Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.[7]. It can do nothing of the sort. [19] The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, a leading expert in the social history of the Third Reich, wrote, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference,"[20][21] that is, that the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by a vicious form of antisemitism on the part of the Nazi elite, but that it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was indifferent to what was happening. 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 . How do you fight against this kind of madness when you are rendered powerless by the state, be it by fear, by law, or? Whatever its weaknesses as causal model, it is first-rate history that has transformed the way we look at the Holocaust. 1614 Words 7 Pages 4 Works Cited Good Essays Read More [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". Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. [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. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. We also learn that only the Germans could commit a genocide of this scale due to their unique evil. A ktet elvitathatatlan rdeme, hogy igen kellemetlen krdseket tol az arcunkba olyasmiket, amelyektl el szoks fordtani a pillantsunkat. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. By clicking SIGN UP,I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random Houses, certain categories of personal information, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information. [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. [2], Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. These are the average German citizens of the early 20th century. "[91] Goldhagen replied: "If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. Finally, we learn that Germans overwhelmingly supported these measures because the Nazis didn't punish opposition like the Soviets did! This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. For a historian, its a bit trickier. 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. (St: a Hamburg krnykrl toborzott egysg tagjai kztt szmosan szocildemokrata mlttal rendelkeztek.) But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused. 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. [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. The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. Want to know what people are actually reading right now? This book makes a powerful argument. Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler, New York: HarperCollins, 1998 page 346. The vast majority stood by and laughed. This is the problem. But Hitler's exemplified and brought to an apotheosis the particular form of eliminationist anti-Semitism that came to the fore in the latter part of the nineteenth century. "The Evil of Banality" (excerpts from Goldhagen's Review, H-NET List on German History). It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. It has no nationality. Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred? 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 . Clendinnen, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics", Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" p. 105-126 from Confront! Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) It was. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Everyone knows its hard to get published. [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. The book argues that many more German citizens were involved . [85] Hilberg summarised the debates: "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."[89]. 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. [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. This book finally gave me the answer. 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. The book Hitler's Willing Executioners begins with Goldhagen's thesis. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Visszafogottabban vettek ht rszt a npirtsban? [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. 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. 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. 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 . 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 . I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. [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. ''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. [9] Goldhagen instead contended that "for the vast majority of the perpetrators a monocausal explanation does suffice". 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. [92], In 2006, Jewish American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. [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. 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. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. 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. 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. 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. [87] "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" Were Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians on the whole any better than the Germans? 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." [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". This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. Some church leaders have wondered aloud why there has been no nationwide, popular outrage over the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug personalities (addicts, pushers, drug lords) in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's so-called "War on Drugs.". 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 . Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2. (Dont steal my idea!). In the interview, Mommsen distinguished three varieties of German antisemitism. The book also demonizes ethnic Germans in a similar way that Protocols of the Elder's of Zion demonized the Jews. Most Germans considered Jews to be parasites and not even human. Totally wrong. A Conversation with Raul Hilberg". [] 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. [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". I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust", Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. 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. 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? The Books Alexis Patterson Is Loving Right Now, Browse All Our Lists, Essays, and Interviews, Amazing Childrens Books by Arab and Arab American Authors. Goldhagen (Government and Social Studies/Harvard) offers irrefutable proof that will force us to reconsider our previous understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. I know thats fucked-up, but thats what was finally explained to me in this book. The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. 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 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. LaCapra, Dominick. 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. One tactic is the micro-history: find yourself a historical footnote, and then elevate it to the turning point of mankind. [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. 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