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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

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Daniel Goldhagen has created a storm in the study of the Holocaust with his new book Hitler's Willing Executioners (based on his PhD research). The furore that the book unleashed was immediate and intense. In a symposium on the book held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Yehuda Bauer dismissed the book, the author and the fact that the research was deemed good enough for a PhD. The book has also raised scholarly eyebrows because the author makes the claim that his version of events is `totally new'.
A.J.P. Taylor once said that in history, the most important duty of the historian is to ask the right questions. Daniel Goldhagen does this even though the academic world has descended upon him. Goldhagen asks how ordinary Germans become perpetrators in the Final Solution. The question, is obviously important, but unfortunately what Goldhagen gives us is a monocausal answer: `antisemitism' or, as Goldhagen terms it `eliminationist antisemitism'. His thesis is that `eliminationist antisemitism' was a cultural norm in Germany by the late 19th century; that all the perpetrators shared this view of the Jews; and, furthermore, most Germans accepted this view of the Jews.
Yet, what I think is more disturbing than this argument is Goldhagen's claim that his thesis is totally new: `the perpetrators, "ordinary Germans", were animated by antisemitism, but a particular type of antisemitism that led them to conclude that Jews ought to die... Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say "no"' (p. 14).
One certainly does not have to dig that far into the literature to find the origins of some of his ideas. Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany From Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990), for example, pre-empts Goldhagen's ideas on eliminationist antisemitism. Rose, interestingly, in foreshadowing Goldhagen, calls German antisemitism `destructionist', but shies away from Goldhagen's monocausal thesis. Likewise, the willing participation of the German population in the enforcement of racial policy has previously been discussed by Robert Gellately.
While Goldhagen certainly `proves' that antisemitism was the main motivating factor for the killers of Jews, such `proof' leaves the reader unsatisfied. If antisemitism is the motivating force, then how do we account for the other victims of the National Socialists such as Gypsies, Russian POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses and countless others? According to Goldhagen (p. 175), the Romani were treated `most murderously'. This understatement aside, Goldhagen provides no account of the history of anti-Gypsy legal repression and violence in Germany despite the fact that the registration of Gypsies had been occurring in Germany since 1899 with an accompanying `Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Workshy' introduced in Bavaria in 1926. Goldhagen does not say that Romani were persecuted on racial grounds similar to Jews and that many laws originally applied to the Jews were later extended to Gypsies. Again, how are we to explain the killing of 70,000 mentally ill people in Germany in the so-called `euthanasia' (T4) campaign? Friedlander has stressed that if we want to find the origins of the Final Solution we have to look at this program as the precursor of the gas chambers.
A large section of Hitler's Willing Executioners discusses the role of the Order Police in the `Final Solution'. The study of this little known group of killers was pioneered a few years ago by Christopher Browning. Some of Goldhagen's ideas on the police battalions have previously been aired and we find the extension of these ideas in the book. Goldhagen has gone beyond Browning's original findings by studying a number of police battalions and showing that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was by no means unusual when it was presented by its commanding officer with an offer not to kill. Indeed, research being conducted by the reviewer suggests that officers exercised a great deal of their own leeway in the carrying out of their orders (even if the order was explicit). As Goldhagen shows, there were a significant number of men who were offered the chance not to kill Jews but who then chose to do so. Far beyond a mere account of the many actions that the men of the Order Police perpetrated (some of whom had their wives present during the actions), Goldhagen has drawn a picture of the lives of the men during their auswärtiger Einsatz: men who `went to night spots and bars, drank, sang, had sex, and talked. Like all people, they had opinions about the character of their lives and what they were doing' (p. 187). Previous research and my own study confirms this picture of men who enjoyed themselves knowing full well that they had and would commit further massacres in the name of the German people.
Yet this section is also problematic. Goldhagen has disregarded any testimony from postwar trials in which perpetrators expressed remorse for their actions or even attempted to save Jews. Thus Goldhagen has guaranteed that his explanations are skewed. How do we explain the role of collaborators from Eastern Europe-a force of some 300,000 men at their peak-who formed auxiliary police battalions that murdered Jews? Were they motivated by antisemitism? Unfortunately, Goldhagen has nothing to say on this score, but rather weakly asserts that `non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the genocide...(and) what can be said about the Germans cannot be said about any other nationality or nationalities combined-namely no Germans, no Holocaust' (p.6), an extraordinary statement when one considers the fact that the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion itself killed around 40,000 Jews between July and November 1941. Furthermore, the question thus arises as to how we are to account for large-scale pogroms in areas like Lithuania which broke out before German troops arrived. There is something more than a particular form of German `eliminationist antisemitism' at work here.
In many ways Hitler's Willing Executioners is a throwback to earlier interpretive models. It is almost a theory of collective guilt which is presented as a hybrid of the long outdated Sonderweg thesis. Goldhagen is right in arguing that we should not deny the importance of antisemitism to the Nazi program, but is it, as he presents it, the ultimate missing link in the German national character from the beginning of the 19th century until 1945? If it is, does it explain the Holocaust? I'm afraid that his `antisemitism is the missing link' explanation resembles `Piltdown Man' more than `Lucy'.
Richard Tidyman is a War Crimes Archivist at the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney. He is currently writing his PhD on the role of a Lithuanian police battalion in the Holocaust.

One hopes that at some future date, Goldhagen (or an editor who acutally knows his job) will return to this work and do some serious editing. Clearly Goldhagen simply took his doctoral thesis, and with precious little revision, transformed it into a book that is barely readable, due to its dense and repetitive language. The reader should be warned that the narrative does not flow freely in this book.

For those readers who have the stomachs to wade through the book to its conclusions, they will find some useful material. In particular, Goldhagen has shown that more ordinary Germans were active participants in the Holocaust than has been previously believed, and in this he is to be commended.

If he had left it at that (and had made his book somewhat more readable), most of the criticism this book has received never would have occurred. Unfortunately, Goldhagen attempts to extend his argument by stating that virtually all Germans were culturally hard-wired to participate in a Holocaust, once the right circumstances were in place. He maintains that German culture has essentially programmed Germans to be eleminationist anti-semites, either tacitly or actively, and furthermore, this is a cultural feature unique to the Germans.

The flaws in this argument should be obvious to anyone. For one thing, Goldhagen assumes that the average German, if he or she did not actively oppose the Nazi regime, was therefore tacitly supporting it and by extension was anti-semitic, abetting the more active Holocaust participants. How does one prove that one is not an eliminationist anti-semite under the conditions Goldhagen has provided? It would be virtually impossible for any human on the planet to prove that he or she wasn't ready to participate in the Holocaust, except that Goldhagen has focused his sights on the Germans alone.

This raises the most glaring flaw: obviously, a great deal of the killing was done by non-Germans, and the majority of the victims in the Holocaust were not Jewish! From Eastern Europe to France, Germany certainly had plenty of help in liquidating the millions of victims it did. How does Goldhagen reconcile this with his argument? Simply put, he doesn't. The sections of the book where he tries to rationalize these discrepancies are unravelling before he even finishes them.

In fact, even his argument that Germany had a uniquely historical predisposition towards anti-semitism is difficult to accept. How does one explain that Jews in 19th century Germany were probably the most prosperous in Europe, if they are living in a region filled with people who are programmed to kill them under the right circumstances? How does one explain away the fact that anti-semitism in France was probably even more virulent at the turn of the century? For that matter, how does one explain away the pogroms in Russia which were clearly taking place long before Nazi ideology began to form?

Goldhagen's argument that Jews were killed by Germans because, well, that's what Germans do, in its own perverse way lets the rest of us, the human race, off the hook. The implication is that the rest of us shouldn't worry about a holocaust in our back yard because we aren't Germans hard-wired to participate in a holocaust. This is very troubling, because obviously the human race at large is very much hard-wired to engage in genocidal activities just as the Germans did, given the right circumstances. The events of the past century should demonstrate that genocide is by no means a German specialty, although the Nazis practiced it with unequalled efficiency.

Goldhagen seems to have focused his enmity towards the Germans to the point he is able to ignore the plentiful evidence of genocide all across the globe, and in so doing, he has cheapened the lives of the victims of genocide who happened not to be Jewish. Genocide isn't a Jewish problem, and it isn't a German problem, it is a human problem. I don't think Goldhagen has fully accepted that; otherwise his book would have been written much differently.

Mr Goldhagens book has been acclaimed for its revelatory analysis of the holocaust, yet this book does not really tell us much that is new about the anti-semitic genocide that took place in europe during WW2. Rather what this book does is break necessary taboos regarding the accountability of an entire nation or ethnic group. The reason the conclusions reached by this book have never attracted so much attention (for they are hardly new) is because their potential for misuse is staggering. The attention of this book is focused squarely on the German responsibilty for the holocaust; little attention is given to the antisemitic violence of the rest of central and eastern Europe. Where for instance was the recognition and analysis of the particulary savage Ustace Croat genocide against the Jews (and the Serbs and the gypsies), or indeed the Latvian, Romanian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and even French and western European compliance in the holocaust. The History of the modern world has shown that violent anti-semitism or any racial prejudice extreme in nature allowed to precede unchecked leads inevitably to eliminationist policies be it in Turkey, the Soviet Union, the United States of America or Australia (all instances of eliminationist genocide against native or minority peoples). What of the Russian pogroms or the anti-semitic genocide planned by the Young Turks (which they had already instigated against more than a million Armenians) around the period of WW1? By singling out the German people in the 20th century this book falls prey to the trap of identifying and demonising an entire nation and ethnic group allowing for the justification of allied atrocities like the Dresden firestorm. This suspicion was confirmed by NATO's use of Mr Goldhagen and his book to demonise the Serbian people during the Kosovo conflict. The Goldhagen conclusion that crimes committed by a democratically elected regime are the fault of an entire ethnic group and nation have been used to justify and shroud the acceleration of the conflict and the bombing of civilians in a mist of bogus moral crusade. I recognise that Mr Goldhagen has a right to his private opinion, but as a historian he has a responsiblity to strive for a level of academic detachment. To attack the opinion of the Nazis from a subjective viewpoint is to disagree with it, not to discredit it. Only through objectivity can totalitarian atrocities be judged. Any other course places justice in the hands of the victims at which point perspective is lost and vengeance prevails. If the historian has made any error or has ignored evidence pertaining to his conclusion he is then responsible for the consequences of vengeance that is misplaced. While his theories and analysis are largely applicable to the holocaust in Germany he should be aware of the danger of making generalised conclusions (for how can one correctly determine the responsiblity of an entire group or nation without taking into account the circumstances and situation of every component individual). The assertion that the German treatment of the Jews was "so horrific that it can hardly be compared with that of other peoples" relies almost entirely on the genocide committed inside the massive concentration camp network and that of the einsatzgruppen and anti-partizan units and effectively ignores the death of the three and a half million captured Russian soldiers marched to death, starved and forced to eat each other, packed into freight wagons, sealed and left in sidings and many other horrific forms of mass murder perpetrated against slav prisoners that were not part of the mechanised concentration and extermination camps designed to deal specifically with the genocide of the Jewish people. To be so incensed as to accuse the entire German nation of genocide, but then to decide other crimes were less horrific and in doing so excuse their perpetrators, establishes a hierarchy of criminals in inverse proportion to the Nazi hierarchy of victims, a reflection not a refutation of racist doctrine. Hatred against one group is not excusable because another group is hated more. If it is Goldhagen's point that the nature of persecution was more horrific in Germany then the alleged relatively lower incidence of persecution elsewhere cannot exclude the need for its mention. The cold war and the need to demonise the Soviet Union has meant the apparent minimalisation of slav suffering as well as of the knowledge that the Russians took a hideous revenge against the Germans and other eastern European peoples as they drove the Germans back and, like the yugoslav partisans against the Ustace Croats, practiced mass murder against their neighbors. Mr Goldhagen does not go far enough in saying that gypsies were "treated similarly" to the Jews, he is right to say that the Nazi's considered the Jews the lowest form of humanity but he does not say outright, as he should that the gypsies were victims of "eliminationist" genocide. The annihilation of the Jews was indeed the purpose of the extermination camps but the annihilation of the gypsies was also an example of total genocide. Thank you for reading

Goldhagen is a glorified notetaker. He was willing to go through a ton of archival information to conclude that the Germans are a "uniquely" flawed people. Wow, it takes real bravery to defend such a proposition, which lambastes the people who gave us the Nazis. Our understanding of what led to such a tragedy can only be perverted by this book. Goldhagen offers the pretense of social science analysis with concepts devised and drawn in obviously contrived and arbitrary ways. He knew the conclusion before he started. If you examine his use of documentation, then you will see that there is no coherent stragegy for the use of his "evidence." He simply takes notes of shocking incidents and communiques and restates them for the reader. For this, he should be commended because it is his recapping of these shocking displays of behavior that make the book compelling. The book still ends up being a tortuous read because the details of events are endlessly provided (or spewed) without being distilled through the lense of a logically clear argumentative outline. Thus, there are no lessons to be gained from this except the wrong one: Having a German national character is "the" necessary and sufficient condition for the occurrence of genocides equal in proportion to the Holocaust. If you really want to learn about what enables a society to engage in such atrocities, then read Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. If you have the fortitude, then move on to her Origins of Totalitarianism. Also, take a look at Ignatieff's argument about the " narcissism of minor differences" in shaping individuals' perceptions about the "other." Read Orwell for the ways in which "evil" becomes routine in life. Trust me. You will learn so many more valuable lessons about the types of factors driving such enormities of political violence.

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.

Probably, I must apologize because I am only a "normal German student" so I only want to add two quotations from famous men before I say something in favor of Germany: First, I witnessed a brilliant lecture by Prof. Dr. Alfred Grosser on the future of Europe (Grosser is a great Jewish scientist from the Sorbonne University in Paris who fled from Germany when he was a child and who became a famous advocate of French-German friendship since the sixties). In this lecture at the university of Trier in autumn 1998, he said incidentally: "In my opinion, Goldhagen's book is not honorable. There were also thousands of purely German victims in the German Nazi concentration camps, for example other religious Christian minorities, pacifists and religious leaders (Bonhoeffer, killed), social democrats (Schumacher, survived and became the first German opposition leader after the war), communists (Thälmann, killed) and from a certain date on, everyone else who could be a German danger for Hitler's power. Certainly, the absolute majority of victims were Jews; but not to mention the German victims in an appropriate manner, too, those who were also tortured and murdered by Hitler's creatures in their camps, this is simply not a scientific way of research." Second quotation: Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Jewish-Austrian "hunter" of Nazi criminals: "When I am asked how all of this could happen in Germany and Austria, the countries of so much culture, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller etc., etc.; then I always say: This simply shows that under certain circumstances all of this could happen everywhere in our world!" Today, there are laws in Germany that also allow to punish people from other nations as the US-Nazi Gary Lauck (from Nebraska) in 1995 who denied the crimes of Auschwitz, who publicly called for hatred against Jews and "inferior races" and who would not have been punished in the USA for the same "crime". So, if you are a "Neo-Nazi", please be careful what you say when you enter today's Germany. Unfortunately, we still have enough of you and you may stay longer in Germany ('s prisons) than you expected. (By the way, the German branch of the so-called Scientology church is observed by German secret services because of it's propagated views of society that look like Hitler's party NSDAP-"social-darwinism" and not because of it's religious ideas. The Germans don't know how it looks like in the USA.) Thank you for your patience.

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.

Daniel Goldhagen's analysis throughs light on one of the darkest periods of German history. But does this light reveal the truth without coloring it? Is it possible to arrive at a general conclusion about the psyche of a whole people? As one of the reviewers points out, the author himself admits at the end that during the last fifty years Germans have turned into exemplary democrats, liberal, humane, and tolerant. --An amazing mutation if Goldhagen's thesis is true.--Another reader indirectly blames Catholicism for the German atrocities since "25% of the SS" belonged to that Church. This opinion is as true as the statement that Hitler was a "corporal" which seems to be carried from one study of the period into another.--He was a private first class.-- My major objection to G.'s thesis is the fact that it remains abstract and lacks the dimension of experience one finds e.g. in Klemperer's diaries and Egon Kogon's seminal "Der SS-Staat" (1945). In a recent book I have tried to reflect on the attitudes of the "average" German during the Third Reich hoping that it may help to understand the Nazi era. But all studies and experiences, it seems, cannot solve the mystery of evil. Even the holy book of Judaism contains "evidence" of genocide if one reads the passages in question (e.g. Genesis 34) without theological or sociological exculpations as Simone Weil does.

The greatest tragedy of Goldhagen's incongruous and untenable thesis was the almost immediate international acclaim he received for this work. Hailed as Time magazine's second best non-fiction book of 1996 and described by the New York Times as `one of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark' , Goldhagen obviously found the kudos for which he was searching. As a piece of historical analysis, however, this unscholarly tirade takes the reader on a journey of massive generalisations, overt contradictions, mischievous use of primary and secondary evidence and a thoroughly unsustainable and highly offensive discourse. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the so-called `Goldhagen controversy' is the ease with which the author has disregarded the criticism of his work, much of which has raised significant and valid concerns over his historical practice and analysis.
Despite his argument's apparent flaws, the increased debate about the role of the German public in the actions of the Nazi regime has raised important historiographical questions, most notably the potential culpability of an entire nation in the crimes of their government. Historians have also been forced to rethink the traditionalist approach to Holocaust history, which argued that the Final Solution was perpetrated by a small group of ideological zealots under the direct influence of Hitler. However, to argue that all Germans should bare the onus for Nazi crimes is demonstrably misleading. The persecution and attempted destruction of the European Jews was not a result of a flawed German cognitive model but rather the crimes of a vicious regime which was determined to win one aspect of its ideological war of attrition. If the German people are to be attributed responsibility for the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews, this culpability should be restricted to the status of a passive collaboration rather than the ruthless pursuit of a depraved nationalistic aim to eradicate European Jewry.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust exposes an uncontrollable German eliminationist anti-Semitism and an entire nationality whose cognitive model forced them to commit acts of severe brutality against the Jewish people. According to Goldhagen's logic, the Holocaust is explicable only as a result of this virulent German anti-Semitism. The most striking flaw of this assertion is his failure to recognise the involvement of non-Germans in the Final Solution, especially in the Nazi occupied eastern territories, as well as the potency of anti-semitism across the continent prior to World War Two. The author also systematically disregards the suffering of non-Jews in his abortive judgment that the other victims suffered a "qualitatively different" fate to that of the Jews. Also, his sweeping generalisations about the German public pays scant attention to the unisolated cases of resistance to Hitler's persecution.
Clearly, Goldhagen's thesis is a crude attempt to broaden the blame for the Holocaust by revising the traditional understanding of the perpetrators as Hitler's ideological zealots. This traditional discourse and Goldhagen's claims, however, are both too simplistic. With the exception of the active resistors and the cold-blooded psychopaths of Nazi Germany, it is a fair assessment to describe Germans as passive collaborators to the horrors of the Holocaust, as most did little to resist the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Goldhagen's argument, however, remains unconvincing because his premise is not placed in the comparative framework necessary to formulate a compelling piece of historical research. This is, of course, all the more ironic given that the PhD thesis, upon which Goldhagen's book is based, was awarded the American Political Science Association's Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. While the book may make good politics, it can be described as nothing more than historical fiction. As a piece of history, this selectively researched diatribe is as pernicious as the myths advocated by Irving. Essentially, Hitler's Willing Executioners manifestly disregards reams of evidence in order to represent a fundamental historical misconception. Unfortunately, it appears that one star is the lowest score that can be applied.

It is wrong to condemn people based on membership in an ethnic group. The idea of guilt by ethnicity, which led to the Holocaust, is aggresively propogated in this book. The irony is astonishing.

A better subtitle would have been "Ordinary People and the Holocaust".