Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. The diversity of the killers has challenged Goldhagen's view that the motivation was a distinct form of German anti-Semitism. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. "War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" sets out to destroy the myth of an Army that fought honorably, while behind the front lines, specialized terror units went about the. The Books Alexis Patterson Is Loving Right Now, Browse All Our Lists, Essays, and Interviews, Amazing Childrens Books by Arab and Arab American Authors. 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. | ISBN 9780307426239 [64], Goldhagen's assertion that almost all Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, as "patent nonsense". Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred? [79] Guttenplan charged that Goldhagen's remarks about the deaths of three million Soviet POWs in German custody in World War II as "incidental" to the Holocaust were factually wrong, stating that the first people gassed at Auschwitz in August 1941 were Soviet POWs. [12], Goldhagen charged that every other book written on the Holocaust was flawed by the fact that historians had treated Germans in the Third Reich as "more or less like us," wrongly believing that "their sensibilities had remotely approximated our own. "[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. LaCapra, Dominick. "Revising the Holocaust" (1997) p.197, Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. BLAMING THE GERMANS. [60] In a 1996 review in First Things, the American Catholic priest Father Richard John Neuhaus took issue with Goldhagen's claim that the Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany were genocidal towards the Jews, arguing that there was a difference between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism. [3] One German commentator suggested that Goldhagen's book "pushes us again and again headfirst into the nasty anti-Semitic mud. Millions of Germans who wished to acknowledge the (undeniable and well-documented) fact that ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust welcomed his work; his suggestion that Germans were predestined killers was accepted as part of the uncomfortable package. 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. [49] Browning wrote: Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. [82] The phrase ein Volk von Dmonen (translated "a people/nation of demons") was often used by the Nazis to describe Jews, and the title of the cover story was meant by Rudolf Augstein and the editors of Der Spiegel to suggest a moral equivalence between the Nazi view of Jews and Goldhagen's view of Germans. 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. Reviewed by Stanley Hoffmann May/June 1996 Published on May 1, 1996 A challenging, powerfully argued, and morally passionate account of the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. But Hitler's exemplified and brought to an apotheosis the particular form of eliminationist anti-Semitism that came to the fore in the latter part of the nineteenth century. [35], Goldhagen was awarded the Democracy Prize in 1997 by the German Journal for German and International Politics, which asserted that "because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public." They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. [45] Some historians have criticized or simply dismissed the text, citing among other deficiencies Goldhagen's "neglect of decades of research in favour of his own preconceptions", which he proceeds to articulate in an "intemperate, emotional, and accusatory tone". [92], In 2006, Jewish American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg argued that "Goldhagen's thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. This unique evil comes from their deeply racist culture throughout their history and the uniquely sociopathic nature of ethnic Germans. [54] Bauer wrote of the major pre-1930 political parties, the only party that could be described as radically antisemitic was the conservative German National People's Party, who Bauer called "the party of the traditional, often radical anti-Semitic elites" who were "a definite minority" while the NSDAP won only 2.6% of the vote in the Reichstag elections in May 1928. [93] Goldberg went on to state that Goldhagen was mistaken in believing that "eliminationist antisemitism" was unique to Germany, and Goldberg charged "eliminationist antisemitism" was just as much a feature of modern Palestinian culture as it was of 19th-20th-century German culture, and that in all essentials Hamas today was just as genocidal as the NSDAP had been. 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. [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. I think not. American writer Daniel Goldhagen viewed the very same unit as "willing executioners," sharing Hitler's vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary. [31] Goldhagen used this incident to argue the men of Battalion 101 were reluctant to kill Polish Catholics, but only too willing to murder Polish Jews. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. "Revising the Holocaust" (1997) pp.199-200, 209. This book finally gave me the answer. 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. [93] In 2011, in an apparent reference to Hitler's Willing Executioners, the American columnist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran were all "eliminationist anti-Semites". Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, 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. [30] Goldhagen argued for the specific antisemitic nature of Battalion 101's violence by noting that in 1942 the battalion was ordered to shoot 200 Gentile Poles, and instead shot 78 Polish Catholics while shooting 180 Polish Jews later that same day. Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. In May 1996, Goldhagen was interviewed about Hitler's Willing Executioners by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum. [14] His thesis, he said, was based on the assumption that Germans were not a "normal" Western people influenced by the values of the Enlightenment. Their task was complicated by the way that "Goldhagen's book [had] neither a bibliography nor a listing of archival sources". Hitlers Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. Traditional explorations tended to accept at face value the usual defenses offered by the Germans: Either they did not . These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents. Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. 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. [10] They were not ordinary men as we usually understand men to be, but "ordinary members of extraordinary political culture, the culture of Nazi Germany, which was possessed of a hallucinatory, lethal view of the Jews. 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. 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. One year later, he joined the SS, even before he graduated from the gymnasium in 1934. 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? Nonetheless, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot all the elderly Poles and set the village on fire before returning to the cinema for an evening of casual and relaxing entertainment. In ''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' he argued that not only Nazis were the perpetrators of the Holocaust. 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. This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. 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. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. 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. Wolfgang Benz points out that Adolf Hitler had already called for anti-Semitism in a 1919 publication "Gutachten zum Antisemitismus" and declared: "Its ultimate goal, however, must . | ISBN 9780679772682 By clicking SIGN UP,I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random Houses, certain categories of personal information, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information. 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. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. Buy, Dec 18, 2007 [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. 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. Ganz gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (published as Hitler's Willing Executioners in the United States). In 1936, he joined the police force in Breslau and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. 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 better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it? [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. [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. [85] 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."[89]. [58] Clendinnen ended her essay by stating she found Browning's account of Battalion 101 to be the more believable. These are the average German citizens of the early 20th century. 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. These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." Under its influence, the vast majority of Germans wanted to eliminate Jews from German society, and the perpetrators of the Holocaust did what they did because they thought it was "right and necessary." The more believable of political science and social studies at Harvard University that Goldhagen 's thesis overstated! 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