olyasmiket, amelyektl el szoks fordtani a pillantsunkat. However, this ideological goal blinds him to any other rational to the causes of the Holocaust. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. The Books Alexis Patterson Is Loving Right Now, Browse All Our Lists, Essays, and Interviews, Amazing Childrens Books by Arab and Arab American Authors. By clicking Sign Up, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. 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. [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". 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? These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." [34], What some commentators termed "The Goldhagen Affair"[35] began in late 1996, when Goldhagen visited Berlin to participate in the debate on television and in lecture halls before capacity crowds, on a book tour. A book that won't leave you. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Overall, this book is a scholarly work. Millions of Germans who wished to acknowledge the (undeniable and well-documented) fact that ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust welcomed his work; his suggestion that Germans were predestined killers was accepted as part of the uncomfortable package. But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles. 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. ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' is an attempt to demolish the standard views about Germans and the Holocaust by arguing that when it came to the Jews, average Germans had no moral scruples to. 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. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. [56], Concerning Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, the Australian historian Inga Clendinnen wrote that Goldhagen's picture of Major Trapp, the unit's commander as an antisemitic fanatic was "far-fetched" and "there is no indication, on that first day or later that he found the murdering of Jewish civilians a congenial task". It still does. [87] "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" LaCapra, Dominick. 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. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. It is precisely because this . The book strives to explain why this genocide happened where and when it did. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. Only elderly Poles, mostly women, remained in the village, as the younger Poles had all fled. Guttenplan, author of The Holocaust on Trial (about the David Irving libel case), also dedicated to Hilberg, wrote that the only difference between Goldhagen's claims of an eliminationist culture and those of Meir Kahane was that Goldhagen's targets were the Germans, whereas Kahane's targets were the Arabs. 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. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. His research is impeccable and the arguments that he puts forth are convincing. [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. Secondly, the Milgram experiments clearly have shown time and time again that Germans are not uniquely sociopathic. [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. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. [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. 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. [51] Browning was echoing the conclusions of the German conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber who once presented at a historians' conference in 1984 a counter-factual scenario whereby, had it been a coalition of the German National People's Party and Der Stahlhelm that took power in 1933 without the NSDAP, all the antisemitic laws in Germany that were passed between 1933 and 1938 would still have occurred but there would have been no Holocaust. 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. Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) [3] These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. 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 argues that the case of the Lipowa and Flughafen Jewish labor camps in Lublin demonstrates that in contrast to other victims, only Jewish labor was treated murderously by the Germans without regard for and indeed counter to economic rationality. The author makes a strong case for the proposition that the mass of gentile Germans (and Austrians) held very strongly hostile attitudes towards their Jewish fellow citizens and Jews in general. In ''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' he argued that not only Nazis were the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. 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. [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. [58] Clendinnen ended her essay by stating she found Browning's account of Battalion 101 to be the more believable. We also learn that only the Germans could commit a genocide of this scale due to their unique evil. 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. It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. As of December 1997, more than 150,000 copies have been sold in Germany. [45] Some historians have criticized or simply dismissed the text, citing among other deficiencies Goldhagen's "neglect of decades of research in favour of his own preconceptions", which he proceeds to articulate in an "intemperate, emotional, and accusatory tone". [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." [2] In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. About The Film With his first book, the #1 international bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - then a professor of political science at Harvard. "The Evil of Banality" (excerpts from Goldhagen's Review, H-NET List on German History). 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. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. It's one of those books. Bibliography: Bibliography Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. [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. THIS is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." [15], Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz. Visszafogottabban vettek ht rszt a npirtsban? [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. 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. Avoid this book, in my opinion. Most scholars assume that the German all but total elimination of European Jewry was [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. 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. Goldhagen has written an outstanding book that to this reader explains not just the German question in which I am a descendent, but the overall question throughout history being, What the hell were they thinking!. Where do I even start with how bad this thesis is? [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. The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. 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! 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. Author goes to Berlin to debate Holocaust, Forum on Holocaust canceled after an author withdraws, Holocaust writer in storm over role of Catholic Church, "Goldhagen Wins German Prize For Holocaust Book", "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis: A Critique of Hitler's Willing Executioners", "Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics", "Why Obama Might Save Israel From Nuclear Iran", "'Hitler's Willing Executioners': An Exchange,", "Goldhagen - His Critics and His Contribution", "Goldhagen in Germany: Historians' Nightmare & Popular Hero. In 1932, at eighteen, he became a member of the Hitler Youth. Until deciding to devote himself full-time to writing, he taught political science and social studies for many years at Harvard University. In 1936, he joined the police force in Breslau and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. By Clive James. He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. How do you fight against this kind of madness when you are rendered powerless by the state, be it by fear, by law, or? Exceptionally wrong. To the Editors. [47] The book Hitler's Willing Executioners begins with Goldhagen's thesis. 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. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. 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. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. Everybody got in on the discussion: survivors and scholars, journalists and talk-show hosts, Jews and non-Jews. [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". [42], Debate about Goldhagen's theory has been intense. Goldhagen doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. [] 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. Ugyanolyan embertelenl viselkedtek, mint az SS*. | ISBN 9780679772682 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. An Essay on the Reception of, "The dispute between Goldhagen and Finkelstein", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners&oldid=1144747678, Wikipedia articles needing factual verification from June 2014, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Clendinnean, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics" pages 114-132 from, Birn, Ruth Bettina, and Riess, Volker, "Revising The Holocaust", in. It required a state. [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. [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. Open Preview. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves. A CRITIC AT LARGE about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's new book "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which holds . [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. Goldhagen (Government and Social Studies/Harvard) offers irrefutable proof that will force us to reconsider our previous understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. [65][83], The book had a "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3][84][85][86] who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jrgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. 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. [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. 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. 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? This is the problem. [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. 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. 'Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond", in LaCapra, D. Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds. [80], Goldhagen has said that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. This is his revenge. To me it is worthless, all the hype by the publisher notwithstanding". None of these is true.[75]. Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. 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. Kwiet, Konrad: "'Hitler's Willing Executioners' and Ordinary Germans': Some Comments on Goldhagen's Ideas". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. x + 622 pp. The last and most dramatic event was the reception of Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. 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. [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. 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. 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. 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. Ganz gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (published as Hitler's Willing Executioners in the United States). Christopher Browning wrote in response to Goldhagen's criticism of him in the 1998 "Afterword" to Ordinary Men published by HarperCollins: Goldhagen must prove not only that Germans treated Jewish and non-Jewish victims differently (on which virtually all historians agree), but also that the different treatment is to be explained fundamentally by the antisemitic motivation of the vast majority of the perpetrators and not by other possible motivations, such as compliance with different government policies for different victim groups. | ISBN 9780307426239 You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. Were Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians on the whole any better than the Germans? That doesnt mean it wasnt a great book. 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?". Get help and learn more about the design. The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of the killing form. Firstly, the notion of unique German evil is utter BULLSHIT! 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. 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