Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Paperback)

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Author) "IN THINKING ABOUT German antisemitism, people have a tendency to make important, unacknowledged assumptions about Germans before and during the Nazi period that bear scrutiny..." (more)
Key Phrases: eliminationist measures, other police battalions, socially dead beings, Soviet Union, Order Police, Clothing Works (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In a work that is as authoritative as it is explosive, Goldhagen forces us to revisit and reconsider our understanding of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, demanding a fundamental revision in our thinking of the years between 1933-1945. Drawing principally on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen marshals new, disquieting primary evidence that explains why, when Hitler conceived of the "final solution" he was able to enlist vast numbers of willing Germans to carry it out. A book sure to provoke new discussion and intense debate. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Goldhagen's gripping and shocking landmark study transforms our understanding of the Holocaust. Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators?those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos, death marches?were, for the most part, ordinary German men and women: merchants, civil servants, academics, farmers, students, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. Rejecting the conventional view that the killers were slavishly carrying out orders under coercion, Goldhagen, assistant professor of government at Harvard, uses hitherto untapped primary sources, including the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves, to show that they killed Jews willingly, approvingly, even zealously. Hitler's genocidal program of a "Final Solution" found ready accomplices in these ordinary Germans who, as Goldhagen persuasively argues, had absorbed a virulent, "eliminationist" anti-Semitism, prevalent as far back as the 18th century, which demonized the Jews and called for their expulsion or physical annihilation. Furthermore, his research reveals that a large proportion of the killers were told by their commanders that they could disobey orders to kill, without fear of retribution?yet they slaughtered Jews anyway. By his careful estimate, hundreds of thousands of Germans were directly involved in the mass murder, and millions more knew of the ongoing genocide. Among the 30 photographs are snapshots taken by the murderers of themselves and their victims.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679772685
• ISBN-13: 978-0679772682
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (204 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #122,133 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

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52 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A much-hyped new book on the Holocaust goes too far, November 24, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Hardcover)

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.

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A provoking but not really scientific book, August 23, 1999

By	[e-mail] (Fachbereich Politikwis... (Trier, Germany) - See all my reviews

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.

184 of 230 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Deeply flawed study with some good points, September 10, 2003

By	chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Hardcover)

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 written much differently.