Kwiet, Konrad: "'Hitler's Willing Executioners' and Ordinary Germans': Some Comments on Goldhagen's Ideas". "Revising the Holocaust" (1997) p.197, Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. I have read Gordon Craig's review of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners [NYR, April 4].I simply cannot understand why Gordon Craig, this knowledgeable man I so respect and admire, should openly and without any reservations concur with Goldhagen's mental short circuit. The book was a "publishing phenomenon",[2] achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians,[3] who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". Abstract Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners has sparked an outpouring of controversy in the international and scholarly press. These are relatively few, though, and are dealt with nicely in Brownings scholarly work, "Ordinary Men." 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. His research is impeccable and the arguments that he puts forth are convincing. This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. [70], In 1996, the American historian David Schoenbaum wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review of Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. 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. Rather, those responsible were representative Germans conditioned by an ''eliminationist anti-Semitism'' so virulent and constant that it needed only the sanction of the Hitler regime to express itself . Whatever the variations, I think Austrian and German anti-Semitism can be seen of a piece, where there was a central model of Jews and a view that they needed to be eliminated. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jrgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Until deciding to devote himself full-time to writing, he taught political science and social studies for many years at Harvard University. In this case, I don't think I would. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. [54] Bauer charged that it was the Great Depression, not an alleged culture of murderous anti-Semitism that allowed the NSDAP to make its electoral breakthrough in the Reichstag elections of September 1930. And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week. The second and third case studies of Hitler's Willing Executioners are aimed at meeting the burden of proof on these two points. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and its difficult to stand out among the sea of words. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". An Essay on the Reception of, "The dispute between Goldhagen and Finkelstein", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners&oldid=1144747678, Wikipedia articles needing factual verification from June 2014, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Clendinnean, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics" pages 114-132 from, Birn, Ruth Bettina, and Riess, Volker, "Revising The Holocaust", in. I just started reading Goldhagen's thesis is that the men and women who murdered Jews were not forced to do so, nor were they just following orders after years of conditioning by the Catholic and Lutheran churches and others, and Hitler's maniacal Jew-hatred, they were quite willing to kill Jews they thought should die. [47] Spring of 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book called Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustin which he argued that scholarship on the Holocaust needed revision. Goldhagen's book was treated as a way of ensuring that Germany came to terms with its past. Nem vletlen, hogy a ktet jelents rszben nem az SS-szel, hanem a rendrzszlaljakkal foglalkozik ezeket az egysgeket ugyanis nem ncikkal, hanem a trsadalom legszlesebb rtegbl vlogatva tltttk fel, nem vizsglva a belpk prtllst, kvetkezskppen tagjaik kztt meglepen kevs politikailag elktelezett szemlyt tallunk. [46] In 1997, the German historian Hans Mommsen gave an interview in which he said that Goldhagen had a poor understanding of the diversities of German antisemitism, that he construed "a unilinear continuity of German anti-semitism from the medieval period onwards" with Hitler as its end result, whereas, said Mommsen, it is obvious that Hitler's antisemitic propaganda had no significant impact on the election campaigns between September 1930 and November 1932 and on his coming to power, a crucial phenomenon ignored by Goldhagen. [79] The American columnist D.D. When Rosenbaum asked Goldhagen about scholarly literature that contends that Austrian anti-Semitism was far more virulent and violent than German anti-Semitism, and if the fact that Hitler was an Austrian had any effect on his thesis, Goldhagen replied: There were regional variations in anti-Semitism even within Germany. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social . [90], Rosenbaum inquired about Goldhagen's "pregnant with murder" metaphor, which suggested that the Shoah was something inevitable that would have happened without Hitler and Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation "No Hitler, no Holocaust". 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. Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. Politics; Books & the Arts; May 21, 2001 Issue; Hitler's Willing Executives Hitler's Willing Executives John Friedman reviews Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust and Reinhold Billstein et al . 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. What made Germany unique was the level of organization and planning that went into this genocide. "Cultural antisemitism," directed primarily against the Eastern Jews, was part of the "cultural code" of German conservatives, who were mainly found in the German officer corps and the high civil administration. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. All the drama of the 60s and 70s have shown us that rebellion and protest make absolutely no difference in the end, so where does that leave us? The accuracy of his work was, in this context, of secondary importance. Theres been so much written about this controversial book that Im sure I dont have too many details to add that havent been covered before so instead Ill gather some thoughts that have been mulling around in my mind in the week since I finished reading it. These are the average German citizens of the early 20th century. I probably would get irritated by his generalizations. Some of the most comprehensive and enduring takes on SS violence were produced by the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. Free delivery for many products. In the interview, Mommsen distinguished three varieties of German antisemitism. This book makes a powerful argument. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. Goldhagen doesn't separate the religious anti-Semitism of Martin Luther with the racial anti-Semitism of the 1800s and later the Nazis. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Little is new in the overall description, but the details and the way he analyzes the attitude of the murderers is powerful and convincing". Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei and his narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book. Another problem was the author's insistence that anti-Semitism throughout German history was the key reason that Germans wanted to kill Jews. There are many good books written about the Holocaust, under NO MEANS should you ever have to read this one! Goldhagen arrived in Germany in September 1996 for a book tour, and appeared on several television talk shows, as well as a number of sold-out panel discussions. Whatever its weaknesses as causal model, it is first-rate history that has transformed the way we look at the Holocaust. Author goes to Berlin to debate Holocaust, Forum on Holocaust canceled after an author withdraws, Holocaust writer in storm over role of Catholic Church, "Goldhagen Wins German Prize For Holocaust Book", "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis: A Critique of Hitler's Willing Executioners", "Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics", "Why Obama Might Save Israel From Nuclear Iran", "'Hitler's Willing Executioners': An Exchange,", "Goldhagen - His Critics and His Contribution", "Goldhagen in Germany: Historians' Nightmare & Popular Hero. [71]:56, Hitler's Willing Executioners also drew controversy with the publication of two critical articles: "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis", by the American political science professor Norman Finkelstein and initially published in the UK political journal New Left Review,[72] and "Historiographical review: Revising the Holocaust", written by the Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn and initially published in the Historical Journal of Cambridge. Had there not been a depression in Germany, then in all likelihood the Nazis wouldn't have come to power. Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) "The book [Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust] sparked controversy in the press and academic circles. [53] Bauer wrote of the main parties of the Weimar Coalition that dominated German politics until 1930, the leftist SPD and the liberal DDP were opposed to anti-Semitism while the right-of-the-centre Catholic Zentrum was "moderately" antisemitic. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. 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. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Pagination Complete Pagination: 622 pages [56], Concerning Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, the Australian historian Inga Clendinnen wrote that Goldhagen's picture of Major Trapp, the unit's commander as an antisemitic fanatic was "far-fetched" and "there is no indication, on that first day or later that he found the murdering of Jewish civilians a congenial task". Hitler's Willing Executioners was dismissed as fundamentally ahistorical in Commentary, of all places, and as a "bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews as an insidious, inherently. Ganz gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (published as Hitler's Willing Executioners in the United States). Goldhagen argues that the case of the Lipowa and Flughafen Jewish labor camps in Lublin demonstrates that in contrast to other victims, only Jewish labor was treated murderously by the Germans without regard for and indeed counter to economic rationality. The truth is, there was a predisposition to treat Jews like parasites throughout Europe at that time. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Everyone knows its hard to get published. The book of Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners published in 1996, reflecting some an issue that concerned many Germans. 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. [76] Their conclusions were that Goldhagen's analysis of the records: seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. "[11] Goldhagen stated that he would write a book that would rebut Ordinary Men and Browning's thesis, and prove instead that it was the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture that led the men of Reserve Battalion 101 to murder Jews. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. Their task was complicated by the way that "Goldhagen's book [had] neither a bibliography nor a listing of archival sources". The details are grim but it is worth reading. [22] Goldhagen, in contrast, declared the term "indifference" to be unacceptable, contending that the vast majority of Germans were active antisemites who wanted to kill Jews in the most "pitiless" and "callous" manner possible. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. 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. In doing this Goldhagen makes breathtaking generalities and grossly misinterprets a lot of evidence that would help disprove his idea of German exceptionalism. [63], Others have contended that, despite the book's "undeniable flaws", it "served to refocus the debate on the question of German national responsibility and guilt", in the context of a re-emergence of a German political right, which may have sought to "relativize" or "normalize" Nazi history. Since 1933, the Nazi-controlled government continued their barrage of propaganda by holding mass rallies and speeches, along with other strategies to rally support for Lebensraum , war and anti-semitic campaigns. [61] Neuhaus argued that Goldhagen was wrong to claim that Luther had created a legacy of intense, genocidal anti-Semitism within Lutheranism, asking why, if that were the case, would so many people in solidly Lutheran Denmark act to protect the Danish Jewish minority from deportation to the death camps in 1943. His doctoral dissertation, The Nazi Executioners: A Study of Their Behavior and the Causation of Genocide, won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. 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. Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes Showing 1-2 of 2. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the But in recent years, its primacy has been challenged: instead of offering a narrative of increasing efficiency and murderousness leading to gas chambers, historians have turned to the sequence of massacres that reached a crescendo in 1942 and continued, albeit at a reduced rate, into the postwar period. [69] Kershaw wrote in 2000 that Goldhagen's book would "occupy only a limited place in the unfolding, vast historiography of such a crucially important topic-probably at best as a challenge to historians to qualify or counter his 'broad-brush' generalisations". It can do nothing of the sort. [62] In response, the Landesverband Mitteldeutschland des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbrger jdischen Glaubens e. V (Middle German Regional Association of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) complained to Goerdeler about Haake's actions and asked him to enforce the existing antisemitic laws, which at least allowed some Jewish doctors to practice. [52], The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Goldhagen's thesis about a murderous antisemitic culture applied better to Romania than to Germany and murderous anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany as Goldhagen had claimed. Hitler's Willing Executioners is a book we must read to begin to understand the underlying anti-Semitism that was pervasive to the German culture that set the whole ambience for how Hitler was able to harness the energy of the German people to support him in what anyone living today should view as insanity run wild. The anti-Semitism would have remained a potential, in the sense of the killing form. The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust", Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. "The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonising Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension," in, (Internet Archive preview, search inside), average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews, Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbrger jdischen Glaubens, Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back, "Is There a New Anti-Semitism? 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. 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. The New Yorker, April 22, 1996 P. 44. [37][41] Elie Wiesel praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read. 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. [26] Despite their very different interpretations of Battalion 101, both Browning and Goldhagen have argued that the men of the unit were a cross-sample of ordinary Germans. [82] The most widely read German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published an eight-part series of opinions of the book before its German publication in August 1996. Free shipping for many products! [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. It has no nationality. [5] Yehuda Bauer was similarly condemnatory, questioning how an institute such as Harvard could award a doctorate for a work which so "slipped through the filter of critical scholarly assessment". [87] "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" [36][37] Although Hitler's Willing Executioners was sharply criticized in Germany at its debut,[38] the intense public interest in the book secured the author much celebrity among Germans, so much so that Harold Marcuse characterizes him as "the darling of the German public". Hitler's Willing Executioners is an extraordinary and original contribution to the mountain of literature on the Holocaust. petrators, who made willing choices.5 In comparison with other explanations of the Holocaust, Goldhagen's argument combines aspects of the older intentionalist school, which argues that it was Hitler's plan all along to murder the Jews, with what Omer Bartov calls the "common sense" school, especially influential among orthodox Jews. [4][5], Hitler's Willing Executioners won the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. [1], Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. 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 ofsomething. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. 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. 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. The book argues that many more German citizens were involved . Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred? There are problems with the book, for those who know a lot about the Holocaust. 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