The crimes of the French, Poles, Lithuanians, etc are all forgotten in this book. Totally wrong. [39] Many media commentators observed that, while the book launched a passionate national discussion about the Holocaust,[40] this discussion was carried out civilly and respectfully. Bibliography: Bibliography Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Visszafogottabban vettek ht rszt a npirtsban? I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why. 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. Reviewed by Carl Schulkin (Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City, Mo) Published on H-High-S (December, 1996) The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. The vast majority stood by and laughed. [] Goldhagen's book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary ones. 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. 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 . 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. 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. [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. [43] Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed"[44] or "bad history". [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". Instead, Goldhagen became a bellwether of German readiness to confront the past. Guttenplan argued that the Nazi theories about "Judo-Bolshevism" made for a more complex explanation for the Holocaust than the Goldhagen thesis about an "eliminationist anti-Semitic" culture. 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. 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. 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. Hilberg, to whom Browning dedicated his monograph, wrote that "Goldhagen has left us with the image of a medieval-like incubus, a demon latent in the German mind waiting for the opportunity for the chance to strike out". "[91] Rosenbaum asked Goldhagen about Richard Levy's 1975 book The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany which traced the decline of the vlkisch parties in the early 20th century until they were all but wiped out in the 1912 Reichstag election. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. 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. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. 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. [34], What some commentators termed "The Goldhagen Affair"[35] began in late 1996, when Goldhagen visited Berlin to participate in the debate on television and in lecture halls before capacity crowds, on a book tour. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. A Conversation with Raul Hilberg". In this case, I don't think I would. Ruth Bettina Birn and Volker Riess recognised the need to examine the primary sources (the Police Battalion investigation records) Goldhagen had cited and determine if Goldhagen had applied the historical method in his research. It's one of those books. [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. It's not that some of Goldhagen's ideas are wrong. [26], Using Geertz's anthropological methods, Goldhagen argued by studying the men of Battalion 101 one could engage in a "thick description" of the German "eliminationist antisemitic" culture. [9] Goldhagen instead contended that "for the vast majority of the perpetrators a monocausal explanation does suffice". [80], Goldhagen has said that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. [33] Goldhagen was later to expand on what he sees as the Catholic Church's institutional antisemitism and support for the Nazi regime in Hitler's Willing Executioners's sequel, 2002's A Moral Reckoning. [69] The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw wrote that he fully agreed with Jckel on the merits of Hitler's Willing Executioners". 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 . By clicking Sign Up, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. [71]:545 Furthermore, Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread antisemitism. Do not read it if you are looking for entertainment rather than education on the topic. And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week. [51] Browning was echoing the conclusions of the German conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber who once presented at a historians' conference in 1984 a counter-factual scenario whereby, had it been a coalition of the German National People's Party and Der Stahlhelm that took power in 1933 without the NSDAP, all the antisemitic laws in Germany that were passed between 1933 and 1938 would still have occurred but there would have been no Holocaust. Most Germans considered Jews to be parasites and not even human. I probably would get irritated by his generalizations. But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles. The anti-Christ of history - a truly shocking effort by a misleading author. 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. A book that won't leave you. The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jrgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. 'Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond", in LaCapra, D. Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds. 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 principal theme of. I don't think that Goldhagen even allows for this. Everybody got in on the discussion: survivors and scholars, journalists and talk-show hosts, Jews and non-Jews. The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen talked spoke about his new book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. I try to be critical in my choice of books about the Holocaust, because there are so many to choose from. 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. 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. These are relatively few, though, and are dealt with nicely in Brownings scholarly work, "Ordinary Men." Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, explains the historical context that brought about the Nazi party and the Holocaust. [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. 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. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.[7]. In the interview, Mommsen distinguished three varieties of German antisemitism. Open Preview. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was awarded Germanys Democracy Prize for Hitlers Willing Executioners. Her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality. It is not at all new. 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. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust" he said. Free delivery for many products. One tactic is the micro-history: find yourself a historical footnote, and then elevate it to the turning point of mankind. ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' is an attempt to demolish the standard views about Germans and the Holocaust by arguing that when it came to the Jews, average Germans had no moral scruples to. 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. It still does. Goldhagen's one-dimensional view of German antisemitism also ignores the specific impact of the vlkisch antisemitism as proclaimed by Houston Stuart Chamberlain and the Richard Wagner movement which directly influenced Hitler as well as the Nazi party. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. [27] Contra Browning, Goldhagen argued that the men of Battalion 101 were not reluctant killers, but instead willingly murdered Polish Jews in the cruelest and sadistic manner possible, that "brutality and cruelty" were central to the ethos of Battalion 101. 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. 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. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust. [42], Debate about Goldhagen's theory has been intense. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a controversial American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. Advertisement Read Next Marion Graeffin Doenhoff, reply by Gordon A. Craig "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. [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. I think not. [28] In its turn, the "culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". [49] Browning wrote: Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. Overall, this book is a scholarly work. Exceptionally wrong. [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. "[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. [23] Other historians, such as the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, the Israeli historian David Bankier, and the American historian Aron Rodrigue, while differing from Kershaw over many details about German public opinion, arguing that the term "passive complicity" is a better description than "indifference", have largely agreed with Kershaw that there was a chasm of opinion about the Jews between the Nazi "true believers" and the wider German public, whose views towards Jews seemed to have expressed more of a dislike than a hatred. Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. Also the author acts like Germans could easily choose to object conscription and simply not fight, despite the fact this was punishable by death. [91] Rosenbaum asked "So you would agree with Himmelfarb's argument? [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. 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 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. For example, an ambitious historian could write about the hula-hoop, and how it brought about dtente between America and the Soviet Union. It SHOULD be a "must read" for all people, especially those in school, but the author is dry and academic and the book could be cut by at least 1/3. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. [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 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. 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. [87] "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. Traditional explorations tended to accept at face value the usual defenses offered by the Germans: Either they did not . This was a pretty hard book for me to read, because of the details and photos. As a teenager Hitler served in WWI and years later was thrown in jail, where he wrote his book Mien Kampf. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. Would the German Royal family have kept marrying with people they considered subhuman? [] Using Goldhagen's method of handling evidence, one could easily find enough citations from the Ludwigsburg material to prove the exact opposite of what Goldhagen maintains. To the Editors. They all actively hated Jews, Slavs, Roma, blacks, and others with extreme passion and happily participated in their murder. And they did it happily because it was for the good of their country. [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 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? I didn't manage to finish this. His approach would be anthropological, treating Germans the same way that an anthropologist would describe preindustrial people who believed in absurd things such as trees having magical powers. BLAMING THE GERMANS. There are a lot of authors and a lot of books, and its difficult to stand out among the sea of words. Of course, they also thought Slavs being put into workhouses and being their slaves was the right thing, too. [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. The Germans DID make a lot of Polack jokes, but that was typically as far as it went. Brownings book is much easier to read for the lay person of Holocaust studies. 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 . If this book was widely followed, we would have little chance of preventing future genocides. 1930, as a 16-year-old. Some of his critics have agreed with him that his thesis is "not intrinsically racist or otherwise illegitimate", including Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein (A Nation on Trial). Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused. ), This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 10:24. These are the folks who brought you the Holocaust in all its "glories." [74] Bauer also suggested that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. 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. De brutalitsa nem ncl, hanem eszkz, amivel Goldhagen sajt lltsait bizonytja ezzel, a npirts gyakorlatnak brzolsval, s a gyilkosok kzelkpeivel teremti meg azt a kognitv keretet, ami szerinte az egsz holokauszt kulcsa. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. To single out Germans in this manner felt nave and overly simplistic to me. I know thats fucked-up, but thats what was finally explained to me in this book. It required a state. This about the predators of the Holocaust, including groups and individuals who made the major decisions establishing the policy of extermination the Jewish people under Nazi regime, executed and supported it. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Hitler's Willing Executioners is an extraordinary and original contribution to the mountain of literature on the Holocaust. "[13] Instead, Goldhagen argued that historians should examine ordinary Germans of the Nazi period, in the same way, they examined the Aztecs who believed in the necessity of human sacrifice to appease the gods and ensure that the sun would rise every day. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves. In ''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' he argued that not only Nazis were the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Until deciding to devote himself full-time to writing, he taught political science and social studies for many years at Harvard University. Ez taln a legbrutlisabb szakknyv, amit valaha olvastam ehhez kpest a Schindler listja csak jtszds klkbrnyokkal zldell mezkn. Hillgruber, Andreas, "Jrgen Habermas, Karl-Heinz Janen, and the Enlightenment in the Year 1986", Piper, Ernst (Ed.). Clendinnen, Inga "The Men in the Green Tunics", Hoffmann, Peter "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" p. 105-126 from Confront! 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. 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. 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