Hitler's Willing Executioners
.jpg) |
|
| Author | Daniel Goldhagen |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | The Holocaust |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
|
Publication date
|
1996 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 622 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 33103054 |
| 940.5318 | |
| LC Class | D804.3 .G648 |
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 the German political culture, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identity, and that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.
The book aims to dispel several popular notions about the scope of German complicity in the Holocaust, which Goldhagen regards to be myths. These "myths" include: the notion that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Werhmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology that had no historical antecedents in Germany.
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. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. His narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book, however. 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".
Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. 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. The book was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".
...
Wikipedia