Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – January 28, 1997

I finally got around to reading this book. I'm not Jewish but have many Jewish friends and even after extensive reading, I couldn't get my head around the holocaust. I was born in Britain in 1948 and grew up in the fifties when virtually every adult suffered from some level of post traumatic stress. No adult talked about the holocaust and gratuitous low-grade anti-semitism was endemic in Britain at that time. In 1963 I worked in a hotel kitchen in Switzerland with husband and wife hotel owners who clearly had been and still were Nazis. They wouldn't talk about it. I visited Eastern Europe in 1967 with a guy who'd liberated Belsen. He didn't talk about it either.

I visited Auschwitz in 2012 and spent most of a day there with a Polish friend and a Polish guide. Very shocking. Emetic in fact; but I still didn't understand it

However, having read this book, I now understand it. I read it and all the pieces and from that prior extensive reading fell into place. This was especially true of the end of the book, where several analytic comments hit home.

The critics who think that Goldhagen says that this was a purely German phenomenon didn't read the book carefully. Eliminationist racism rears its ugly head in many parts of the world today with depressing regularity. Mindless Islamophobia is a striking example.

Strangely, although racism is alive and well in the world in 2016, race itself is a complete myth. Human traits do run in certain genetically related populations (sickle cell disease or pseudocholinesterase deficiency for example) but humans are less dissimilar from each other than dogs and cats are. They come in all shapes and sizes and levels of ability. Intelligence, educability, moral development and cleverness are more or less randomly distributed. I am a physician and a scholar and can reference everything I'm saying from other sources

Judaism is simply a religion. It was the leading monotheistic religion in the Roman Empire immediately before the conversion of Constantine. The residual Jews tended to be those at the periphery of the Empire who for one reason or another dug their heels in when the imperial command to convert eventually reached them.

I highly recommend a thorough reading and understanding of this book to anyone who wants to understand the holocaust or wants to prevent future genocides.

The horrible, the inescapable truth is marshaled into the forefront by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in this incredible book. Suffice it to say that Worse Than War, published 15 years later, deserves the same careful attention and admiration as Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Truth for the Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust is not at the bottom of some bottomless well. In this kind of revelation there is hope, dim indeed, but still there.

This was much more tedious to read than most other books on the subject I've read. It was written as I imagine a PhD paper is - rather terse and overwhelmed by repeating the thesis over and over again, in slightly different ways. I think that the book paints all Germans as complicit in the Holocaust, and while many were in some way - it rather ignores those who helped Jews at great risk to themselves. It's a very one sided viewpoint.
The book looks at historical antisemitism, and how easily a large number of the Germans were able to use their long term hatred of Jews to kill without remorse. I found parts of this well done, but repetitive as presented.

In its genius, truth and humanity it gives voice to the victims and their descendants. It also reconfirms the decency of the human endeavor in the face of unimaginable horror inflicted by the Nazis, the fascists, their European collaborators and the legions of 'willing executioners'

In the depths of World War II the British government contracted with noted historian A.J.P. Tay to write a book on the Germans- one of those "why we fight" tomes that was supposed to provide context for the war. What the government wanted was a story explaining how the ordinary Germans were simply the victims of their leaders, and we're bad people at all. What Taylor provided was a book arguing that Nazism was the almost inevitable consequence of German history, and the book was never issued to troops although you can (and should read it for its excellent insights. (The Course of German History (Routledge Classics)). After the war the Allies set up the Nuremberg tribunals to apportion guilt, but after two years, the public demand for retribution and justice faded, and the desire to build West Germany and Austria up as a buffer against Soviet expansionism, along with the growth of the US Space Program, resulted in the rapid de-Nazification of the records of many who had served the Reich, like Werner von Braun and Austrian Prime Minister Kurt Waldheim.

In Germany, the desire to erase any trace Nazism from their nation- a well-intentioned plan- let to a state of affairs where by the early 1960s, most young Germans knew almost nothing of the Nazi years, and if they had any knowledge at all of Adolf Hitler, it was a kindly old man who had once been the leader in Grandfather's day. This was followed by a swing in the other direction, in which those too young to have had any culpability in the actions of the Nazi state sought to confront their nation's history, and so a great many books were published and a great many debates were staged. And so the history of Germany in the 30s and 40s, and the interpretation of that history, has swung back and forth over the years. The general position taken by most Germans, and a good many historians, was that once the Nazis seized power they so effectively suppressed dissent that ordinary Germans- most of whom were not Nazi sympathizers- were powerless to stop the juggernaut.

Into this stepped Daniel Goldhagen with two dissenting theses: The first, which has stirred the most contentious debate, is his thesis that antisemitism was not just a policy of the Nazis, but a characteristic of German society. How true that is I cannot judge, not being a historian, and not having access to the original records. I do find it a reasonable contention, given what history I have read. This is not to say by any means that all Germans were anti-Semites, and I don't think Goldhagen makes that argument, but only that it was a commonly held belief. After all, it was, in fact, a commonly held belief through most of the world. One not need look much farther than the United States to see how common antisemitism was in that era. Goldhagen's more important thesis, and the one that he argues most effectively, is that the horrors of the Holocaust were not performed exclusively by the SS or even by government forces, and that few if any troops had to be coerced into executing Jews, Gypsies and other victims. Goldhagen documents a great many examples of ordinary citizens, and not Germans, happily participating in mass execution. He also notes, as have other authors, that there are plenty of examples of German soldiers who could not bear to perform these duties being assigned other ones. The great majority of German citizens may not have participated directly in mass executions, but they willingly presented a blind eye to the disappearance of their neighbors, the seizure of property, the enslavement of captured soldiers and civilians, and the public humiliation of Jews and others in the street. They did so in large part because they profited greatly from the seizure of private properly and the appropriation of the wealth of captured nations.

It is particularly notable that this book was far better received in Germany, where it served to spark a re-interest in the Nazi years, and a number of new debates on morality and the responsibility of the citizen, than it was in the US. Whether or not you will accept all of Goldhagen's theses regarding the root causes of the Holocaust and Nazism, this is a valuable addition to the literature and a worthwhile read for students of the era. Those who doubt its thesis should read another book on this topic that makes use of recent released transcript from caputeured German soldiers during WWII: Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying.

Most enlightened book on the Holocaust I have read!!!
Disturbing to say the least in light what we have been told about the involvement of ordinary Germans.

A look fat reality and not wishful thinking. I'm just one of the lucky ones.

excellent