Her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality. Some of the most comprehensive and enduring takes on SS violence were produced by the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. Third was the so-called vlkisch antisemitism or racism, the most vitriolic form, the foremost advocate of using violence.[47]. 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. Goldhagen doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. 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". 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. 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. 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? 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. That doesnt mean it wasnt a great book. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. As a teenager Hitler served in WWI and years later was thrown in jail, where he wrote his book Mien Kampf. For Goldhagen the Holocaust, in which so many Germans participated, must be explained as a result of the specifically German brand of antisemitism. [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 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". 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 . It stifled protests by conservatives against persecutions of the Jews, as well as Hitler's proclamation of a "racial annihilation war" against the Soviet Union. The better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it? The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of the killing form. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and its difficult to stand out among the sea of words. [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 a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. Szerinte a npirts nem egy szk rteg ltal elkvetett cselekmnysorozat, amihez a tbbsg legfeljebb tudatlanul asszisztlt, hanem egy antiszemitizmustl teljesen titatott trsadalom kzs bne. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei and his narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book. 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. Whatever the variations, I think Austrian and German anti-Semitism can be seen of a piece, where there was a central model of Jews and a view that they needed to be eliminated. "The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonising Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension," in, (Internet Archive preview, search inside), average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews, Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbrger jdischen Glaubens, Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back, "Is There a New Anti-Semitism? 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 . Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful 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. Where do I even start with how bad this thesis is? 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. ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized. This author simply hates all Germans and claims they were all just like Hitler. Whatever its weaknesses as causal model, it is first-rate history that has transformed the way we look at the Holocaust. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust" he said. This book makes a powerful argument. Instead, Goldhagen became a bellwether of German readiness to confront the past. Goldhagen himself mentions that a large proportion of the Jewish upper classes in Germany converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century. 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. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. [49] Browning wrote: Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. 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. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. [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. Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. | ISBN 9780307426239 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. 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. I was replying to my friend Mark when I remembered this embarrassment. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. 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?". "[91] Goldhagen replied: "If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. About Goldhagen's claims that the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 were reluctant to kill Polish Catholics while being eager to kill Polish Jews, Browning accused Goldhagen of having double standards with the historical evidence. [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. "[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. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. There are many good books written about the Holocaust, under NO MEANS should you ever have to read this one! Despite the fact that up to 70,000 Germans were killed for real or imagined opposition to the Nazis. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978--679-77268-2; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978--679-44695-8. 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. He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. 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. 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. 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. Only elderly Poles, mostly women, remained in the village, as the younger Poles had all fled. Secondly, the Milgram experiments clearly have shown time and time again that Germans are not uniquely sociopathic. [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. Visszafogottabban vettek ht rszt a npirtsban? (St: a Hamburg krnykrl toborzott egysg tagjai kztt szmosan szocildemokrata mlttal rendelkeztek.) This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. In doing this Goldhagen makes breathtaking generalities and grossly misinterprets a lot of evidence that would help disprove his idea of German exceptionalism. "War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" sets out to destroy the myth of an Army that fought honorably, while behind the front lines, specialized terror units went about the. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". [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. 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 reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews . By Clive James. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. Please try again later. [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. [64], Goldhagen's assertion that almost all Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, as "patent nonsense". 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. 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 . The accuracy of his work was, in this context, of secondary importance. [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. 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. And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week. 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 . Bibliography: Bibliography Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. I probably would get irritated by his generalizations. [30] Goldhagen argued for the specific antisemitic nature of Battalion 101's violence by noting that in 1942 the battalion was ordered to shoot 200 Gentile Poles, and instead shot 78 Polish Catholics while shooting 180 Polish Jews later that same day. 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. [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. [80], Goldhagen has said that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. Goldhagen replied to his critics in an article Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics: What is striking among some of those who have criticized my book against whom so many people in Germany are openly reacting is that much of what they have written and said has either a tenuous relationship to the book's contents or is patently false. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. This book really has pissed people off. 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. 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. The principal theme of. I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why. They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. I didn't manage to finish this. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House, Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network. "The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of "ordinary" Germans and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positionedto slaughter Jews. Auschwitz long figured as the preeminent site of the Holocaust. I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. Ugyanolyan embertelenl viselkedtek, mint az SS*. This is his revenge. [] Goldhagen's book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary ones. [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. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion.Hitlers Willing Executioners is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to theliterature on the Holocaust.New York Review of BooksThe most important book ever published about the HolocaustEloquently written, meticulously documented, impassionedA model of moral and scholarly integrity.Philadelphia Inquirer. The book Hitler's Willing Executioners begins with Goldhagen's thesis. 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. [42], Debate about Goldhagen's theory has been intense. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. Totally wrong. 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!). 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. The book also demonizes ethnic Germans in a similar way that Protocols of the Elder's of Zion demonized the Jews. 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. He joined Battalion 101 in the spring of 1942 and in June of that year, "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. Emellett ezek az egysgek jellemzen az idsebb korosztlybl verbuvldtak vagyis nem a Hitler-rezsim oktatsi viszonyai kztt szocializldtak. [28] In its turn, the "culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". Kwiet, Konrad: "'Hitler's Willing Executioners' and Ordinary Germans': Some Comments on Goldhagen's Ideas". It can do nothing of the sort. 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