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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
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. 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.
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 during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival material, 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. 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.
"Hitler's Willing Executioners is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books
"The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
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 during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival material, 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. 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.
"Hitler's Willing Executioners is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books
"The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
634 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
459 people are currently reading
7352 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
9 books42 followersDaniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide.
"The book [Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust] sparked controversy in the press and academic circles. 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 was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany despite being criticized by some historians, who called it ahistorical and, according to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless." Due to its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, it has been characterized as anti-German. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer claims that "Goldhagen stumbles badly," .. Bauer argues that "Goldhagen's thesis does not work." and charges "...that the anti-German bias of his book, almost a racist bias (however much he may deny it) leads nowhere." The American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. Hilberg summarised the debates, "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."[ Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_...]
"The book [Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust] sparked controversy in the press and academic circles. 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 was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany despite being criticized by some historians, who called it ahistorical and, according to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless." Due to its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, it has been characterized as anti-German. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer claims that "Goldhagen stumbles badly," .. Bauer argues that "Goldhagen's thesis does not work." and charges "...that the anti-German bias of his book, almost a racist bias (however much he may deny it) leads nowhere." The American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. Hilberg summarised the debates, "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map."[ Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_...]
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April 26, 2016
Everyone knows it’s hard to get published. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and it’s difficult to stand out among the sea of words. It’s a bit easier for memoirists, who can rely on shabby childhoods and drug addictions. For a historian, it’s a bit trickier. One tactic is the micro-history: find yourself a historical footnote, and then elevate it to the turning point of mankind. For example, an ambitious historian could write about the hula-hoop, and how it brought about détente between America and the Soviet Union. (Don’t steal my idea!)
There is another route you can take, a road less traveled. It’s perilous, and might make it difficult for you to travel in the future, but it will get you noticed (and in publishing, there is no such thing as bad attention). What do you do? Simple. Make a shocking statement that insults at least 80 million people but that is at least half-defensible.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen nails this principle in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It’s why his presumably-turgid Harvard dissertation was repackaged into a best-selling book that most buyers probably found impossible to read.
Probably the most popular notion to come out of the Holocaust is Hannah Arendt’s famous conception of the “banality of evil.” The phrase, while it has a certain pseudo-intellectual ring, is shallow, clichéd, and specious. Moreover, it was derived from Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann, who was fighting for his life in a Jerusalem courtroom, and thereby willing to say anything. Still, there are certain aspects of the Holocaust that might qualify as banal. After all, it never would have occurred without lawyers, accountants and engineers (and IBM!), who managed to tabulate, round-up, and transport millions of Jews. Presumably, many of these people never saw the awful end result of their work.
Goldhagen doesn’t believe in this H&R Block explanation of the Holocaust. He does not accept that it was somehow diffused enough that most perpetrators didn't know what they were doing, or to what ends. Of course, you probably already figured that out, after having read the title.
Suffice it to say, Hitler’s Willing Executioners has a different way of explaining the Holocaust. First, Goldhagen broadens the typical indictment of “the Nazis” to include the whole of the German people. He does not lay blame simply with the tens of thousands of einsatzgruppen who shot Jews in Russia, or the camp guards who manned the wire at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Rather, he casts his net over virtually all Germans, from the SS officer delivering a coup de grace with his Luger to the German stationmaster who helped the trains run on time to the German inhabitant of Dachau, who lived within sight of a concentration camp.
Secondly, Goldhagen posits that the Holocaust occurred because of Germany’s unique brand of anti-Semitism (he terms this “eliminationist anti-Semitism”).
It is this second point that provides the thrust of Goldhagen’s book. There are dozens of explanations as to why the Holocaust occurred: the magnetic sway of Hitler; Germanic obedience to authority; various social and psychological pressures; the alleged exigencies of the war. Goldhagen finds these explanations unconvincing (as though any explanation could possibly suffice).
To Goldhagen, the justification for the Holocaust begins and ends with German anti-Semitism. He spends roughly the first half of the book, in terms of total pages, trying to explain the nature of this mindset. It is this portion of the book that will likely try the patience of most readers. As I mentioned above, Hitler’s Willing Executioners began life as a PhD dissertation. If you’ve ever read a dissertation, you know that clarity is not the foremost concern; getting a PhD is. Goldhagen’s writing, especially in these early sections, is quite frankly, awful. It is dry, turgid, overly technical, awkwardly phrased, and freighted with fancy Harvard words. (Goldhagen uses the word “phenomenological” so often it started to lose meaning for me).
A discussion about German anti-Semitism is not inherently complex. It’s not, after all, particle physics or fractal geometry. Goldhagen, though, has a particular way of obfuscating the obvious, of hiding his meaning in a tangle of clauses. He uses entire paragraphs to extol meanings better accomplished with a single sentence. The denseness of his writing comes across as uncertainty, as though he’s trying to hide the flaws in his arguments by making his arguments incomprehensible.
What you should get out of this section, when all is said and done, is the proposition that the anti-Semitic, eliminationist mindset of the Germans caused the Holocaust.
The next part of the book is devoted to proving this hypothesis. Goldhagen does this by way of three case studies: (1) the Police Battalions; (2) the “work” camps; and (3) the death marches. These sections are a bit more manageable in terms of ease of comprehension. I’m guessing that most of the changes in the dissertation-to-book transformation took place here. While Goldhagen avowedly eschews any type of narrative, he does pepper the proceedings with enough first-hand accounts to keep a reader at least mildly interested. (At the very least, it reminds you that humans were involved in the Holocaust. This is important to remember, because Hitler’s Willing Executioners could have been written by a supercomputer).
Goldhagen does not set out (or make any attempt) to tell the story of the Holocaust. Instead, he enters the realm of social-science to try to prove a point. To do so, he relies heavily on the case study method, in which you do an in-depth study of a single group.
The first of these groups are the Police Battalions, specifically, Police Battalion 101. The men of these Battalions were involved in “actions” on the Eastern Front, in which they followed in the wake of the fast-advancing Wehrmacht, rounded up Jews, and shot them in the thousands.
Goldhagen spends a lot of time in this section critiquing the work of Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men about Police Battalion 101. Browning’s thesis, which Goldhagen disputes, is that the Germans of Battalion 101 were not fanatical Nazis, but “ordinary” guys who were very obedient to authority (think Stanley Milgram’s Yale experiments).
I didn't care for Goldhagen’s attacks on Browning. First off, he comes across as a douche (I suppose this really isn’t a substantive criticism). Goldhagen seems just like your typical grad student: young and callow, piggybacking off another’s hard work. It’s hard to come up with an original idea, and quite easy to find flaws. Browning built a sandcastle; Goldhagen, wearing a blazer and turtleneck and walking his labradoodle, saw Browning’s sandcastle and kicked it over.
More pertinently, Goldhagen’s critique of Browning is logically and factually unpersuasive. Goldhagen wants so much to find empirical support for his arguments, but while he’s talking empiricism, he’s relying on anecdotes. For instance, Goldhagen makes a huge deal over the fact that a couple soldiers in Battalion 101 asked for, and were allowed, to avoid taking part in the shootings of Jews. Goldhagen points to this as proof that the Nazis didn't have to follow orders to shoot Jews. Of course, this never takes into account Browning’s arguments regarding obedience, peer pressure, or the stages of violent brutalization. How does Goldhagen get around this? He dismisses Browning’s arguments by writing I dismiss these arguments. Literally. He simply writes off Browning in favor of his own precious, monocausal idea: that age-old, all-pervading German anti-Semitism answers all Holocaust questions.
The sections on the “work” camps and the death marches are similar to the discussion about Police Battalion 101. In each, Goldhagen isolates a discrete group of Holocaust perpetrators and attempts to show that their actions were predicated upon eliminationist anti-Semitism. These sections share the same problems that I noted above. Simply put, Goldhagen can’t prove his point to any degree of certainty. Unfortunately for the historian, the Nazis did not do exit interviews with the SS, the Police Battalions, or the camp guards. This leaves Goldhagen casting about for concrete conclusions based on flimsy bits of evidence such as social class, profession, and Nazi party affiliation.
In many ways, a book like this lives and dies based on the strength of its argument. After all, its incendiary revelations (“Everything you know is wrong!”) is its raison d’être. And that’s fair. If your book purports to be a landmark restructuring of the Holocaust story, you better be ready to back this up. On this level, I found the book to be an utter failure. I wasn’t convinced by Goldhagen; I wasn’t even moved.
I’m aware that actual scholars (as opposed to me) have criticized Goldhagen’s research, or lack thereof. However, that doesn’t matter to me, since I am not a leading authority of 19th century German anti-Semitism (I apologize if I’ve been giving off that misleading vibe). I don’t know how accurately Goldhagen presents the reality of Germanic anti-Semitism. All I know is that there were dozens of times throughout the book when a thought-bubble formed over my head; inside that thought bubble was a question mark.
First and foremost, while Goldhagen goes to great lengths to show that anti-Semitism was a necessary condition to the Holocaust, he falls woefully short trying to prove it was sufficient. From a common sense standpoint, it makes no sense that an otherwise ordinary German could be convinced to kill, and kill brutally, simply because he or she holds anti-Semitic beliefs. There has to be a lot more: peer pressure; social pressure; professional pressure; psychological brutalization (that is, training in violence); obedience to authority; a belief in the ultimate goals. You also need a regime in which this action is not only tolerated, but demanded. In other words, you need the perverted genius of an Adolf Hitler, who, despite the book’s title, never makes an appearance.
It may seem like a dodge, but the explanation for the Holocaust isn’t any one thing; it’s a combination of a lot of things. (And this combination of things is different for each person who participated). The only proof I have of this is that anti-Semitism goes back to the time of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, yet the Holocaust did not occur until the mid-20th century. If Goldhagen is right, and anti-Semitism is both necessary and sufficient for the Holocaust, then the Holocaust should have occurred much earlier. But it did not. Accordingly, there must have been a confluence (anti-Semitism plus Versailles plus the Depression plus Hitler plus the failure of Weimar plus an authoritarian regime plus…well, you get the picture), rather than a sole cause. (Besides, many other genocides have occurred without the aid of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitic mindset alone, at least to me, does not explain anything except that Germans hated Jews. Which I sort of figured out without Goldhagen’s assistance).
Even if Goldhagen had convinced me of the worth of his assertions, it wouldn’t have done a lot to improve my opinion of his book. This is due to a startling lack of readability. Hitler’s Willing Executioners seems almost intentionally graceless and ponderous, as though the only way to write about the Holocaust is through cement-like prose. Goldhagen has taken as his subject one of the world’s great tales of human suffering. What’s more, he professes to know this. At one point, he emphasizes the brutality of the Holocaust, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of physical destruction: spattered blood, torn flesh, shattered bones. His writing, however, does not support his own declamations. In short, Hitler’s Willing Executioners would have benefited greatly from an infusion of humanity.
There is another route you can take, a road less traveled. It’s perilous, and might make it difficult for you to travel in the future, but it will get you noticed (and in publishing, there is no such thing as bad attention). What do you do? Simple. Make a shocking statement that insults at least 80 million people but that is at least half-defensible.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen nails this principle in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It’s why his presumably-turgid Harvard dissertation was repackaged into a best-selling book that most buyers probably found impossible to read.
Probably the most popular notion to come out of the Holocaust is Hannah Arendt’s famous conception of the “banality of evil.” The phrase, while it has a certain pseudo-intellectual ring, is shallow, clichéd, and specious. Moreover, it was derived from Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann, who was fighting for his life in a Jerusalem courtroom, and thereby willing to say anything. Still, there are certain aspects of the Holocaust that might qualify as banal. After all, it never would have occurred without lawyers, accountants and engineers (and IBM!), who managed to tabulate, round-up, and transport millions of Jews. Presumably, many of these people never saw the awful end result of their work.
Goldhagen doesn’t believe in this H&R Block explanation of the Holocaust. He does not accept that it was somehow diffused enough that most perpetrators didn't know what they were doing, or to what ends. Of course, you probably already figured that out, after having read the title.
Suffice it to say, Hitler’s Willing Executioners has a different way of explaining the Holocaust. First, Goldhagen broadens the typical indictment of “the Nazis” to include the whole of the German people. He does not lay blame simply with the tens of thousands of einsatzgruppen who shot Jews in Russia, or the camp guards who manned the wire at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Rather, he casts his net over virtually all Germans, from the SS officer delivering a coup de grace with his Luger to the German stationmaster who helped the trains run on time to the German inhabitant of Dachau, who lived within sight of a concentration camp.
Secondly, Goldhagen posits that the Holocaust occurred because of Germany’s unique brand of anti-Semitism (he terms this “eliminationist anti-Semitism”).
It is this second point that provides the thrust of Goldhagen’s book. There are dozens of explanations as to why the Holocaust occurred: the magnetic sway of Hitler; Germanic obedience to authority; various social and psychological pressures; the alleged exigencies of the war. Goldhagen finds these explanations unconvincing (as though any explanation could possibly suffice).
To Goldhagen, the justification for the Holocaust begins and ends with German anti-Semitism. He spends roughly the first half of the book, in terms of total pages, trying to explain the nature of this mindset. It is this portion of the book that will likely try the patience of most readers. As I mentioned above, Hitler’s Willing Executioners began life as a PhD dissertation. If you’ve ever read a dissertation, you know that clarity is not the foremost concern; getting a PhD is. Goldhagen’s writing, especially in these early sections, is quite frankly, awful. It is dry, turgid, overly technical, awkwardly phrased, and freighted with fancy Harvard words. (Goldhagen uses the word “phenomenological” so often it started to lose meaning for me).
A discussion about German anti-Semitism is not inherently complex. It’s not, after all, particle physics or fractal geometry. Goldhagen, though, has a particular way of obfuscating the obvious, of hiding his meaning in a tangle of clauses. He uses entire paragraphs to extol meanings better accomplished with a single sentence. The denseness of his writing comes across as uncertainty, as though he’s trying to hide the flaws in his arguments by making his arguments incomprehensible.
What you should get out of this section, when all is said and done, is the proposition that the anti-Semitic, eliminationist mindset of the Germans caused the Holocaust.
The next part of the book is devoted to proving this hypothesis. Goldhagen does this by way of three case studies: (1) the Police Battalions; (2) the “work” camps; and (3) the death marches. These sections are a bit more manageable in terms of ease of comprehension. I’m guessing that most of the changes in the dissertation-to-book transformation took place here. While Goldhagen avowedly eschews any type of narrative, he does pepper the proceedings with enough first-hand accounts to keep a reader at least mildly interested. (At the very least, it reminds you that humans were involved in the Holocaust. This is important to remember, because Hitler’s Willing Executioners could have been written by a supercomputer).
Goldhagen does not set out (or make any attempt) to tell the story of the Holocaust. Instead, he enters the realm of social-science to try to prove a point. To do so, he relies heavily on the case study method, in which you do an in-depth study of a single group.
The first of these groups are the Police Battalions, specifically, Police Battalion 101. The men of these Battalions were involved in “actions” on the Eastern Front, in which they followed in the wake of the fast-advancing Wehrmacht, rounded up Jews, and shot them in the thousands.
Goldhagen spends a lot of time in this section critiquing the work of Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men about Police Battalion 101. Browning’s thesis, which Goldhagen disputes, is that the Germans of Battalion 101 were not fanatical Nazis, but “ordinary” guys who were very obedient to authority (think Stanley Milgram’s Yale experiments).
I didn't care for Goldhagen’s attacks on Browning. First off, he comes across as a douche (I suppose this really isn’t a substantive criticism). Goldhagen seems just like your typical grad student: young and callow, piggybacking off another’s hard work. It’s hard to come up with an original idea, and quite easy to find flaws. Browning built a sandcastle; Goldhagen, wearing a blazer and turtleneck and walking his labradoodle, saw Browning’s sandcastle and kicked it over.
More pertinently, Goldhagen’s critique of Browning is logically and factually unpersuasive. Goldhagen wants so much to find empirical support for his arguments, but while he’s talking empiricism, he’s relying on anecdotes. For instance, Goldhagen makes a huge deal over the fact that a couple soldiers in Battalion 101 asked for, and were allowed, to avoid taking part in the shootings of Jews. Goldhagen points to this as proof that the Nazis didn't have to follow orders to shoot Jews. Of course, this never takes into account Browning’s arguments regarding obedience, peer pressure, or the stages of violent brutalization. How does Goldhagen get around this? He dismisses Browning’s arguments by writing I dismiss these arguments. Literally. He simply writes off Browning in favor of his own precious, monocausal idea: that age-old, all-pervading German anti-Semitism answers all Holocaust questions.
The sections on the “work” camps and the death marches are similar to the discussion about Police Battalion 101. In each, Goldhagen isolates a discrete group of Holocaust perpetrators and attempts to show that their actions were predicated upon eliminationist anti-Semitism. These sections share the same problems that I noted above. Simply put, Goldhagen can’t prove his point to any degree of certainty. Unfortunately for the historian, the Nazis did not do exit interviews with the SS, the Police Battalions, or the camp guards. This leaves Goldhagen casting about for concrete conclusions based on flimsy bits of evidence such as social class, profession, and Nazi party affiliation.
In many ways, a book like this lives and dies based on the strength of its argument. After all, its incendiary revelations (“Everything you know is wrong!”) is its raison d’être. And that’s fair. If your book purports to be a landmark restructuring of the Holocaust story, you better be ready to back this up. On this level, I found the book to be an utter failure. I wasn’t convinced by Goldhagen; I wasn’t even moved.
I’m aware that actual scholars (as opposed to me) have criticized Goldhagen’s research, or lack thereof. However, that doesn’t matter to me, since I am not a leading authority of 19th century German anti-Semitism (I apologize if I’ve been giving off that misleading vibe). I don’t know how accurately Goldhagen presents the reality of Germanic anti-Semitism. All I know is that there were dozens of times throughout the book when a thought-bubble formed over my head; inside that thought bubble was a question mark.
First and foremost, while Goldhagen goes to great lengths to show that anti-Semitism was a necessary condition to the Holocaust, he falls woefully short trying to prove it was sufficient. From a common sense standpoint, it makes no sense that an otherwise ordinary German could be convinced to kill, and kill brutally, simply because he or she holds anti-Semitic beliefs. There has to be a lot more: peer pressure; social pressure; professional pressure; psychological brutalization (that is, training in violence); obedience to authority; a belief in the ultimate goals. You also need a regime in which this action is not only tolerated, but demanded. In other words, you need the perverted genius of an Adolf Hitler, who, despite the book’s title, never makes an appearance.
It may seem like a dodge, but the explanation for the Holocaust isn’t any one thing; it’s a combination of a lot of things. (And this combination of things is different for each person who participated). The only proof I have of this is that anti-Semitism goes back to the time of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, yet the Holocaust did not occur until the mid-20th century. If Goldhagen is right, and anti-Semitism is both necessary and sufficient for the Holocaust, then the Holocaust should have occurred much earlier. But it did not. Accordingly, there must have been a confluence (anti-Semitism plus Versailles plus the Depression plus Hitler plus the failure of Weimar plus an authoritarian regime plus…well, you get the picture), rather than a sole cause. (Besides, many other genocides have occurred without the aid of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitic mindset alone, at least to me, does not explain anything except that Germans hated Jews. Which I sort of figured out without Goldhagen’s assistance).
Even if Goldhagen had convinced me of the worth of his assertions, it wouldn’t have done a lot to improve my opinion of his book. This is due to a startling lack of readability. Hitler’s Willing Executioners seems almost intentionally graceless and ponderous, as though the only way to write about the Holocaust is through cement-like prose. Goldhagen has taken as his subject one of the world’s great tales of human suffering. What’s more, he professes to know this. At one point, he emphasizes the brutality of the Holocaust, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of physical destruction: spattered blood, torn flesh, shattered bones. His writing, however, does not support his own declamations. In short, Hitler’s Willing Executioners would have benefited greatly from an infusion of humanity.
September 7, 2016
This should, for many reasons, get only one star. It gets two for the occasional flashes of actual, legitimate historical scholarship and for some of the evidence he has dug up.
Nonetheless, it is a truly terrible work, made even more so by its persuasive and populist tone, and the large numbers of copies sold. It is an almost textbook example of the dangers of creating a thesis, and then selecting and interpreting evidence to fit that thesis. His conclusions are simply wrong, and not backed up by evidence. My Master’s Thesis was on the Shoah and I have studied it at postgraduate level for some time and can confirm that this book is dismissed outright by all serious scholars of the period. I can do no more than urge everyone not to waste their time reading it.
A much better work on this topic is Browning’s. Read that instead.
A much more thorough critique can be read here https://www.foreignaffairs.com/review...
or this
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...
amongst countless others. There is a substantial amount of academic criticism out there on this text, and any decision to read it should be taken with that in mind.
November 30, 2018
I didn't manage to finish this. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Essentially, this book has one central premise. 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. That its erroneous to believe the Nazis were capable of brainwashing an entire nation that wasn't already predisposed to embrace a hatred of Jews. The author does an admirable job in researching how "ordinary" Germans behaved during the war. 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. You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. The vast majority stood by and laughed. 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. That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. He focuses a lot on the police battalions, often middle aged men who didn't belong to the Nazi party but who had no problem murdering Jews, even women, children and the infirm elderly. However, I began to have a problem with the author singling out Germans for antisemitism. The truth is, there was a predisposition to treat Jews like parasites throughout Europe at that time. Were Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians on the whole any better than the Germans? It's difficult to think of more than a few European countries where the general population harboured a decent humane view of the Jews. So, yes the author makes some important points in helping us to understand the incomprehensible but he does tend to make the same point over and over again and with increasing vehemence, like a man bringing his fist down continually on his desk. Racial hatred is unfortunately a widespread virus that is always awaiting an opportunity to break out. It has no nationality. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. To single out Germans in this manner felt naïve and overly simplistic to me.
not-to-read
September 11, 2016I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. I also find it important that I think I can respect the author before I add his or her book on my must read shelf. I ask myself if I would like to have a conversation in person with that author. In this case, I don't think I would. I probably would get irritated by his generalizations.
My view is based on these reviews in particular :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
But there are many other negative reviews.
My view is based on these reviews in particular :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
But there are many other negative reviews.
November 30, 2010
This book really has pissed people off. Goldhagen takes a very different view of Germans, Nazi or not, who actively helped in brutalizing and murdering Jews. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power.
He does acknowledge other victims of Nazism, but this book is about German anti-semitism and Jews. That is a long enough story. Many critics fault him for not discussing Gypsies and homosexuals, but who has? Probably the same despising of "the Other" that underlies Jew hatred also explains these victims. In any event, he never pretends to be discussing anything except Jew hatred. The history of it in Germany is well-known as is the form it took. Moreover, as he shows, none of the other groups targeted by the Nazis were treated with anything approaching the cruelty towards Jews from infancy on.
Now that I've finished, here is my final assessment:
When the German soldiers who were tried at Nuremburg after World War II said they weren’t guilty because they were “following orders,” I and millions of others believed them. If that were true, then were they guilty? After all, even in America, soldiers had to follow orders.
Later, when the horrors that Stalin visited upon the Russians became known, I understood that was the result of a dictatorship. Since the American Press also called Hitler a dictator, I assumed that Germans, like Russians, had no say in what their government did. As an American, my cognitive model of a dictator was that of a totalitarian government, one in which people had no freedom of choice at all. Indeed, based I now realize on the Stalinist model, I presumed that Germans who protested Hitler’s policies would be imprisoned. Worse, I thought was that their families would be harmed. Just recently I said to a friend, not Jewish, who made a remark about the German people, “Well, Barnaby, I’d like to think I’d have helped out Jews, but if they would punish my family, I don’t think I would have.
Most Americans thought that Stalin’s rule and Hitler’s were pretty much the same: blind obedience or else. However, Daniel Goldhagen shows convincingly that living under Hitler was quite different from living under Stalin, especially if you weren’t Jewish. Hitler wasn’t a dictator as Stalin was. He was voted into office by Germans, who were weary of the democracy that was forced on them after their defeat in 1918. The vote for Hitler was not a slim plurality and it was not a vote by lowlifes and thugs. Germans of all classes not only voted for Hitler, and, as Goldhagen argues, they agreed wholeheartedly with the need to exterminate all the Jews in the world. Goldhagen proves that this idea was rampant in Germany from the early 19th century on. When Nazi troops marched into Austria, the cultured Viennese cheered with glee and immediately dragged the assimilated Austrian Jews out in the streets and made them scrub sidewalks while wearing their finest dress-up clothes. Meanwhile the oh so cultured Aryans laughed and enjoyed the show. No, Hitler wasn’t foisted on these people.
Moreover, Germans could and did protest Hitler’s policies and get them changed. Goldhagen presents data from German records that prove this. Three examples suffice. One was Hitler’s policy of killing mental defectives. The Churches and the people protested and the so-called euthanasia was stopped. Second, when husbands of Aryan women were rounded up for deportation to death camps, the women demonstrated in the streets, even confronting the Gestapo—and their husbands were released and spent the rest of the war in Germany in their homes with their wives. Third, when Poles were brought in as forced laborers, Germans were ordered not to fraternize with them as they were inferior Slavs. However, the Germans refused to obey, and, after a while, the restrictions were lifted.
The most compelling evidence that the author provides is that which shows how much both soldiers and citizens enjoyed what they were doing to Jews. He relies not only on eye witness accounts, but German records and even pictures that they took.
Goldhagen doesn’t specifically mention Now Dwor, Poland, my grandfather’s home town, but in researching my family history website, http://elaineostrachchaika.com, I came across a vivid account of what happened there at
http://www.knecht.ca/history/nowydwor... . If you click on it, you’ll find what a source for hilarity the Jews provided the German soldiers with for five unbelievable, but apparently rollicking years for the cultured Aryans. What delights even the German officers thought up for amusement! These delights involved the most degrading, cruel, foul, and depraved tortures I have ever heard of. This site lends even more credence to Goldhagen’s claims.
In sum, I found Hitler’s Willing Executioners a solidly researched book, based upon the records that the Nazis themselves kept, as well as his careful research into German anti-Semitism.
He does acknowledge other victims of Nazism, but this book is about German anti-semitism and Jews. That is a long enough story. Many critics fault him for not discussing Gypsies and homosexuals, but who has? Probably the same despising of "the Other" that underlies Jew hatred also explains these victims. In any event, he never pretends to be discussing anything except Jew hatred. The history of it in Germany is well-known as is the form it took. Moreover, as he shows, none of the other groups targeted by the Nazis were treated with anything approaching the cruelty towards Jews from infancy on.
Now that I've finished, here is my final assessment:
When the German soldiers who were tried at Nuremburg after World War II said they weren’t guilty because they were “following orders,” I and millions of others believed them. If that were true, then were they guilty? After all, even in America, soldiers had to follow orders.
Later, when the horrors that Stalin visited upon the Russians became known, I understood that was the result of a dictatorship. Since the American Press also called Hitler a dictator, I assumed that Germans, like Russians, had no say in what their government did. As an American, my cognitive model of a dictator was that of a totalitarian government, one in which people had no freedom of choice at all. Indeed, based I now realize on the Stalinist model, I presumed that Germans who protested Hitler’s policies would be imprisoned. Worse, I thought was that their families would be harmed. Just recently I said to a friend, not Jewish, who made a remark about the German people, “Well, Barnaby, I’d like to think I’d have helped out Jews, but if they would punish my family, I don’t think I would have.
Most Americans thought that Stalin’s rule and Hitler’s were pretty much the same: blind obedience or else. However, Daniel Goldhagen shows convincingly that living under Hitler was quite different from living under Stalin, especially if you weren’t Jewish. Hitler wasn’t a dictator as Stalin was. He was voted into office by Germans, who were weary of the democracy that was forced on them after their defeat in 1918. The vote for Hitler was not a slim plurality and it was not a vote by lowlifes and thugs. Germans of all classes not only voted for Hitler, and, as Goldhagen argues, they agreed wholeheartedly with the need to exterminate all the Jews in the world. Goldhagen proves that this idea was rampant in Germany from the early 19th century on. When Nazi troops marched into Austria, the cultured Viennese cheered with glee and immediately dragged the assimilated Austrian Jews out in the streets and made them scrub sidewalks while wearing their finest dress-up clothes. Meanwhile the oh so cultured Aryans laughed and enjoyed the show. No, Hitler wasn’t foisted on these people.
Moreover, Germans could and did protest Hitler’s policies and get them changed. Goldhagen presents data from German records that prove this. Three examples suffice. One was Hitler’s policy of killing mental defectives. The Churches and the people protested and the so-called euthanasia was stopped. Second, when husbands of Aryan women were rounded up for deportation to death camps, the women demonstrated in the streets, even confronting the Gestapo—and their husbands were released and spent the rest of the war in Germany in their homes with their wives. Third, when Poles were brought in as forced laborers, Germans were ordered not to fraternize with them as they were inferior Slavs. However, the Germans refused to obey, and, after a while, the restrictions were lifted.
The most compelling evidence that the author provides is that which shows how much both soldiers and citizens enjoyed what they were doing to Jews. He relies not only on eye witness accounts, but German records and even pictures that they took.
Goldhagen doesn’t specifically mention Now Dwor, Poland, my grandfather’s home town, but in researching my family history website, http://elaineostrachchaika.com, I came across a vivid account of what happened there at
http://www.knecht.ca/history/nowydwor... . If you click on it, you’ll find what a source for hilarity the Jews provided the German soldiers with for five unbelievable, but apparently rollicking years for the cultured Aryans. What delights even the German officers thought up for amusement! These delights involved the most degrading, cruel, foul, and depraved tortures I have ever heard of. This site lends even more credence to Goldhagen’s claims.
In sum, I found Hitler’s Willing Executioners a solidly researched book, based upon the records that the Nazis themselves kept, as well as his careful research into German anti-Semitism.
January 20, 2008
It's not that some of Goldhagen's ideas are wrong. He makes a valuable contribution by recognizing the history of anti-Semitism in Germany history prior to WWII and the Holocaust. However, this ideological goal blinds him to any other rational to the causes of the Holocaust. 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. In doing this Goldhagen makes breathtaking generalities and grossly misinterprets a lot of evidence that would help disprove his idea of German exceptionalism. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc... are all forgotten in this book. 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.
December 3, 2016
I don't feel qualified to review this book about the horrors of the Holocaust.....not because I haven't read much about that unbelievable event but because the author puts forward a very controversial approach to the "why" of the slaughter of the Jews that is at odds with most history. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. His research is impeccable and the arguments that he puts forth are convincing.
What he purports is that the German population as a whole was a willing participant in the Holocaust.....not just the military but the volk whose anti-Semitism was ingrained in their culture. Jews were seen as the enemy and their extermination was seen as just. Long before the Nazis came to power the Jews were degraded, treated cruelly and often murdered. It appeared to make sense to the Germans that Hitler's Final Solution of genocide was acceptable and some actually saw it as a sport. Even near the end of the war when Himmler ordered the people to cease the killings, they continued.
This is a dense and very disturbing book and I am basing my rating on the fact that, besides being well written, the information presented gives the reader much to consider when thinking and studying about the Holocaust, Whether I agree or disagree with the author's conclusions is unimportant.
What he purports is that the German population as a whole was a willing participant in the Holocaust.....not just the military but the volk whose anti-Semitism was ingrained in their culture. Jews were seen as the enemy and their extermination was seen as just. Long before the Nazis came to power the Jews were degraded, treated cruelly and often murdered. It appeared to make sense to the Germans that Hitler's Final Solution of genocide was acceptable and some actually saw it as a sport. Even near the end of the war when Himmler ordered the people to cease the killings, they continued.
This is a dense and very disturbing book and I am basing my rating on the fact that, besides being well written, the information presented gives the reader much to consider when thinking and studying about the Holocaust, Whether I agree or disagree with the author's conclusions is unimportant.
November 24, 2008
This book makes a powerful argument. It's main thesis is that the vast majority of Germans during and before WWII had antisemetic beliefs that were of such power and scope, that they led many ordinary Germans to perpetrate and support the destruction of the Jewish people.
He refutes competing claims such as that the Nazis forced them into killing. He provides many detailed accounts of police squads killing without orders, and sometimes against orders. He demonstrates that men in Police batallion 101 had opportunities to be transferred to non-killing assignments but chose not to. Even as the Germans were near defeat, many male and even female guards at prison camps continued to kill Jews to the very last moment. Himmler had actually commanded them not to do this so he could better negotiate with the Americans. They disobeyed the orders.
Goldhagen's findings are unsettling. It is frighting to believe that a lie can be so powerful as to delude an entire culture. Even the Christian church was largely deceived. However, is this really so hard to accept when we study the history of man? This book contradicts the Disney philosophy that "there is good in everyone, you just have to look deep inside to find it."
Hitler's Willing Executioners is not an easy read. It was Goldhagen's doctoral thesis and it reads like it. There is some repetition and terms used can sometimes be obscure. This is not a popular history. However, there were many times when I could not put it down. The argument breaks new ground and deserves the thorough treatment given to it.
He refutes competing claims such as that the Nazis forced them into killing. He provides many detailed accounts of police squads killing without orders, and sometimes against orders. He demonstrates that men in Police batallion 101 had opportunities to be transferred to non-killing assignments but chose not to. Even as the Germans were near defeat, many male and even female guards at prison camps continued to kill Jews to the very last moment. Himmler had actually commanded them not to do this so he could better negotiate with the Americans. They disobeyed the orders.
Goldhagen's findings are unsettling. It is frighting to believe that a lie can be so powerful as to delude an entire culture. Even the Christian church was largely deceived. However, is this really so hard to accept when we study the history of man? This book contradicts the Disney philosophy that "there is good in everyone, you just have to look deep inside to find it."
Hitler's Willing Executioners is not an easy read. It was Goldhagen's doctoral thesis and it reads like it. There is some repetition and terms used can sometimes be obscure. This is not a popular history. However, there were many times when I could not put it down. The argument breaks new ground and deserves the thorough treatment given to it.
July 17, 2020
I’ve 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? This book finally gave me the answer. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. I learned that since the 1800s Germans had been blaming the Jewish people for the problems of their country and that this blame became even stronger after World War I. Most Germans considered Jews to be parasites and not even human. They felt that if there were no more Jews in Germany, than there would be more of everything for them. When they started invading other nations, they would kill or imprison every Jew they found – men, women and children. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. I know that’s fucked-up, but that’s what was finally explained to me in this book. The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. Of course, they also thought Slavs being put into workhouses and being their slaves was the right thing, too. This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great book. It was. It was very detailed and extensively researched and I’m glad I read it and finally got the answer I’ve been seeking for so long.
November 18, 2008
Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. This author simply hates all Germans and claims they were all just like Hitler. Avoid this book, in my opinion.
Read
September 21, 2020I 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.
UPDATED ... The book is vastly detailed, and not easy to read, but IMO it clearly proves Goldhagen's point that ordinary Germans, conditioned first by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches and then by relentless propaganda, were quite willing to murder Jews in the service, not of the Nazis, but of Germany
I will use examples from the book to have my fictional character Berthold question the other prisoners at Spandau (where Berthold is serving a 20 year sentence) as to their knowledge and reaction to the horrors which constituted the mass murder of "the Jews." The book I'm writing follows A Flood of Evil and A Promise Kept: 1934 to 1946 with the post-war reflections and analysis of Berthold and Anna regarding both Hitler and God.
a few excerpts ...
... the Catholic Church viewed Jews as violating their order of the world ... denigrating and defiling their concept of God and everything they held sacred ... Jews were self-willed agents of evil ... opposed to the fundamental Christian good ... demons bent on desecration and defilement
... Christian Jew-hatred is not based on any familiarity with real Jews ... the need to hate Jews is woven into the fabric of Christianity itself ... the underlying Christian premise was that Jews, who killed Christ, are capable of all heinous acts
... German cruelty and murder of Jews ... served no military necessity (in fact, the opposite) ... had nothing to do with bombing raids on Germany, which the murders of Jews mostly preceded ... but ... because of a set of beliefs that defined Jewish suffering as retribution and created a profound hatred
... Germans killed Jews because they wanted to
UPDATED ... The book is vastly detailed, and not easy to read, but IMO it clearly proves Goldhagen's point that ordinary Germans, conditioned first by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches and then by relentless propaganda, were quite willing to murder Jews in the service, not of the Nazis, but of Germany
I will use examples from the book to have my fictional character Berthold question the other prisoners at Spandau (where Berthold is serving a 20 year sentence) as to their knowledge and reaction to the horrors which constituted the mass murder of "the Jews." The book I'm writing follows A Flood of Evil and A Promise Kept: 1934 to 1946 with the post-war reflections and analysis of Berthold and Anna regarding both Hitler and God.
a few excerpts ...
... the Catholic Church viewed Jews as violating their order of the world ... denigrating and defiling their concept of God and everything they held sacred ... Jews were self-willed agents of evil ... opposed to the fundamental Christian good ... demons bent on desecration and defilement
... Christian Jew-hatred is not based on any familiarity with real Jews ... the need to hate Jews is woven into the fabric of Christianity itself ... the underlying Christian premise was that Jews, who killed Christ, are capable of all heinous acts
... German cruelty and murder of Jews ... served no military necessity (in fact, the opposite) ... had nothing to do with bombing raids on Germany, which the murders of Jews mostly preceded ... but ... because of a set of beliefs that defined Jewish suffering as retribution and created a profound hatred
... Germans killed Jews because they wanted to
July 26, 2007
Terrible, terrible, terrible.
Provocative theory, but one which falls apart throughout his making the argument.
Provocative theory, but one which falls apart throughout his making the argument.
January 10, 2017
Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. I was replying to my friend Mark when I remembered this embarrassment. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES.
He took relationships that were either nonexistent, or at best, spurious, and stretched them out into this "book." It's awful. To suggest that there was something about the German people that somehow perfectly primed them for accepting with open arms Hitler, Nazis, torture, wide-scale murder and genocide, and the contention that the arians were meant to rule the world would be LAUGHABLE had not so many millions suffered and died as a result.
I read this in grad school. I remember wondering then as I still wonder today whether it was written to serve as a polemic. Terrible. Please. Don't waste your time.
He took relationships that were either nonexistent, or at best, spurious, and stretched them out into this "book." It's awful. To suggest that there was something about the German people that somehow perfectly primed them for accepting with open arms Hitler, Nazis, torture, wide-scale murder and genocide, and the contention that the arians were meant to rule the world would be LAUGHABLE had not so many millions suffered and died as a result.
I read this in grad school. I remember wondering then as I still wonder today whether it was written to serve as a polemic. Terrible. Please. Don't waste your time.
May 29, 2017
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. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused.
It’s a shame such a provocative theme got taken up by so limited a talent. The text is really just 483 pages, including three appendices, plus 130 pages of often important notes that readers will want to consult. Most of these notes should have been folded into the text, but okay. I used two bookmarks.
Both the author and his editor ought to be detained by the first English professor who catches them and given a stern lecture. The basic fault in the text is the failure to render an academic thesis in accessible prose. The less annoying fault is that such a loaded subject needs understatement, yet the author resorts to exclamation points and italics.
Now to the subject. Nobody wants to hold today’s Germans collectively guilty of a crime and in turn victimize them, so discussing the role of Germans in the Holocaust has been tricky. Standard accounts explain the annihilation with little reference to the perpetrators. I often wondered why Jews were never put to work at a time when Germany had a labor shortage of several million and the outcome of the war hung in the balance. Something didn’t add up.
This is the niche Goldhagen steps into. The author’s claim is that the Holocaust was common knowledge to Germans, wildly popular and based on a hatred radically unlike that found in all other times and places. He argues with a persuasive methodology. He looks at three things: police batallions, work camps, and the death marches in the Spring of 1945. Why he chooses these comes clear in the reading. The study of these aspects of the extermination supports his thesis.
Many people reject this idea. The event is so horrific that people now simply can’t bring themselves to think it could have enjoyed widespread support. But Goldhagen can be wrong only if his methodology is mistaken. So we might ask what his methods really prove about the actual source of anti-Semitism. What about the socialists? Socialism in Germany did not imply any sense of brotherhood with Jews, the author claims. Their nationalist turn at the start of World War I seems to bear him out.
Communists, who did disavow anti-Semitism, garnered about a sixth of 1932 vote. But although Goldhagen may be mistaken in hinting that up to 95% of Germans were anti-Semitic, a figure closer to 85% scarcely disposes of the problem. Nor does a 1946 survey of German attitudes, in which up to 80% of Germans espoused anti-Semitic beliefs, even after seeing the consequences. How is that?
We forget the grip that race theory had on the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the impetus given it by an early misreading of Darwin. The milieu was made worse by the volkisch substratum of German culture in the century before Hitler. The historian George Mosse describes the transmogrification of race by the German writer Wilhelm Riehl:
Above all there was the Jew, who by his very nature was restless. Although the Jew belonged to a Volk, it occupied no specific territory and was consequently doomed to rootlessness. These elements of the population dominated the large cities, which they had erected, according to Riehl, in their own image to represent their particular landscape. However, this was an artificial domain, and in contrast to serene rootedness, everything it contained, including the inhabitants, was in continuous motion. The big city and the proletariat seemed to fuse into an ominous colossus which was endangering the realm of the Volk …
This came decades before Nazism. The author argues that this view became received wisdom throughout German society. The sheer ferocity of the extermination stemmed from a terror of Jews, seen as an evil, diabolically clever race. But even this was not enough to bring on the Holocaust, which, Goldhagen tells us, required that two other rather unlikely events transpire as well. His argument for this confluence of three factors is his unique contribution to Holocaust studies.
The book’s characterization of Germans matches Anthony Beevor’s historical account, The Fall of Berlin 1945. The defeated Germans, Beevor notes, complained that Allied tactics had brought communism deep into Europe and America’s entry into the war was gratuitous. Beevor cites these among several examples of what he calls “the fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect” by which Germans reasoned. The same pattern comes across in Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
To pin responsibility on the German people as individuals has a sexy cachet in today's culture of total self-responsibility. The confluence of factors by which the author explains the Holocaust, however, does not involve the personal attitudes of Germans and actually throws into doubt the relevance of his methodology in establishing cause.
What the author ignores is the social aspect of the Holocaust, its status as the product of a particular socioeconomic structure. Goldhagen's quest to tag individuals for their actions deflects attention from the context in which fascism arose and neglects the fact that it came to power only over the dead bodies of thousands of Germans. The author takes dishonest advantage of the fact that the aforementioned communists, the main obstacle to anti-Semitism, were exterminated in the process that led to the Holocaust. No, dead men tell no tales; nor does Goldhagen speak for them.
The author notes Germany’s formal disavowal of anti-Semitism. Compare Germany’s accounting of its crimes with Japan’s and one is impressed by how hard it is for any nation to admit to such a wrong. Better yet, compare it to the United States, which, 100 years after slavery, still nurtured dreams of ridding itself of blacks. Even Northern abolitionists before the Civil War were almost universally racist. The inferiority of blacks was taken as fact, a kind of volkisch Americana. All these ideas have their source in social systems that foster the notion that people are manifestly unequal -- and should be treated so.
The effort of Germans to redeem the past sets an example for people in all countries. We might even consider this the bookend to the Holocaust insofar as it, too, has been a particularly German project. People and cultures do change, and modern Germany, at least until recently, has shown us those conditions can change for the better. But the return of militarism in Germany and, with it, historical falsification by the likes of Jorg Barberowski at Humboldt University, throws attention once again not on individuals, but on the nature and function of German capitalism.
.
It’s a shame such a provocative theme got taken up by so limited a talent. The text is really just 483 pages, including three appendices, plus 130 pages of often important notes that readers will want to consult. Most of these notes should have been folded into the text, but okay. I used two bookmarks.
Both the author and his editor ought to be detained by the first English professor who catches them and given a stern lecture. The basic fault in the text is the failure to render an academic thesis in accessible prose. The less annoying fault is that such a loaded subject needs understatement, yet the author resorts to exclamation points and italics.
Now to the subject. Nobody wants to hold today’s Germans collectively guilty of a crime and in turn victimize them, so discussing the role of Germans in the Holocaust has been tricky. Standard accounts explain the annihilation with little reference to the perpetrators. I often wondered why Jews were never put to work at a time when Germany had a labor shortage of several million and the outcome of the war hung in the balance. Something didn’t add up.
This is the niche Goldhagen steps into. The author’s claim is that the Holocaust was common knowledge to Germans, wildly popular and based on a hatred radically unlike that found in all other times and places. He argues with a persuasive methodology. He looks at three things: police batallions, work camps, and the death marches in the Spring of 1945. Why he chooses these comes clear in the reading. The study of these aspects of the extermination supports his thesis.
Many people reject this idea. The event is so horrific that people now simply can’t bring themselves to think it could have enjoyed widespread support. But Goldhagen can be wrong only if his methodology is mistaken. So we might ask what his methods really prove about the actual source of anti-Semitism. What about the socialists? Socialism in Germany did not imply any sense of brotherhood with Jews, the author claims. Their nationalist turn at the start of World War I seems to bear him out.
Communists, who did disavow anti-Semitism, garnered about a sixth of 1932 vote. But although Goldhagen may be mistaken in hinting that up to 95% of Germans were anti-Semitic, a figure closer to 85% scarcely disposes of the problem. Nor does a 1946 survey of German attitudes, in which up to 80% of Germans espoused anti-Semitic beliefs, even after seeing the consequences. How is that?
We forget the grip that race theory had on the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the impetus given it by an early misreading of Darwin. The milieu was made worse by the volkisch substratum of German culture in the century before Hitler. The historian George Mosse describes the transmogrification of race by the German writer Wilhelm Riehl:
Above all there was the Jew, who by his very nature was restless. Although the Jew belonged to a Volk, it occupied no specific territory and was consequently doomed to rootlessness. These elements of the population dominated the large cities, which they had erected, according to Riehl, in their own image to represent their particular landscape. However, this was an artificial domain, and in contrast to serene rootedness, everything it contained, including the inhabitants, was in continuous motion. The big city and the proletariat seemed to fuse into an ominous colossus which was endangering the realm of the Volk …
This came decades before Nazism. The author argues that this view became received wisdom throughout German society. The sheer ferocity of the extermination stemmed from a terror of Jews, seen as an evil, diabolically clever race. But even this was not enough to bring on the Holocaust, which, Goldhagen tells us, required that two other rather unlikely events transpire as well. His argument for this confluence of three factors is his unique contribution to Holocaust studies.
The book’s characterization of Germans matches Anthony Beevor’s historical account, The Fall of Berlin 1945. The defeated Germans, Beevor notes, complained that Allied tactics had brought communism deep into Europe and America’s entry into the war was gratuitous. Beevor cites these among several examples of what he calls “the fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect” by which Germans reasoned. The same pattern comes across in Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
To pin responsibility on the German people as individuals has a sexy cachet in today's culture of total self-responsibility. The confluence of factors by which the author explains the Holocaust, however, does not involve the personal attitudes of Germans and actually throws into doubt the relevance of his methodology in establishing cause.
What the author ignores is the social aspect of the Holocaust, its status as the product of a particular socioeconomic structure. Goldhagen's quest to tag individuals for their actions deflects attention from the context in which fascism arose and neglects the fact that it came to power only over the dead bodies of thousands of Germans. The author takes dishonest advantage of the fact that the aforementioned communists, the main obstacle to anti-Semitism, were exterminated in the process that led to the Holocaust. No, dead men tell no tales; nor does Goldhagen speak for them.
The author notes Germany’s formal disavowal of anti-Semitism. Compare Germany’s accounting of its crimes with Japan’s and one is impressed by how hard it is for any nation to admit to such a wrong. Better yet, compare it to the United States, which, 100 years after slavery, still nurtured dreams of ridding itself of blacks. Even Northern abolitionists before the Civil War were almost universally racist. The inferiority of blacks was taken as fact, a kind of volkisch Americana. All these ideas have their source in social systems that foster the notion that people are manifestly unequal -- and should be treated so.
The effort of Germans to redeem the past sets an example for people in all countries. We might even consider this the bookend to the Holocaust insofar as it, too, has been a particularly German project. People and cultures do change, and modern Germany, at least until recently, has shown us those conditions can change for the better. But the return of militarism in Germany and, with it, historical falsification by the likes of Jorg Barberowski at Humboldt University, throws attention once again not on individuals, but on the nature and function of German capitalism.
.
March 11, 2012
There’s been so much written about this controversial book that I’m sure I don’t have too many details to add that haven’t been covered before … so instead I’ll gather some thoughts that have been mulling around in my mind in the week since I finished reading it.
First, I find this an important book in that it reminds us that this period in history – and the actions of the Germans - shouldn’t be blithely discounted with the standard “it happened because of the economic climate of the time.” As the mother of a high-schooler, I heard this as the primary lesson covered in their history class and it disturbed me greatly. As with most issues, I believe it’s more complex than that.
Do I believe, especially after reviewing some of Mr. Goldhagen’s examples, that the common German people were more culpable than we speak aloud? Sure. It’s a disturbing thought. It should be. But before we jump on the condemnation bandwagon, I don’t believe this is due to some genetic marker inherent only in Germans (and I say this not because I’m partially of German extraction). Nor do I believe that dire economic times alone are enough to trigger such extremely sadistic treatment.
I believe it was an historic “perfect storm” that included economics, bigotry and a charismatic leader, and possibly other things I can’t think of at the moment.
Was there already an active bigotry against Jews throughout Germany? Sure. Throughout most of the world, in fact. Most Christian faiths at that time were disdainful of other Christian faiths, so it’s no great leap to acknowledge that they were particularly intolerant of Jews or any other non-Christian faith.
And, as history has shown in instances such as Jim Jones’ Jonestown massacre, a charismatic leader can persuade large numbers of people to do appalling things and feel righteous about doing them. This is particularly true of religions, which have a tradition of creating an elitism among believers by convincing them that they’re superior to nonbelievers who may be lesser (even evil) human beings. Sometimes they even convince the believers that their souls are in jeopardy should they not eradicate nonbelievers. This didn’t begin or end with the Germans of WWII.
I won’t even start in on the very human condition that makes these events possible (although, should you doubt that, I suggest you revisit “The Lord of the Flies”).
I don’t disagree with those who state that Mr. Goldhagen is unable to be impartial with his research, or that the book is difficult to read. There were many times that I found the writing repetitive and pedantic.
But I also find it an important book to read because, as I look around our globe, the air is easily stirred and there are “perfect storms” gathering all around us. Even among us. We need constant reminders of what all of us are capable of doing given the right situation. For that reason, I’ve given the book high stars and recommend that it’s worth reading.
First, I find this an important book in that it reminds us that this period in history – and the actions of the Germans - shouldn’t be blithely discounted with the standard “it happened because of the economic climate of the time.” As the mother of a high-schooler, I heard this as the primary lesson covered in their history class and it disturbed me greatly. As with most issues, I believe it’s more complex than that.
Do I believe, especially after reviewing some of Mr. Goldhagen’s examples, that the common German people were more culpable than we speak aloud? Sure. It’s a disturbing thought. It should be. But before we jump on the condemnation bandwagon, I don’t believe this is due to some genetic marker inherent only in Germans (and I say this not because I’m partially of German extraction). Nor do I believe that dire economic times alone are enough to trigger such extremely sadistic treatment.
I believe it was an historic “perfect storm” that included economics, bigotry and a charismatic leader, and possibly other things I can’t think of at the moment.
Was there already an active bigotry against Jews throughout Germany? Sure. Throughout most of the world, in fact. Most Christian faiths at that time were disdainful of other Christian faiths, so it’s no great leap to acknowledge that they were particularly intolerant of Jews or any other non-Christian faith.
And, as history has shown in instances such as Jim Jones’ Jonestown massacre, a charismatic leader can persuade large numbers of people to do appalling things and feel righteous about doing them. This is particularly true of religions, which have a tradition of creating an elitism among believers by convincing them that they’re superior to nonbelievers who may be lesser (even evil) human beings. Sometimes they even convince the believers that their souls are in jeopardy should they not eradicate nonbelievers. This didn’t begin or end with the Germans of WWII.
I won’t even start in on the very human condition that makes these events possible (although, should you doubt that, I suggest you revisit “The Lord of the Flies”).
I don’t disagree with those who state that Mr. Goldhagen is unable to be impartial with his research, or that the book is difficult to read. There were many times that I found the writing repetitive and pedantic.
But I also find it an important book to read because, as I look around our globe, the air is easily stirred and there are “perfect storms” gathering all around us. Even among us. We need constant reminders of what all of us are capable of doing given the right situation. For that reason, I’ve given the book high stars and recommend that it’s worth reading.
December 16, 2014
I suppose I take this book personally, given that my grandparents were German and in Germany during the Holocaust - they weren't Nazis (my very existence is proof of that), they were simply trying to survive, and I think there's a difference between that, and actively aiding genocide. I don't think that Goldhagen even allows for this. 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 of...something. How do you fight against this kind of madness when you are rendered powerless by the state, be it by fear, by law, or...? 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?
I very little hope that humanity is going to see this century through without destroying itself.
I very little hope that humanity is going to see this century through without destroying itself.
March 27, 2008
It always amazes me that people, who have constructed their own paradigms, and have worked vigorously at maintaining it, can ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary. At most Goldhagen provides an explanation as to why people do the things they do regardless of their social or economic background. At worse Goldhagen brings to light one possibility in explaining how one, if not the most learned and advanced country in the world could fall from grace in a matter of a few years of Financial despair. At the same time it should be understood that it was the created genus of Hitler and his party in capturing with total control such a country in the first six months as Chancellor of Germany. 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!”
April 24, 2019
Some church leaders have wondered aloud why there has been no nationwide, popular outrage over the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug personalities (addicts, pushers, drug lords) in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's so-called "War on Drugs.". I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. It is not at all new.
First, is the identification of these drug personalities as an evil, powerful enemy of the State. Something that threatens the very survival of the nation. President Duterte had estimated the drug addicts’ numbers to be around three to four million which he claimed would surely multiply rapidly to millions more unless stopped. He said he is the country’s last chance to prevent this certain catastrophe as he spoke of the very near possibility of the Philippines turning into a narco-state, controlled by narco-politicians. It is a very grim picture indeed.
Second, is the DEHUMANIZATION of this enemy. One time he had asked, in a serious tone, if these addicts are “still human.” He also said once that a person who had been an addict for two years had no more functioning brain to speak of and is already completely “hopeless.” He warns addicts not to leave their houses anymore, though there had been several instances of these extrajudicial killings done inside the houses of the victims, some of them shot to death while sleeping.
That these drug personalities are perceived to be no longer human, or had become SUB-HUMANS, is wittingly or unwittingly suggested in the language of those who had expressed approval of these killings, some of them directly (“kill them all!”) and some indirectly (“let’s support this war on drugs!”). Netizens who applaud President Duterte’s method, for example, label these drug personalities as “mga patapon” (useless, good-for-nothing), animals, criminals and the scourge of society. One time, in the context of the then coming Miss Universe contest in the Philippines, Senator Sotto said that DESPITE the daily killings, the Philippines is a safe country. One would wonder how a country afflicted with DAILY unsolved murders by the dozens could possibly be “safe,” but if one would consider that the victims are sub-human entities with no rights, then the statement of the senator makes perfect sense. The society is indeed safe, safe for people, because those falling victims to this violence are more just like stray dogs being put to permanent sleep.
President Duterte had warned several times: “If you destroy my country, I will kill you.” The people had long shared this world-view of drug personalities destroying the country and of them already beyond the clutches of normality that they had become less of a human being than the upright citizens of this country. This, even before President Duterte stood in the limelight of national politics.
This is the mindset that has gripped the nation and it is eerily similar to the anti-semitism so very popular and strong in Germany in the 1930’s which catapulted Adolf Hitler into power precisely under that platform. The drug personalities in the Philippines today were the Jews in Germany and Europe during Hitler’s time. International Jewry was then likewise perceived to be a powerful force which had brought, and will continue to bring, untold misery to the German nation and will usher its complete destruction unless eliminated. Similarly, this prevalent anti-semitism was also based on the widely-held conviction that the Jews are sub-humans who can, or OUGHT to, be removed from the face of the earth. Anti-semitism was very strong in Germany, but was not confined there. The American General George S. Patton, for example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, had expressed the view that Jews are “lower than animals…a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.”
Some friends of mine had opined that the comparison is way off because, they reasoned out, the Jews were “innocent” while the drug personalities we have now (including the addicts) are “guilty.” But I merely point out to them: during those times, the Jews were looked down upon as scoundrels, criminals and as guilty as hell, possibly in much worse way Filipinos consider the drug personalities as heinous criminals now.
Some church leaders are speaking out now against these extrajudicial killings but you don’t see any of the great churches here in the Philippines using their economic, moral and political clout to the fullest to stop these killings, possibly stymied by President Duterte’s continued popularity. Not even all the Philippine churches are speaking out. This was similar to what had happened in Germany during the Nazi era:
“The German churches provide a crucial case in the study of the breadth, character, and power of modern German eliminationist antisemitism, because their leadership and membership could have been expected, for variety of reasons, to have been among the people in Germany most resistant to it. The churches retained a large measure of their institutional independence, they contained many people who regarding other matters harbored non-Nazi and anti-Nazi sympathies, and their governing doctrines and humanistic traditions clashed glaringly with central precepts of the eliminationist project. The abundant evidence about their leadership’s and membership’s conceptions of Jews and stances towards the eliminationist persecution merely confirms and, because it is a crucial case, further strengthens greatly the conclusion that among the German people, the Nazified conception of Jews and support for the eliminationist project was extremely widespread, a virtual axiom.
“Not only the churches and their leadership but also…virtually the entire German elite—intellectual, professional, religious, political, and military—embraced eliminationist antisemitism wholeheartedly as its own. The German elite and ordinary Germans alike failed to express dissent from the Nazi conception of Jewry in 1933, 1938, 1941, and 1944, although the nature and statue of the Jews was one of the most relentlessly discussed subjects in the German public sphere. No evidence suggests that any but an insignificant scattering of Germans harbored opposition to the eliminationist program, save for its most brutally wanton aspects. Even violent anti-Nazi diatribes typically did not dwell on the eliminationist anti-semitism or measures as reasons for hating and opposing the Nazis. Germans not only failed to indicate that they believed the (by non-Nazi standards) criminal treatment of the Jews to be unjust. They not only failed to end help to their beleaguered countrymen, let alone foreign Jews. But even worse for the Jews, so many Germans also willingly aided the eliminationist enterprise. They did so by taking initiative to further it, by attacking Jews verbally and physically, or by hastening the process of excluding and isolating them from German society and thereby accelerating the process of turning Jews into socially dead beings and German Jewry into a leprous community.”(“Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)
Another common thing between Germany then and the Philippines now is the concept of collective guilt. Sure, some drug personalities before had committed rape, murder and other barbaric crimes which, to the outraged citizens, truly deserved the harshest punishment. But those being extrajudicially killed now are obviously not those who did these crimes of long ago, some of them having been already meted out the punishment they deserved. The drug personalities being targeted now for execution, sans trial, are deemed deserving of their fate not because of personal guilt but merely guilt by association. This was similar to the Holocaust where people were killed regardless of nationality, religion, political belief or personal history but simply because of their Jewish blood. That was why even babies and young Jewish children were shot or gassed in the Nazi crematoria.
Hitler was likewise a much beloved leader, who took power via a democratic election and was considered as Father (Tatay) to the German nation. To the Germans, he was a saviour, almost god-like, that they could lovingly write about him like this:
“…For years we have been following with the greatest inner sympathy and approval the uplifting work of Adolf Hitler, this German man who, filled with ardent love for his fatherland, is sacrificing his life for his idea of a purified, united, national greater Germany, who has set himself the hazardous task of opening the eyes of the working class to the enemy within and to Marxism and its consequences, who as no other has managed to bring people together in brotherly reconciliation, has been able to do away with the almost insuperable class hatred, who has restored to thousands upon thousands of despairing people the joyous hope of a reviving, dignified fatherland and a firm belief in it. His personality has made on us too, as anyone who comes into contact with him, a deep, moving impression, and we have understood how such s simple, physically delicate man is capable of exercising such power. This power is founded on the moral strength and purity of this man, who without ceasing stands up for an idea he has seen to be right, which he is trying with the fervour and humility of divine vocation to realise. Such a man, who is standing up so directly for good, must inspire, electrify people, animate them with selfless love and devotion for his person. I freely admit that we too are under the spell of this personality, that we too, who stood by him in happy days, will remain faithful to him now too in his hour of need.” (“Twilight of the Wagners: the Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy” by Gottfried Wagner).
What we see now, for me, is but History repeating itself. Unfortunately it has decide to resurrect here, in our clueless nation which is seemingly condemned to suffer the unlearned lessons of the past.
First, is the identification of these drug personalities as an evil, powerful enemy of the State. Something that threatens the very survival of the nation. President Duterte had estimated the drug addicts’ numbers to be around three to four million which he claimed would surely multiply rapidly to millions more unless stopped. He said he is the country’s last chance to prevent this certain catastrophe as he spoke of the very near possibility of the Philippines turning into a narco-state, controlled by narco-politicians. It is a very grim picture indeed.
Second, is the DEHUMANIZATION of this enemy. One time he had asked, in a serious tone, if these addicts are “still human.” He also said once that a person who had been an addict for two years had no more functioning brain to speak of and is already completely “hopeless.” He warns addicts not to leave their houses anymore, though there had been several instances of these extrajudicial killings done inside the houses of the victims, some of them shot to death while sleeping.
That these drug personalities are perceived to be no longer human, or had become SUB-HUMANS, is wittingly or unwittingly suggested in the language of those who had expressed approval of these killings, some of them directly (“kill them all!”) and some indirectly (“let’s support this war on drugs!”). Netizens who applaud President Duterte’s method, for example, label these drug personalities as “mga patapon” (useless, good-for-nothing), animals, criminals and the scourge of society. One time, in the context of the then coming Miss Universe contest in the Philippines, Senator Sotto said that DESPITE the daily killings, the Philippines is a safe country. One would wonder how a country afflicted with DAILY unsolved murders by the dozens could possibly be “safe,” but if one would consider that the victims are sub-human entities with no rights, then the statement of the senator makes perfect sense. The society is indeed safe, safe for people, because those falling victims to this violence are more just like stray dogs being put to permanent sleep.
President Duterte had warned several times: “If you destroy my country, I will kill you.” The people had long shared this world-view of drug personalities destroying the country and of them already beyond the clutches of normality that they had become less of a human being than the upright citizens of this country. This, even before President Duterte stood in the limelight of national politics.
This is the mindset that has gripped the nation and it is eerily similar to the anti-semitism so very popular and strong in Germany in the 1930’s which catapulted Adolf Hitler into power precisely under that platform. The drug personalities in the Philippines today were the Jews in Germany and Europe during Hitler’s time. International Jewry was then likewise perceived to be a powerful force which had brought, and will continue to bring, untold misery to the German nation and will usher its complete destruction unless eliminated. Similarly, this prevalent anti-semitism was also based on the widely-held conviction that the Jews are sub-humans who can, or OUGHT to, be removed from the face of the earth. Anti-semitism was very strong in Germany, but was not confined there. The American General George S. Patton, for example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, had expressed the view that Jews are “lower than animals…a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.”
Some friends of mine had opined that the comparison is way off because, they reasoned out, the Jews were “innocent” while the drug personalities we have now (including the addicts) are “guilty.” But I merely point out to them: during those times, the Jews were looked down upon as scoundrels, criminals and as guilty as hell, possibly in much worse way Filipinos consider the drug personalities as heinous criminals now.
Some church leaders are speaking out now against these extrajudicial killings but you don’t see any of the great churches here in the Philippines using their economic, moral and political clout to the fullest to stop these killings, possibly stymied by President Duterte’s continued popularity. Not even all the Philippine churches are speaking out. This was similar to what had happened in Germany during the Nazi era:
“The German churches provide a crucial case in the study of the breadth, character, and power of modern German eliminationist antisemitism, because their leadership and membership could have been expected, for variety of reasons, to have been among the people in Germany most resistant to it. The churches retained a large measure of their institutional independence, they contained many people who regarding other matters harbored non-Nazi and anti-Nazi sympathies, and their governing doctrines and humanistic traditions clashed glaringly with central precepts of the eliminationist project. The abundant evidence about their leadership’s and membership’s conceptions of Jews and stances towards the eliminationist persecution merely confirms and, because it is a crucial case, further strengthens greatly the conclusion that among the German people, the Nazified conception of Jews and support for the eliminationist project was extremely widespread, a virtual axiom.
“Not only the churches and their leadership but also…virtually the entire German elite—intellectual, professional, religious, political, and military—embraced eliminationist antisemitism wholeheartedly as its own. The German elite and ordinary Germans alike failed to express dissent from the Nazi conception of Jewry in 1933, 1938, 1941, and 1944, although the nature and statue of the Jews was one of the most relentlessly discussed subjects in the German public sphere. No evidence suggests that any but an insignificant scattering of Germans harbored opposition to the eliminationist program, save for its most brutally wanton aspects. Even violent anti-Nazi diatribes typically did not dwell on the eliminationist anti-semitism or measures as reasons for hating and opposing the Nazis. Germans not only failed to indicate that they believed the (by non-Nazi standards) criminal treatment of the Jews to be unjust. They not only failed to end help to their beleaguered countrymen, let alone foreign Jews. But even worse for the Jews, so many Germans also willingly aided the eliminationist enterprise. They did so by taking initiative to further it, by attacking Jews verbally and physically, or by hastening the process of excluding and isolating them from German society and thereby accelerating the process of turning Jews into socially dead beings and German Jewry into a leprous community.”(“Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)
Another common thing between Germany then and the Philippines now is the concept of collective guilt. Sure, some drug personalities before had committed rape, murder and other barbaric crimes which, to the outraged citizens, truly deserved the harshest punishment. But those being extrajudicially killed now are obviously not those who did these crimes of long ago, some of them having been already meted out the punishment they deserved. The drug personalities being targeted now for execution, sans trial, are deemed deserving of their fate not because of personal guilt but merely guilt by association. This was similar to the Holocaust where people were killed regardless of nationality, religion, political belief or personal history but simply because of their Jewish blood. That was why even babies and young Jewish children were shot or gassed in the Nazi crematoria.
Hitler was likewise a much beloved leader, who took power via a democratic election and was considered as Father (Tatay) to the German nation. To the Germans, he was a saviour, almost god-like, that they could lovingly write about him like this:
“…For years we have been following with the greatest inner sympathy and approval the uplifting work of Adolf Hitler, this German man who, filled with ardent love for his fatherland, is sacrificing his life for his idea of a purified, united, national greater Germany, who has set himself the hazardous task of opening the eyes of the working class to the enemy within and to Marxism and its consequences, who as no other has managed to bring people together in brotherly reconciliation, has been able to do away with the almost insuperable class hatred, who has restored to thousands upon thousands of despairing people the joyous hope of a reviving, dignified fatherland and a firm belief in it. His personality has made on us too, as anyone who comes into contact with him, a deep, moving impression, and we have understood how such s simple, physically delicate man is capable of exercising such power. This power is founded on the moral strength and purity of this man, who without ceasing stands up for an idea he has seen to be right, which he is trying with the fervour and humility of divine vocation to realise. Such a man, who is standing up so directly for good, must inspire, electrify people, animate them with selfless love and devotion for his person. I freely admit that we too are under the spell of this personality, that we too, who stood by him in happy days, will remain faithful to him now too in his hour of need.” (“Twilight of the Wagners: the Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy” by Gottfried Wagner).
What we see now, for me, is but History repeating itself. Unfortunately it has decide to resurrect here, in our clueless nation which is seemingly condemned to suffer the unlearned lessons of the past.
October 30, 2017
The author makes a strong case for the proposition that the mass of gentile Germans (and Austrians) held very strongly hostile attitudes towards their Jewish fellow citizens and Jews in general. Drawing evidence from a wide array of sources, but especially from Police Battalions primarily made up from German males raised before the Nazi seizure of power, he demonstrates how gratuitously cruel and vicious ordinary people were towards what amounted to only a tiny minority of their population and how, even when SS head Himmler ordered the cessation of such mistreatment, many maintained the same levels of violence when the war was obviously lost and nothing objectively might be gained--nothing except, from their psychotic viewpoint, a further ridding of pestiferous vermin.
The book begins with some historical background, showing how widespread anti-Jewish beliefs were throughout Christendom. Believing them to be, on the basis of a reading of one gospel, the killers of Jesus, the traditional view was that Jews, in failing to repent by conversion to the new revelation in Christ, were an obstinate people at odds with God. More recently, however, the Nazis and other right-wing groups there and elsewhere, adapting Darwin to the 'science' of eugenics, recognized the Jews as a pernicious race, a native evil opposed to the instrinsically superior Aryans. Although often represented as inferior in all respects for propagandistic purposes, the real inferiority of the Jews was moral. In matters of business (especially banking), politics (witness the Bolsheviks), and a certain kind of cunning intelligence, Jews were worthy--and dangerous--opponents.
While an important work, one that future students of the racial policies and practices of Nazism must deal with, 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' is not without flaws. It reads like the worked-over dissertation it is, being dry and long-winded. There is a great deal of repetition. The focus on Germany and gentile Germans is so narrow as to encourage the, in my mind, mistaken belief that such evils are peculiar to them. One thinks, for instance, of contemporaneous events in Croatia. Going back a ways, one thinks of common 'American' beliefs as regards black Africans and the First Peoples of these continents.
Beyond mere scholarship, the point of such research should be to effectuate a raised consciousness in its students. Narrowly focusing on the Germans of a bygone era too easily lends itself to the continuation of the projection of evil unto others. The point should be to reveal the potential of evil within our own selves and how our governments, our schools and temples manipulate, if not instill, our prejudices.
The book begins with some historical background, showing how widespread anti-Jewish beliefs were throughout Christendom. Believing them to be, on the basis of a reading of one gospel, the killers of Jesus, the traditional view was that Jews, in failing to repent by conversion to the new revelation in Christ, were an obstinate people at odds with God. More recently, however, the Nazis and other right-wing groups there and elsewhere, adapting Darwin to the 'science' of eugenics, recognized the Jews as a pernicious race, a native evil opposed to the instrinsically superior Aryans. Although often represented as inferior in all respects for propagandistic purposes, the real inferiority of the Jews was moral. In matters of business (especially banking), politics (witness the Bolsheviks), and a certain kind of cunning intelligence, Jews were worthy--and dangerous--opponents.
While an important work, one that future students of the racial policies and practices of Nazism must deal with, 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' is not without flaws. It reads like the worked-over dissertation it is, being dry and long-winded. There is a great deal of repetition. The focus on Germany and gentile Germans is so narrow as to encourage the, in my mind, mistaken belief that such evils are peculiar to them. One thinks, for instance, of contemporaneous events in Croatia. Going back a ways, one thinks of common 'American' beliefs as regards black Africans and the First Peoples of these continents.
Beyond mere scholarship, the point of such research should be to effectuate a raised consciousness in its students. Narrowly focusing on the Germans of a bygone era too easily lends itself to the continuation of the projection of evil unto others. The point should be to reveal the potential of evil within our own selves and how our governments, our schools and temples manipulate, if not instill, our prejudices.
June 3, 2016
I read this years ago and was shocked at the implications of the author's premise, although not unwilling to accept it. Nevertheless, this author has been accused of twisting sources to support a point (see Lewis Weinstein's review of Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning on Goodreads), and that makes me wonder about the credibility of his statements here. Other books, such as Browning's Ordinary Men, make the possibilities that Goldhagen describes all too likely for some Nazi-era Germans, although they were not the universal response of the Germans to the Holocaust. Some people actively tried to oppose the Nazi regime and its actions and to help the persecuted Jews; others saw what was going on and knew it was wrong, but were (in many cases justifiably) afraid to act lest they lose all that they loved or valued. It is easy to be judgmental from the safe harbor of twenty-first century America, but the terrors and horror of the time are something we can only indirectly know.
January 19, 2025
The would-be book is marred by extensively superficial research and exceptionally poor scholarship.
Comparison: Please reference A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.
The editor of the libearl German newspaper, Die Zeit, Marion Countess Dönhoff wrote a detailed and balanced review of the book: "The decidedly misleading nature of Goldhagen’s book Hitler's Willing Executioners.”
Marion Countess Dönhoff was involved in the nearly successful July 1944 bomb assassination attempt on Hitler's life. Whereby Colonel Klaus Stauffenberg and co-conspirators were all executed thereafter, Countess Dönhoff was one of only three who eluded capture.
The other two surviving conspirators were Philipp v. Boeselager and Ewald v. Kleist Schmenzin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewald-H...)
Review of the Goldhagen book Marion Countess Dönhoff – excerpt (translation from German)
https://www.zeit.de/1996/37/goldhage....
I am of the opinion that DIE ZEIT has made far too much fuss about the book. The questionable methods are used to support a theory, which, it seems to me, has not been proven by the author himself.
Goldhagen's questionable method: he starts from the "final solution" i.e. the Holocaust, and rewinds the causal chain, whereby the "final solution” automatically remains present until all prehistoric times. In this way, he proves that "the whole of German society has always shared Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism of extermination."
He claims that the enforcers were representative of the German population in their composition. He does not say whether his statistics include the Austrians, who made up a third of the SS extermination units and commanded four of the main death camps, as Paul Johnson writes in the Washington Post.
(Please reference The Holocaust by Paul Johnson)
If this is the argument, one has to wonder what such a passionately anti-Semitic people would have done if Hitler had fallen on the Western Front in 1917 - where he had been wounded? An authoritarian regime may well have been established in Germany, as in Spain or Italy, but certainly not Hitler's National Socialism.
Goldhagen's questionable thesis: he says that the Holocaust was a "German national project.” The Germans were not only anti-Semitic in the usual sense, they also paid homage to a special anti-Semitism, "extermination anti-Semitism.” This, as he calls it, "eliminatory” anti-Semitism had the goal of eradicating the Jews.
If this kind of racism is in the genes of the Germans, as Goldhagen apparently believes, then one wonders what may have happened to these genes after 1945, because, as he admits, the Germans changed completely.
Of course, the author of the book takes the precaution of defending himself against the accusation that he has postulated a collective guilt of the Germans ("I categorically reject the idea of collective guilt"); but the talk of the "whole people” or "all Germans” refers to nothing other than a collective. Goldhagen also claims: "The entire German elite wholeheartedly embraced the anti-Semitism of extermination.” Another collective! Goldhagen cites two pieces of evidence for the Germans' willingness not only to tolerate the brutal massacres, but also to approve of them with relish.
The first piece of evidence: the people cheered Hitler, even after the "Kristallnacht” in November 1938. This can only surprise someone who views the complete period monocausally in terms of the Holocaust. In fact, people were by no means cheering because of the discrimination against Jews - the "Kristallnacht” in particular was disapproved of by many. Rather, Hitler's great, enduring, and acclaimed myth was based on the rare combination of success and terror.
Success: the elimination of unemployment, the annexation of Austria, the return of the Sudetenland, the victory over France, which believed itself safe behind the Maginot Line. Under these circumstances, the majority of the people regarded the seizure of power as a national uprising worthy of gratitude.
Terror: immediately after the seizure of power, 4,000 communist functionaries were arrested; in the first year alone, the Nazis set up thirty concentration camps for people who did not toe the line: those who listened to the BBC station or expressed skepticism about the regime. Even in the last week of the war, soldiers were executed because they did not believe in the final victory; a Catholic priest was executed because he had not reported to the Gestapo what he had learned during the confession of a resister.
In view of such measures, the second piece of evidence for the allegedly great approval of all Germans for Hitler's Jewish policy is also unconvincing. In a Spiegel interview, Goldhagen answered Augstein's question as to how he knew that the majority of those who saw the synagogues burning thought: "It serves the Jews right.” Goldhagen's answer: "The lack of evidence is itself evidence . . ."
How does Goldhagen imagine life in a dictatorship? Every person who was seriously against it naturally did everything to cover their tracks. The few lists of key positions that were drawn up before the assassination attempt of July 20 (because it was feared that otherwise a vacuum might develop somewhere and the Gauleiter in charge might unleash a civil war) had a disastrous effect. All those whose names were listed on them were executed.
Which in turn proves that Goldhagen's claim that there was no resistance is incorrect. After the assassination attempt, which had been planned for years and then failed, the following were executed: 21 generals, 33 colonels, 2 ambassadors, 7 diplomats, a minister, 3 state secretaries, and the head of the Reich Criminal Police; also several chief presidents, police presidents and district presidents. Since 1940/41, the number of death sentences handed down by military courts has doubled every year. In 1944/45 there were 8,200, while the People's Court handed down 2,140 sentences in the same year.
The fate of the Scholl siblings and countless unknown people should not be forgotten either - even if they did not all risk their lives directly for the sake of the Jews, but had the goal of eliminating the supreme authority - the criminal system - in mind. But for many of them, the barbaric massacres in Poland strengthened their resolve to join the resistance.
Incidentally, many Jews did not consider themselves threatened at all. My closest Jewish friends, Professor Ernst Kantorowicz and Richard Meyer, head of the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office, were not prepared to emigrate early - they remained in Germany until the late 1930s.
Goldhagen's book is nevertheless important because it is able to make the unimaginable atrocities shockingly clear like no other. It is also important because it raises the question of how it was possible that ordinary people, members of the nation of poets and thinkers, were capable of such deeds. Even if Goldhagen does not answer this question, it remains and will continue to torment us.
It is regrettable that he exaggerates and exaggerates his theses to such an extent that they provoke contradiction and the reaction is therefore likely to be negative. Instead of opening people up to new insights, it is to be feared that they will close themselves off with the argument "it wasn't like that” and no longer think about these outrages at all. Unfortunately, the fear that the Goldhagen book could revive … silenced anti-Semitism cannot be entirely dismissed.
Comparison: Please reference A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.
The editor of the libearl German newspaper, Die Zeit, Marion Countess Dönhoff wrote a detailed and balanced review of the book: "The decidedly misleading nature of Goldhagen’s book Hitler's Willing Executioners.”
Marion Countess Dönhoff was involved in the nearly successful July 1944 bomb assassination attempt on Hitler's life. Whereby Colonel Klaus Stauffenberg and co-conspirators were all executed thereafter, Countess Dönhoff was one of only three who eluded capture.
The other two surviving conspirators were Philipp v. Boeselager and Ewald v. Kleist Schmenzin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewald-H...)
Review of the Goldhagen book Marion Countess Dönhoff – excerpt (translation from German)
https://www.zeit.de/1996/37/goldhage....
I am of the opinion that DIE ZEIT has made far too much fuss about the book. The questionable methods are used to support a theory, which, it seems to me, has not been proven by the author himself.
Goldhagen's questionable method: he starts from the "final solution" i.e. the Holocaust, and rewinds the causal chain, whereby the "final solution” automatically remains present until all prehistoric times. In this way, he proves that "the whole of German society has always shared Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism of extermination."
He claims that the enforcers were representative of the German population in their composition. He does not say whether his statistics include the Austrians, who made up a third of the SS extermination units and commanded four of the main death camps, as Paul Johnson writes in the Washington Post.
(Please reference The Holocaust by Paul Johnson)
If this is the argument, one has to wonder what such a passionately anti-Semitic people would have done if Hitler had fallen on the Western Front in 1917 - where he had been wounded? An authoritarian regime may well have been established in Germany, as in Spain or Italy, but certainly not Hitler's National Socialism.
Goldhagen's questionable thesis: he says that the Holocaust was a "German national project.” The Germans were not only anti-Semitic in the usual sense, they also paid homage to a special anti-Semitism, "extermination anti-Semitism.” This, as he calls it, "eliminatory” anti-Semitism had the goal of eradicating the Jews.
If this kind of racism is in the genes of the Germans, as Goldhagen apparently believes, then one wonders what may have happened to these genes after 1945, because, as he admits, the Germans changed completely.
Of course, the author of the book takes the precaution of defending himself against the accusation that he has postulated a collective guilt of the Germans ("I categorically reject the idea of collective guilt"); but the talk of the "whole people” or "all Germans” refers to nothing other than a collective. Goldhagen also claims: "The entire German elite wholeheartedly embraced the anti-Semitism of extermination.” Another collective! Goldhagen cites two pieces of evidence for the Germans' willingness not only to tolerate the brutal massacres, but also to approve of them with relish.
The first piece of evidence: the people cheered Hitler, even after the "Kristallnacht” in November 1938. This can only surprise someone who views the complete period monocausally in terms of the Holocaust. In fact, people were by no means cheering because of the discrimination against Jews - the "Kristallnacht” in particular was disapproved of by many. Rather, Hitler's great, enduring, and acclaimed myth was based on the rare combination of success and terror.
Success: the elimination of unemployment, the annexation of Austria, the return of the Sudetenland, the victory over France, which believed itself safe behind the Maginot Line. Under these circumstances, the majority of the people regarded the seizure of power as a national uprising worthy of gratitude.
Terror: immediately after the seizure of power, 4,000 communist functionaries were arrested; in the first year alone, the Nazis set up thirty concentration camps for people who did not toe the line: those who listened to the BBC station or expressed skepticism about the regime. Even in the last week of the war, soldiers were executed because they did not believe in the final victory; a Catholic priest was executed because he had not reported to the Gestapo what he had learned during the confession of a resister.
In view of such measures, the second piece of evidence for the allegedly great approval of all Germans for Hitler's Jewish policy is also unconvincing. In a Spiegel interview, Goldhagen answered Augstein's question as to how he knew that the majority of those who saw the synagogues burning thought: "It serves the Jews right.” Goldhagen's answer: "The lack of evidence is itself evidence . . ."
How does Goldhagen imagine life in a dictatorship? Every person who was seriously against it naturally did everything to cover their tracks. The few lists of key positions that were drawn up before the assassination attempt of July 20 (because it was feared that otherwise a vacuum might develop somewhere and the Gauleiter in charge might unleash a civil war) had a disastrous effect. All those whose names were listed on them were executed.
Which in turn proves that Goldhagen's claim that there was no resistance is incorrect. After the assassination attempt, which had been planned for years and then failed, the following were executed: 21 generals, 33 colonels, 2 ambassadors, 7 diplomats, a minister, 3 state secretaries, and the head of the Reich Criminal Police; also several chief presidents, police presidents and district presidents. Since 1940/41, the number of death sentences handed down by military courts has doubled every year. In 1944/45 there were 8,200, while the People's Court handed down 2,140 sentences in the same year.
The fate of the Scholl siblings and countless unknown people should not be forgotten either - even if they did not all risk their lives directly for the sake of the Jews, but had the goal of eliminating the supreme authority - the criminal system - in mind. But for many of them, the barbaric massacres in Poland strengthened their resolve to join the resistance.
Incidentally, many Jews did not consider themselves threatened at all. My closest Jewish friends, Professor Ernst Kantorowicz and Richard Meyer, head of the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office, were not prepared to emigrate early - they remained in Germany until the late 1930s.
Goldhagen's book is nevertheless important because it is able to make the unimaginable atrocities shockingly clear like no other. It is also important because it raises the question of how it was possible that ordinary people, members of the nation of poets and thinkers, were capable of such deeds. Even if Goldhagen does not answer this question, it remains and will continue to torment us.
It is regrettable that he exaggerates and exaggerates his theses to such an extent that they provoke contradiction and the reaction is therefore likely to be negative. Instead of opening people up to new insights, it is to be feared that they will close themselves off with the argument "it wasn't like that” and no longer think about these outrages at all. Unfortunately, the fear that the Goldhagen book could revive … silenced anti-Semitism cannot be entirely dismissed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 8, 2012
[Deep breath] This is a difficult book to review as the subject matter is so contentious and horrific. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. Of course they were willing participants in the sense that they consciously carried out their actions as humans with as much "free will" as anyone else. The better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it?
Goldhagen spends much of the book building a case for a history of the German people that made them unique and more capable of this atrocity than other nations/cultures/peoples. Not only is this wrong but it does a disservice to humanity by providing an argument that could be used to state that only in Germany could the Holocaust have occurred nor could it occur again as circumstances and the German national temperament have changed. As any cursory review of recent history will show, the German people do not have a monopoly on genocide. The importance in studying the Holocaust is to prevent its re-occurrence. Any "scholarship" that purports to explain the Holocaust only as a unique event fails in this purpose.
Goldhagen's book is frequently contrasted with Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. Goldhagen and Browning used much of the same source material. Goldhagen's work got the headlines through his incendiary claims but it is Browning's work that is the illuminating one. Browning shows us something that is both more plausible and horrifying than Goldhagen does - Browning shows that the men who committed these murders were just that, men, as complex and conflicted as any other man, who nonetheless were able to justify their actions to themselves and carry them out. It is crucial that we understand this. Browning attempts to provide understanding; Goldhagen attempts to provide denunciation and facile explanations.
I quote from the preface to Browning's book, page xx: "Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations...were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader -- both were human -- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive...Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature."
Goldhagen's book is the antithesis of what Browning wrote in his preface. Goldhagen believes the study of the Holocaust demands the demonization of those that carried it out. He does not believe the perpetrators were human beings like you and me. He does not believe others would have acted the same under the same circumstances. He believes that to empathize is to forgive so instead we have a book that at every turn tries to impart that the Nazi was beyond understanding, beyond humanity. This is a comforting thought, it is a glib thought, and it is wrong.
If you are looking for a polemic that explains the Holocaust as unique to a given country and a given people, then Goldhagen's book is the one you want. If you are looking for a history book that actually attempts to explore and understand how humanity can undertake horrific acts, then Browning's book is the one you want.
Goldhagen spends much of the book building a case for a history of the German people that made them unique and more capable of this atrocity than other nations/cultures/peoples. Not only is this wrong but it does a disservice to humanity by providing an argument that could be used to state that only in Germany could the Holocaust have occurred nor could it occur again as circumstances and the German national temperament have changed. As any cursory review of recent history will show, the German people do not have a monopoly on genocide. The importance in studying the Holocaust is to prevent its re-occurrence. Any "scholarship" that purports to explain the Holocaust only as a unique event fails in this purpose.
Goldhagen's book is frequently contrasted with Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. Goldhagen and Browning used much of the same source material. Goldhagen's work got the headlines through his incendiary claims but it is Browning's work that is the illuminating one. Browning shows us something that is both more plausible and horrifying than Goldhagen does - Browning shows that the men who committed these murders were just that, men, as complex and conflicted as any other man, who nonetheless were able to justify their actions to themselves and carry them out. It is crucial that we understand this. Browning attempts to provide understanding; Goldhagen attempts to provide denunciation and facile explanations.
I quote from the preface to Browning's book, page xx: "Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations...were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader -- both were human -- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive...Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature."
Goldhagen's book is the antithesis of what Browning wrote in his preface. Goldhagen believes the study of the Holocaust demands the demonization of those that carried it out. He does not believe the perpetrators were human beings like you and me. He does not believe others would have acted the same under the same circumstances. He believes that to empathize is to forgive so instead we have a book that at every turn tries to impart that the Nazi was beyond understanding, beyond humanity. This is a comforting thought, it is a glib thought, and it is wrong.
If you are looking for a polemic that explains the Holocaust as unique to a given country and a given people, then Goldhagen's book is the one you want. If you are looking for a history book that actually attempts to explore and understand how humanity can undertake horrific acts, then Browning's book is the one you want.
August 12, 2008
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. It was controversial at the time of publication but the author argues, convincingly in my opinion, that ordinary Germans were willing participants in the persecution and murder of Jews, based on the premise that European culture was imbued with anti-semitic sentiment for hundreds of years before Hitler came along .Learning the details of just how bad the Nazi years were for European Jews rips away the abstraction of the number Six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The details are grim but it is worth reading.
October 21, 2019
Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. Goldhagen's thesis is that no one was coerced, they had the possibility to refuse to take part, yet few did...
October 13, 2016
“Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a richly detailed and provocative history of the Holocaust. The book strives to explain why this genocide happened where and when it did. I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why.
Goldhagen’s book tries to rebut popular misconceptions about the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi-held territory: that the killing of Jews was done only by SS officers and Nazi Party members, that most Germans of the time knew nothing about the concentration camps, that perpetrators of the murders were only following orders and would have been killed if they disobeyed, and that only a small minority of Germans in the early 20th century were antisemitic.
“Hundreds of thousands of German contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration camp system,” Goldhagen writes. “Despite the regime’s half-hearted attempts to keep the genocide beyond the view of most Germans, millions knew of the mass slaughter.”
Goldhagen convincingly points out that antisemitism had a long history in Christian Europe and was strong in what in 1871 became Germany. “European antisemitism is a corollary of Christianity. From the earliest days of Christianity’s consolidation of its hold over the Roman Empire, its leaders preached against Jews, employing explicit, powerfully worded, emotionally charged condemnations.”
This widespread antisemitism in Germany and, to be fair, almost all European countries in the early 20th century was amplified by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933. The Nazi Party was obsessively antisemitic from its start in 1919, and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” exhibited hatred of the Jews and a determination to make Germany free of them, one way or another.
No evidence has been produced, Goldhagen writes, that any German soldier was killed or sent to a concentration for refusing to execute Jews. He also writes that the claim that German soldiers blindly obeyed orders in general is false. In many cases, German military people of all ranks disobeyed orders they thought illegitimate, and a number of Germans, including top officers of the Wehrmacht, conspired to kill Hitler.
Goldhagen condemns the failure of Christian churches and their leaders in Germany, with few exceptions, to oppose the Nazis and the murdering of innocent Jews. “The moral bankruptcy of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, regarding Jews was so extensive and abject that it warrants far more attention than can be devoted to it here.”
Most Protestant and Catholic churches, despite some private dissent of the Nazi’s doctrine about the Jews, were publicly antisemitic, Goldhagen writes.
He readily admits that other countries in Europe and elsewhere had populations that were antisemitic. But in Germany it was worse. Antisemitism was not popular in Italy and not originally part of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, Goldhagen writes. Even when Mussolini was forced to accede to Germans’ demands against Jews, “Italians, even the Italian military, by and large disobeyed Mussolini’s orders for the deportation of Jews to what they knew would have been death at the Germans’ hands.”
Antisemitism could be found – and can be found – in many area of the world, including the Middle East and the U.S. But a few nations were worse than others. “The most important national groups who aided the Germans in slaughtering Jews were the Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, about whom two things can be said. They came from cultures that were profoundly antisemitic.”
One aspect of antisemitism and the resulting obsession with murdering Jews is how illogical and fantastical these beliefs were from start to end. This might seem a mystery except that we must understand that bigotry by its very nature is illogical, a hatred that is a matter of faith not of evidence.
“All antisemitism is fundamentally ‘abstract,’ in the sense of not being derived from actual qualities of Jews, yet simultaneously is real and concrete in its effects.”
Goldhagen continues: “Christians’ antisemitism was not based on any familiarity with real Jews. It could not have been. Similarly, most virulent antisemites in German during Weimar and during the Nazi period probably had little or no contact with Jews. Entire areas of Germany were practically without Jews, since Jews formed less than 1 percent of the German population and 70 percent of this small percentage lived in large urban areas.”
There were 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, a small part of the total population of Germany of 67 million. Almost 130,000 emigrated in the next five years. During 1938-39, 118,000 more Jews emigrated. After WWII began, 30,000 more left. The Nazis had forced over half of the Jews of Germany to leave, usually having to forfeit all their property and belongings.
The Nazis believed and persuaded many Germans that Jews were a threat to the Fatherland, despite their small numbers and limited political and economic power. The Jews were accused – again, illogically – of being the founders of both capitalism and communism.
The ideological obsession of the Nazis to destroy Jews was self-destructive. During World War II, Jews were murdered and mostly not put to work in war plants despite a labor shortage, and the Holocaust effort diverted valuable resources from the war effort. “The destruction of the Jews, once it had become achievable, took priority even over safeguarding Nazism’s very existence.”
The Wannsee Conference of Jan. 20, 1942, directed by Reinhard Heydrich, came up with a grandiose master plan for “The Final Solution” against the 11 million Jews in countries from Portugal to the Soviet Union and Ireland to Turkey. Many of the countries were not in German control but presumably, to the conference attendees, would be.
The book includes a map of Europe with totals of the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Most Jews were not killed in Germany but German-occupied countries. The most Jews killed were in Poland (2.9 million), Soviet Union (1 million), and Hungary (550,000). In Germany, 134,500 Jews were killed. Only 60 Jews were killed in Denmark.
Mere statistics can numb one’s comprehension of this horror and mute empathy for the victims of this genocide or any genocide. Fortunately the author spends many pages detailing individual stories of the perpetrators and victims during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and German-held territories. These stories are difficult to read.
Several people attacked “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” after its publication as being anti-German. I think the more relevant question is whether Goldhagen’s book is accurate and fair. If the book is indeed (almost or entirely) accurate and fair, then that charge is meaningless.
The book was produced from Goldhagen’s doctoral dissertation. He mostly avoids the worst of dense, jargon-filled academic prose, but the book still can be dense in places and at times he uses big words where smaller ones would do. For instance, why did Goldhagen use the word “voluntaristic” repeatedly instead of “voluntary.”
A more important criticism is great repetition of argument throughout the book, not just once or twice but dozens of times. A statement is made on one page, then again three pages on, then 50 pages later, etc.
The 622-page book includes an index and 126 pages of notes, but no bibliography. I would have liked to have seen a bibliography, to be able to compile a list of books I might want to read later on. A lack of bibliography made this task a little more difficult.
Overall, I thought the book well-researched and illuminating, providing gruesome details of the Nazi evil drive to eliminate Jews and other people. The book is also thought-provoking, lingering in my mind for weeks after I finished it. I hope to read related books in future years to see how Goldhagen’s assertions have stood the test of time.
Goldhagen’s book tries to rebut popular misconceptions about the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi-held territory: that the killing of Jews was done only by SS officers and Nazi Party members, that most Germans of the time knew nothing about the concentration camps, that perpetrators of the murders were only following orders and would have been killed if they disobeyed, and that only a small minority of Germans in the early 20th century were antisemitic.
“Hundreds of thousands of German contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration camp system,” Goldhagen writes. “Despite the regime’s half-hearted attempts to keep the genocide beyond the view of most Germans, millions knew of the mass slaughter.”
Goldhagen convincingly points out that antisemitism had a long history in Christian Europe and was strong in what in 1871 became Germany. “European antisemitism is a corollary of Christianity. From the earliest days of Christianity’s consolidation of its hold over the Roman Empire, its leaders preached against Jews, employing explicit, powerfully worded, emotionally charged condemnations.”
This widespread antisemitism in Germany and, to be fair, almost all European countries in the early 20th century was amplified by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933. The Nazi Party was obsessively antisemitic from its start in 1919, and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” exhibited hatred of the Jews and a determination to make Germany free of them, one way or another.
No evidence has been produced, Goldhagen writes, that any German soldier was killed or sent to a concentration for refusing to execute Jews. He also writes that the claim that German soldiers blindly obeyed orders in general is false. In many cases, German military people of all ranks disobeyed orders they thought illegitimate, and a number of Germans, including top officers of the Wehrmacht, conspired to kill Hitler.
Goldhagen condemns the failure of Christian churches and their leaders in Germany, with few exceptions, to oppose the Nazis and the murdering of innocent Jews. “The moral bankruptcy of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, regarding Jews was so extensive and abject that it warrants far more attention than can be devoted to it here.”
Most Protestant and Catholic churches, despite some private dissent of the Nazi’s doctrine about the Jews, were publicly antisemitic, Goldhagen writes.
He readily admits that other countries in Europe and elsewhere had populations that were antisemitic. But in Germany it was worse. Antisemitism was not popular in Italy and not originally part of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, Goldhagen writes. Even when Mussolini was forced to accede to Germans’ demands against Jews, “Italians, even the Italian military, by and large disobeyed Mussolini’s orders for the deportation of Jews to what they knew would have been death at the Germans’ hands.”
Antisemitism could be found – and can be found – in many area of the world, including the Middle East and the U.S. But a few nations were worse than others. “The most important national groups who aided the Germans in slaughtering Jews were the Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, about whom two things can be said. They came from cultures that were profoundly antisemitic.”
One aspect of antisemitism and the resulting obsession with murdering Jews is how illogical and fantastical these beliefs were from start to end. This might seem a mystery except that we must understand that bigotry by its very nature is illogical, a hatred that is a matter of faith not of evidence.
“All antisemitism is fundamentally ‘abstract,’ in the sense of not being derived from actual qualities of Jews, yet simultaneously is real and concrete in its effects.”
Goldhagen continues: “Christians’ antisemitism was not based on any familiarity with real Jews. It could not have been. Similarly, most virulent antisemites in German during Weimar and during the Nazi period probably had little or no contact with Jews. Entire areas of Germany were practically without Jews, since Jews formed less than 1 percent of the German population and 70 percent of this small percentage lived in large urban areas.”
There were 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, a small part of the total population of Germany of 67 million. Almost 130,000 emigrated in the next five years. During 1938-39, 118,000 more Jews emigrated. After WWII began, 30,000 more left. The Nazis had forced over half of the Jews of Germany to leave, usually having to forfeit all their property and belongings.
The Nazis believed and persuaded many Germans that Jews were a threat to the Fatherland, despite their small numbers and limited political and economic power. The Jews were accused – again, illogically – of being the founders of both capitalism and communism.
The ideological obsession of the Nazis to destroy Jews was self-destructive. During World War II, Jews were murdered and mostly not put to work in war plants despite a labor shortage, and the Holocaust effort diverted valuable resources from the war effort. “The destruction of the Jews, once it had become achievable, took priority even over safeguarding Nazism’s very existence.”
The Wannsee Conference of Jan. 20, 1942, directed by Reinhard Heydrich, came up with a grandiose master plan for “The Final Solution” against the 11 million Jews in countries from Portugal to the Soviet Union and Ireland to Turkey. Many of the countries were not in German control but presumably, to the conference attendees, would be.
The book includes a map of Europe with totals of the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Most Jews were not killed in Germany but German-occupied countries. The most Jews killed were in Poland (2.9 million), Soviet Union (1 million), and Hungary (550,000). In Germany, 134,500 Jews were killed. Only 60 Jews were killed in Denmark.
Mere statistics can numb one’s comprehension of this horror and mute empathy for the victims of this genocide or any genocide. Fortunately the author spends many pages detailing individual stories of the perpetrators and victims during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and German-held territories. These stories are difficult to read.
Several people attacked “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” after its publication as being anti-German. I think the more relevant question is whether Goldhagen’s book is accurate and fair. If the book is indeed (almost or entirely) accurate and fair, then that charge is meaningless.
The book was produced from Goldhagen’s doctoral dissertation. He mostly avoids the worst of dense, jargon-filled academic prose, but the book still can be dense in places and at times he uses big words where smaller ones would do. For instance, why did Goldhagen use the word “voluntaristic” repeatedly instead of “voluntary.”
A more important criticism is great repetition of argument throughout the book, not just once or twice but dozens of times. A statement is made on one page, then again three pages on, then 50 pages later, etc.
The 622-page book includes an index and 126 pages of notes, but no bibliography. I would have liked to have seen a bibliography, to be able to compile a list of books I might want to read later on. A lack of bibliography made this task a little more difficult.
Overall, I thought the book well-researched and illuminating, providing gruesome details of the Nazi evil drive to eliminate Jews and other people. The book is also thought-provoking, lingering in my mind for weeks after I finished it. I hope to read related books in future years to see how Goldhagen’s assertions have stood the test of time.
December 25, 2013
In this book we learn that not only did the average German know the full details of the Holocaust and General Plan OST (despite both being highly classified), but supported these measures with glee. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. We also learn that only the Germans could commit a genocide of this scale due to their unique evil. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. Finally, we learn that Germans overwhelmingly supported these measures because the Nazis didn't punish opposition like the Soviets did! Despite the fact that up to 70,000 Germans were killed for real or imagined opposition to the Nazis. Also the author acts like Germans could easily choose to object conscription and simply not fight, despite the fact this was punishable by death. 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. This book is a massive oversimplification of history's worst genocide, and turns the Germans into 1 dimensional demons that stand around twirling their handle bar moustaches and laughing maniacally. Where do I even start with how bad this thesis is? Firstly, the notion of unique German evil is utter BULLSHIT! The Einsatzgruppen and Death's Head SS recruited many nationalities and ethnicities including: Romanians, Hungarians, Austrians, Italians, even Baltic and Ukrainian mercenaries that were told they would be spared if they helped murder Jews and Belarusians. Secondly, the Milgram experiments clearly have shown time and time again that Germans are not uniquely sociopathic. They follow orders just like everyone else, which is why MANY other peoples have committed hateful genocides including: Turks, Mongols, Japanese, Hutu, Serbs, Belgians, Russians, and too many more to even count. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. Goldhagen doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. Did I mention most of the racial theories including the creation of the fictional "Aryan" race and the concept of killing the Jew race were developed outside of Germany? France, UK, and the US actually are responsible for most of the racist theories that the Nazis used with Hitler considering the Madison Grant, American bestseller Passing of the Great Race to be his Bible. 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. Would the German Royal family have kept marrying with people they considered subhuman? I think not. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. Overall, this book does a grievous disservice to the 17 million victims of Nazi racial policies by confining the problem of genocide into just being a German problem. If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. The book also demonizes ethnic Germans in a similar way that Protocols of the Elder's of Zion demonized the Jews. 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. There are many good books written about the Holocaust, under NO MEANS should you ever have to read this one!
December 27, 2015
This is a very hard book to read, I give you all fair warning. The photographs, in particular, are hard to look at, hard to force oneself to understand. On page 407, that really is a German soldier posing for the photographer as he takes aim at a Jewish woman and her child. On page 224-25, those really are pictures, taken by a German soldier as mementoes, of Jews waiting to be massacred.
I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.
Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.
That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.
Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.
I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.
I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.
Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.
That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.
Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.
I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.
July 20, 2015
The anti-Christ of history - a truly shocking effort by a misleading author.
I once had to write a 5000 word piece for my history degree and this utter tosh was mentioned several times. The topic I was researching was West German memory in the post-war period, looking at how the German public aligned itself with its Nazi past. As part of this I looked at different historians views on how involved "ordinary" Germans actually were.
Goldhagen's problem is he does not understand the German society of the time, it's different groups, attitudes and responsibilities within the regime. The result is he groups "Germans" as one united regime with one opinion and role within the war.
Goldhagen thus groups the nation as all involved in the Hollocaust in some way, and thus responsible for it, and should feel guilt within the post-war period.
"Goldhagen implied that the whole nation was involved; phrases such as `the Germans' slaughter of Jews; were left uncontextualised." Taken from Bill Niven's 'Facing The Nazi Past' (p129), which is well worth a read.
This is worth reading if you need an example of how not to be a historian. Otherwise it is misleading and almost racist in its conclusions. If you would like a true insight into the period, then this is a miss. Read the book I have mentioned.
I find it really disappointing that some people have given this a good review. It is not just an opinion in stating this book is terrible!
Ironically the German public, perhaps trying to distance itself from its past, liked the book!
I once had to write a 5000 word piece for my history degree and this utter tosh was mentioned several times. The topic I was researching was West German memory in the post-war period, looking at how the German public aligned itself with its Nazi past. As part of this I looked at different historians views on how involved "ordinary" Germans actually were.
Goldhagen's problem is he does not understand the German society of the time, it's different groups, attitudes and responsibilities within the regime. The result is he groups "Germans" as one united regime with one opinion and role within the war.
Goldhagen thus groups the nation as all involved in the Hollocaust in some way, and thus responsible for it, and should feel guilt within the post-war period.
"Goldhagen implied that the whole nation was involved; phrases such as `the Germans' slaughter of Jews; were left uncontextualised." Taken from Bill Niven's 'Facing The Nazi Past' (p129), which is well worth a read.
This is worth reading if you need an example of how not to be a historian. Otherwise it is misleading and almost racist in its conclusions. If you would like a true insight into the period, then this is a miss. Read the book I have mentioned.
I find it really disappointing that some people have given this a good review. It is not just an opinion in stating this book is terrible!
Ironically the German public, perhaps trying to distance itself from its past, liked the book!
October 26, 2019
Ez talán a legbrutálisabb szakkönyv, amit valaha olvastam – ehhez képest a Schindler listája csak játszódás kölökbárányokkal zöldellő mezőkön. De brutalitása nem öncél, hanem eszköz, amivel Goldhagen saját állításait bizonyítja – ezzel, a népirtás gyakorlatának ábrázolásával, és a gyilkosok közelképeivel teremti meg azt a „kognitív keretet”, ami szerinte az egész holokauszt kulcsa. A kötet elvitathatatlan érdeme, hogy igen kellemetlen kérdéseket tol az arcunkba – olyasmiket, amelyektől el szokás fordítani a pillantásunkat. Szerinte a népirtás nem egy szűk réteg által elkövetett cselekménysorozat, amihez a többség legfeljebb tudatlanul asszisztált, hanem egy antiszemitizmustól teljesen átitatott társadalom közös bűne. Nem véletlen, hogy a kötet jelentős részében nem az SS-szel, hanem a rendőrzászlóaljakkal foglalkozik – ezeket az egységeket ugyanis nem nácikkal, hanem a társadalom legszélesebb rétegéből válogatva töltötték fel, nem vizsgálva a belépők pártállását, következésképpen tagjaik között meglepően kevés politikailag elkötelezett személyt találunk. (Sőt: a Hamburg környékéről toborzott egység tagjai között számosan szociáldemokrata múlttal rendelkeztek.) Emellett ezek az egységek jellemzően az idősebb korosztályból verbuválódtak – vagyis nem a Hitler-rezsim oktatási viszonyai között szocializálódtak. Visszafogottabban vettek hát részt a népirtásban? Goldhagen bőséges adatokat szolgáltat arra, hogy nem. Ugyanolyan embertelenül viselkedtek, mint az SS*.
Goldhagen azt a mítoszt is cáfolni igyekszik, hogy a gyilkosságok egy automatizált, parancsalapú rendszer gépies, de a maga perverz módján racionális működése során történtek volna. Nem, az elkövetők az esetek jelentős részében indokolatlan szadizmussal öltek, nem pusztán eliminálni akarták a zsidóságot, hanem létében megalázni, és rendszeresen túlteljesítették a normát. Elvetettek minden gazdasági észszerűséget: még ha a munkaerőhiány miatt akadozott is a német termelés, vonakodtak a zsidókra mint munkaerőre tekinteni**. Az irracionalitás leglátványosabb példái pedig talán a halálmenetek (amikkel Goldhagen szintén sokat foglalkozik), amelyek során egy már elvesztett háborúban ide-oda masíroztatták értelem nélkül a foglyokat olyan németek, akik pontosan tudták, hogy hamarosan el kell számolniuk a tetteikkel – mégis alig mutattak könyörületet. Mindezt úgy, hogy ekkor Himmler már konkrétan parancsba adta, hogy kíméljék a zsidókat (a szövetségesek nyugati felével való egyezkedés aranyfedezetének szánta őket) – de speciel ezt a parancsot a legtöbben hajlandóak voltak figyelmen kívül hagyni.
Ezekben a kérdésekben Goldhagen bőségesen megadatolt és meggyőző, ugyanakkor más állításaiban tág tere van a cáfolatnak. Egyrészt itt van az, hogy a népirtás alanyai szerinte csak a zsidók lehettek, akik semmi mással nem behelyettesíthetőek. No most tény, hogy amíg az eutanáziaprogrammal kapcsolatban léteztek (sikeres!) tiltakozások, és a sztrájk fogalma sem volt ismeretlen a Harmadik Birodalomban, addig a holokauszt ellen intenzív tömegmegmozdulást nem ismerünk – jellemző, hogy még a Stauffenberg-féle összeesküvők többségének is legfeljebb a megvalósítással, nem magával az antiszemitizmussal volt problémája. Az is igaz, hogy az antiszemitizmus az összes idegengyűlölet közül a legkomplexebb jelenség (Európában legalábbis), ami a kereszténység bizonyos ágaiban is erős gyökeret vert – szóval ez legalábbis védhető álláspont. Ugyanakkor erősen leszűkíti azt a kört, amiben a kötet tanulsággal bír – én a magam részéről meggyőzőbbnek tartom Snyder megközelítését, aki a hangsúlyt inkább arra helyezi, hogy a gyilkos az gyilkos: az elkövető mentális állapota a kulcs, nem az áldozat hovatartozása***. Az viszont már egyértelműen ellenérzéseket kelt bennem, hogy Goldhagen az elkövetők körét is leszűkíti azzal, hogy a holokauszt feltételei szerinte kizárólag Németországban alakulhattak ki – hiába taglalja hosszasan, milyen történelmi specifikumai vannak a német antiszemitizmusnak, egy tényből (hogy a németek fejéből pattant ki az ötlet) visszakövetkeztetve gyűjti össze a bizonyítékokat, amik őt támasztják alá. És ez így logikailag elég problémásnak tűnik. Megemlít ugyan érintőlegesen más elkövetőket (elsősorban a hiwiket), de nem foglalkozik velük – holott az ő puszta létük elbizonytalaníthatná saját állításával szemben.
Összegzés: fontos, provokatív könyv, aminek súlya háttérbe szorítja amúgy nagyon is számottevő hiányosságait, illetve hajlamát az önismétlésre. A holokauszt, és egyáltalán: az emberi gonoszság iránt érdeklődőknek erősen ajánlott olvasmány – olyan szegletekbe világít be a témával kapcsolatban, ahol eleddig vaksötét volt. Jó lett volna, ha egy igazán jó fordító magyarítja. (Bocs, Bokor Pál, de Luther Márton mint "Martin Luther king" - sic!!! -, a Saar-vidék pedig mint Szárvidék... hát... viccnek is rossz.)
* Jegyezzük meg, mert fontos: a rendőrzászlóaljak tagjainak volt választási lehetőségük. Azoknak, akik kérvényezték áthelyezésüket, vagy nem kívántak részt venni a kivégzésekben, semmilyen bántódásuk nem esett. És mégis – legfeljebb néhányan választották ezt az utat.
** A munkatáborok rendszerének ugyanis – mint Goldhagen meggyőzően bizonyítja – valójában semmi köze nem volt a munkához, a bennük végzett teljesen improduktív feladatok csak a rabok megalázásának eszközei voltak.
*** "Az Einsatzgruppék több ezer tagja és több tízezer olyan német között, akik zsidókat öltek, egyetlen elkövetőről sem tudunk, aki vállalta, hogy zsidókat öl, viszont azt nem, hogy belorusz civilekkel vagy szovjet hadifoglyokkal végezzen. Mint ahogy olyanok sem voltak, akik vállalták belorusz civilek vagy szovjet hadifoglyok vagy cigányok megölését, de zsidókét nem. Akik embert öltek, azok embert öltek." (Timothy Snyder: Fekete föld) Amúgy is Snyder témába vágó könyvét jóval kiforrottabb alkotásnak érzem, mint ezt.
Goldhagen azt a mítoszt is cáfolni igyekszik, hogy a gyilkosságok egy automatizált, parancsalapú rendszer gépies, de a maga perverz módján racionális működése során történtek volna. Nem, az elkövetők az esetek jelentős részében indokolatlan szadizmussal öltek, nem pusztán eliminálni akarták a zsidóságot, hanem létében megalázni, és rendszeresen túlteljesítették a normát. Elvetettek minden gazdasági észszerűséget: még ha a munkaerőhiány miatt akadozott is a német termelés, vonakodtak a zsidókra mint munkaerőre tekinteni**. Az irracionalitás leglátványosabb példái pedig talán a halálmenetek (amikkel Goldhagen szintén sokat foglalkozik), amelyek során egy már elvesztett háborúban ide-oda masíroztatták értelem nélkül a foglyokat olyan németek, akik pontosan tudták, hogy hamarosan el kell számolniuk a tetteikkel – mégis alig mutattak könyörületet. Mindezt úgy, hogy ekkor Himmler már konkrétan parancsba adta, hogy kíméljék a zsidókat (a szövetségesek nyugati felével való egyezkedés aranyfedezetének szánta őket) – de speciel ezt a parancsot a legtöbben hajlandóak voltak figyelmen kívül hagyni.
Ezekben a kérdésekben Goldhagen bőségesen megadatolt és meggyőző, ugyanakkor más állításaiban tág tere van a cáfolatnak. Egyrészt itt van az, hogy a népirtás alanyai szerinte csak a zsidók lehettek, akik semmi mással nem behelyettesíthetőek. No most tény, hogy amíg az eutanáziaprogrammal kapcsolatban léteztek (sikeres!) tiltakozások, és a sztrájk fogalma sem volt ismeretlen a Harmadik Birodalomban, addig a holokauszt ellen intenzív tömegmegmozdulást nem ismerünk – jellemző, hogy még a Stauffenberg-féle összeesküvők többségének is legfeljebb a megvalósítással, nem magával az antiszemitizmussal volt problémája. Az is igaz, hogy az antiszemitizmus az összes idegengyűlölet közül a legkomplexebb jelenség (Európában legalábbis), ami a kereszténység bizonyos ágaiban is erős gyökeret vert – szóval ez legalábbis védhető álláspont. Ugyanakkor erősen leszűkíti azt a kört, amiben a kötet tanulsággal bír – én a magam részéről meggyőzőbbnek tartom Snyder megközelítését, aki a hangsúlyt inkább arra helyezi, hogy a gyilkos az gyilkos: az elkövető mentális állapota a kulcs, nem az áldozat hovatartozása***. Az viszont már egyértelműen ellenérzéseket kelt bennem, hogy Goldhagen az elkövetők körét is leszűkíti azzal, hogy a holokauszt feltételei szerinte kizárólag Németországban alakulhattak ki – hiába taglalja hosszasan, milyen történelmi specifikumai vannak a német antiszemitizmusnak, egy tényből (hogy a németek fejéből pattant ki az ötlet) visszakövetkeztetve gyűjti össze a bizonyítékokat, amik őt támasztják alá. És ez így logikailag elég problémásnak tűnik. Megemlít ugyan érintőlegesen más elkövetőket (elsősorban a hiwiket), de nem foglalkozik velük – holott az ő puszta létük elbizonytalaníthatná saját állításával szemben.
Összegzés: fontos, provokatív könyv, aminek súlya háttérbe szorítja amúgy nagyon is számottevő hiányosságait, illetve hajlamát az önismétlésre. A holokauszt, és egyáltalán: az emberi gonoszság iránt érdeklődőknek erősen ajánlott olvasmány – olyan szegletekbe világít be a témával kapcsolatban, ahol eleddig vaksötét volt. Jó lett volna, ha egy igazán jó fordító magyarítja. (Bocs, Bokor Pál, de Luther Márton mint "Martin Luther king" - sic!!! -, a Saar-vidék pedig mint Szárvidék... hát... viccnek is rossz.)
* Jegyezzük meg, mert fontos: a rendőrzászlóaljak tagjainak volt választási lehetőségük. Azoknak, akik kérvényezték áthelyezésüket, vagy nem kívántak részt venni a kivégzésekben, semmilyen bántódásuk nem esett. És mégis – legfeljebb néhányan választották ezt az utat.
** A munkatáborok rendszerének ugyanis – mint Goldhagen meggyőzően bizonyítja – valójában semmi köze nem volt a munkához, a bennük végzett teljesen improduktív feladatok csak a rabok megalázásának eszközei voltak.
*** "Az Einsatzgruppék több ezer tagja és több tízezer olyan német között, akik zsidókat öltek, egyetlen elkövetőről sem tudunk, aki vállalta, hogy zsidókat öl, viszont azt nem, hogy belorusz civilekkel vagy szovjet hadifoglyokkal végezzen. Mint ahogy olyanok sem voltak, akik vállalták belorusz civilek vagy szovjet hadifoglyok vagy cigányok megölését, de zsidókét nem. Akik embert öltek, azok embert öltek." (Timothy Snyder: Fekete föld) Amúgy is Snyder témába vágó könyvét jóval kiforrottabb alkotásnak érzem, mint ezt.
February 18, 2013
There are problems with the book, for those who know a lot about the Holocaust. These are relatively few, though, and are dealt with nicely in Brownings scholarly work, "Ordinary Men." Overall, this book is a scholarly work. Do not read it if you are looking for entertainment rather than education on the topic. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. It strikes me, though, looking through the various reviews left by other readers, that those who rated Goldhagen's book with a 1 or a 2 were most likely those who either do not have the scholarly background to appreciate this work or who simply skimmed through it and never really read it for biased reasons.
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