Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagenin 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. 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.
Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized. The Hitler s Responsibility Of The Holocaust challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. 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 go here was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents.
The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning 's book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei and his narrative challenges numerous aspects of Hiitler book.
The Silence Of The Holocaust
Almond Award for Hitler s Responsibility Of The Holocaust best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreitthe German historiographical debate of the s that sought to explain Nazi history. 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".
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".
Inthe American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled Ordinary Men about the Reserve Police Battalionwhich had been used in to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburgwho had been drafted but found unfit for military duty.
To What Extent Was Hitler Responsible for the Holocaust?
In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhardthese men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, Rexponsibility shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice please click for source 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 Hitler s Responsibility Of The Holocaust opting out.
Browning argued that the men of Unit agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressurenot blood-lust or primal hatred. In his review of Ordinary Responsiibility published in July[8] Goldhagen expressed agreement with several of Browning's findings, namely, that the killings were not, Hitler s Responsibility Of The Holocaust many people believe, done entirely by SS men, but also by Trawnikis ; that the men of Unit had the option not to kill, and — a point Goldhagen emphasizes — that no German was ever punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews.
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That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism. In Hitler's Willing Executioners Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism, which he called " eliminationist antisemitism ," a virulent ideology stretching back through centuries of German history.
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. Goldhagen charged Reslonsibility 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. His approach would be anthropological, treating Germans the same continue reading that an anthropologist would describe preindustrial people who believed in absurd things such as trees having magical powers. Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological " thick description " in the manner of Clifford Geertz.]
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