At most Goldhagen provides an explanation as to why people do the things they do regardless of their social or economic background. 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 . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. This book finally gave me the answer. 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. The Catholic Church maintained its own "silent anti-Judaism" which "immuniz[ed] the Catholic population against the escalating persecution" and kept the Church from protesting against the persecution of the Jews, even while it did protest against the euthanasia program. [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". A book that won't leave you. [28] In its turn, the "culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". Hoffmann contended that what happened was that on April 9, 1935, the Deputy Mayor of Leipzig, the National Socialist Rudolf Haake, banned all Jewish doctors from participating in public health insurance and advised all municipal employees not to consult Jewish doctors, going beyond the existing antisemitic laws then in place. Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. Also, his focus on German crimes during the Holocaust blinds him to the genocide perpetrates in other European countries by other European nationals. [9] But Goldhagen disagreed with Browning's "central interpretation" that the killing was done in the context of the ordinary sociological phenomenon of obedience to authority. Steve Crawshaw writes that although the German readership was keenly aware of certain "professional failings" in Goldhagen's book, [T]hese perceived professional failings proved almost irrelevant. None of these is true.[75]. 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. 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. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. [31] Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. 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. Its a bit easier for memoirists, who can rely on shabby childhoods and drug addictions. [29] Goldhagen noted that the officers in charge of Battalion 101 led by Major Wilhem Trapp allowed the men to excuse themselves from killing if they found it too unpleasant, and Goldhagen used the fact that the vast majority of the men of Battalion 101 did not excuse themselves to argue that this proved the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture. The Harvard Gazette asserted that the selection was the result of Goldhagen's book having "helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany". It's one of those books. The Germans weren't following orders, trying to cover their asses, or acting with too much indifference like other historians believe. [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. "Revising the Holocaust" (1997) p.197, Birn, Ruth Bettina & Riess, Volker. Racial hatred is unfortunately a widespread virus that is always awaiting an opportunity to break out. 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 . Goldhagen replied that voting for or against the wildly antisemitic vlkisch parties had nothing to do with antisemitic feeling, and that people could still hate Jews without voting for the vlkisch parties. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. Nevertheless, this author has been accused of twisting sources to support a point (see Lewis Weinstein's review of Goldhagen's. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES. Totally wrong. Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred? [24], As such, to prove his thesis Goldhagen focused on the behavior of ordinary Germans who killed Jews, especially the behavior of the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland in 1942 to argue ordinary Germans possessed by "eliminationist antisemitism" chose to willingly murder Jews. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. [76] Their conclusions were that Goldhagen's analysis of the records: seems to follow no stringent methodological approach whatsoever. The anti-Christ of history - a truly shocking effort by a misleading author. Buy, 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. Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) It would be more accurate to say Germans are unusually organized than unusually evil. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of Ordinary Men in the July 13, 1992, edition of The New Republic titled "The Evil of Banality". 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 crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. Abacus 1997 at the best online prices at eBay! You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime. 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. Finally, we learn that Germans overwhelmingly supported these measures because the Nazis didn't punish opposition like the Soviets did! [95] In turn during a review of A Nation On Trial, the American journalist Max Frankel wrote that Finkelstein's anti-Zionist politics had led him to "get so far afield from the Goldhagen thesis that it is a relief to reach the critique by Ruth Bettina Birn".[96]. 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. [88] The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. 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. The diversity of the killers has challenged Goldhagen's view that the motivation was a distinct form of German anti-Semitism. 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. In a society where eliminationist norms were universal and in which Jews were rejected even after they had converted, or so he argues, the rise of this extreme form of assimilation of Jews would hardly have been possible. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. [] Goldhagen's book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary ones. 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. 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. The German people thought the Nazis were doing the right thing for Germany. Christopher Browning wrote in response to Goldhagen's criticism of him in the 1998 "Afterword" to Ordinary Men published by HarperCollins: Goldhagen must prove not only that Germans treated Jewish and non-Jewish victims differently (on which virtually all historians agree), but also that the different treatment is to be explained fundamentally by the antisemitic motivation of the vast majority of the perpetrators and not by other possible motivations, such as compliance with different government policies for different victim groups. [2], Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. The New Yorker, April 22, 1996 P. 44. [6], In 1992, the American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled Ordinary Men about the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which had been used in 1942 to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.
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