To the Editors. "[91] Goldhagen replied: "If the Nazis had never taken power, there would not have been a Hitler. This is his revenge. 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. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. Also the author acts like Germans could easily choose to object conscription and simply not fight, despite the fact this was punishable by death. [28] In its turn, the "culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". Visszafogottabban vettek ht rszt a npirtsban? 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. Theres been so much written about this controversial book that Im sure I dont have too many details to add that havent been covered before so instead Ill gather some thoughts that have been mulling around in my mind in the week since I finished reading it. 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. I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. A book that won't leave you. [80], Goldhagen has said that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. My rating is a split verdict: the author has an interesting yet poorly written argument; neither element should be decisive in convincing potential readers to take up the book or ignore it. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. I am actually shocked that Goldhagen didn't end the book by suggesting that all ethnic Germans should be rounded up and executed to prevent future atrocities. Their task was complicated by the way that "Goldhagen's book [had] neither a bibliography nor a listing of archival sources". Goldhagen bsges adatokat szolgltat arra, hogy nem. The book Hitler's Willing Executioners begins with Goldhagen's thesis. 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. I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why. [26], Using Geertz's anthropological methods, Goldhagen argued by studying the men of Battalion 101 one could engage in a "thick description" of the German "eliminationist antisemitic" culture. Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust", Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. Abacus 1997 at the best online prices at eBay! 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. Open Preview. Exceptionally wrong. 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. [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. guilty for failing to protest Hitler's murderous intentions and policies while there was still time, and for this, they should be ashamed. [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. All the drama of the 60s and 70s have shown us that rebellion and protest make absolutely no difference in the end, so where does that leave us? 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. LaCapra, Dominick. "[11] Goldhagen stated that he would write a book that would rebut Ordinary Men and Browning's thesis, and prove instead that it was the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture that led the men of Reserve Battalion 101 to murder Jews. 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. Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. Hoffmann contended that what happened was that on April 9, 1935, the Deputy Mayor of Leipzig, the National Socialist Rudolf Haake, banned all Jewish doctors from participating in public health insurance and advised all municipal employees not to consult Jewish doctors, going beyond the existing antisemitic laws then in place. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and its difficult to stand out among the sea of words. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. [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. 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". You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. That Germany as a nation was murderously antisemtic long before the Nazis came to power, dating back in fact to Martin Luther's hate-spewing speeches and beyond and that it's erroneous to single out the Nazis instead of making culpable the entire German population as being responsible for the Holocaust. We are experiencing technical difficulties. 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. [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. 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." 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!. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. [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. It's one of those books. If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. Emellett ezek az egysgek jellemzen az idsebb korosztlybl verbuvldtak vagyis nem a Hitler-rezsim oktatsi viszonyai kztt szocializldtak. His doctoral dissertation, The Nazi Executioners: A Study of Their Behavior and the Causation of Genocide, won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. Nevertheless, this author has been accused of twisting sources to support a point (see Lewis Weinstein's review of Goldhagen's. [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". 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. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen talked spoke about his new book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. For Goldhagen the Holocaust, in which so many Germans participated, must be explained as a result of the specifically German brand of antisemitism. 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. I think not. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. Free delivery for many products. The Books Alexis Patterson Is Loving Right Now, Browse All Our Lists, Essays, and Interviews, Amazing Childrens Books by Arab and Arab American Authors. [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. [79] The American columnist D.D. [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. [47] [93] In 2011, in an apparent reference to Hitler's Willing Executioners, the American columnist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran were all "eliminationist anti-Semites". Ugyanolyan embertelenl viselkedtek, mint az SS*. When they started invading other nations, they would kill or imprison every Jew they found men, women and children. Free shipping for many products! Of course, they also thought Slavs being put into workhouses and being their slaves was the right thing, too. 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 doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. Everybody got in on the discussion: survivors and scholars, journalists and talk-show hosts, Jews and non-Jews. As of December 1997, more than 150,000 copies have been sold in Germany. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. 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. To me it is worthless, all the hype by the publisher notwithstanding". Guttenplan argued that the Nazi theories about "Judo-Bolshevism" made for a more complex explanation for the Holocaust than the Goldhagen thesis about an "eliminationist anti-Semitic" culture. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. Bibliography: Bibliography Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. He prefers instead to use parts of the statements selectively, to re-interpret them according to his own point of view, or to take them out of context and make them fit into his own interpretative framework. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". [65][83], The book had a "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3][84][85][86] who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical. April 14, 1996. Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. "The book [Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust] sparked controversy in the press and academic circles. [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. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. [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. Racial hatred is unfortunately a widespread virus that is always awaiting an opportunity to break out. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. I just started reading Goldhagen's thesis is that the men and women who murdered Jews were not forced to do so, nor were they just following orders after years of conditioning by the Catholic and Lutheran churches and others, and Hitler's maniacal Jew-hatred, they were quite willing to kill Jews they thought should die. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. [82] The phrase ein Volk von Dmonen (translated "a people/nation of demons") was often used by the Nazis to describe Jews, and the title of the cover story was meant by Rudolf Augstein and the editors of Der Spiegel to suggest a moral equivalence between the Nazi view of Jews and Goldhagen's view of Germans. The second and third case studies of Hitler's Willing Executioners are aimed at meeting the burden of proof on these two points. [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. It has no nationality. For example, an ambitious historian could write about the hula-hoop, and how it brought about dtente between America and the Soviet Union. 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. [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. "[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. Essentially, this book has one central premise. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. 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. 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! Hitler s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, 601 pp. However, I began to have a problem with the author singling out Germans for antisemitism. [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. [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". 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]. Until deciding to devote himself full-time to writing, he taught political science and social studies for many years at Harvard University. 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 . In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. [16] The violent antisemitic "cultural axiom" held by Martin Luther in the 16th century and expressed in his 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, according to Goldhagen, were the same as those held by Adolf Hitler in the 20th century. 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 . [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. 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. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. 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. Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents. These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." Ganz gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (published as Hitler's Willing Executioners in the United States). It required a state. 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