Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

In later works, the author may want to compare German anti-Semitism with that of France, Britain, or Russia to reinforce his point about its unique ‘eliminationist’ virulence in Germany. It will not be possible to write about the Holocaust without taking into account the findings of this extraordinary book. But those who believe that people are motivated only by self-interest will find his conclusion hard to accept, since it might oblige them to change their truncated view of human nature.

But nowhere does he deny that ‘eliminationism’ became ‘exterminationism’ because of the deliberate, systematic policies of Hitler and the Nazis, nor does he argue that every German was an eliminationist, nor does he say that a society cannot, by confronting its crimes, extirpate its worst prejudices and overcome its past. Goldhagen will probably be attacked for indicting a whole society.

That part of his book is likely to be the most controversial. Goldhagen provides the reader with massive evidence of both the depth and scope of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and the degree to which it impregnated the political culture before Hitler. The only convincing explanation is ideology: it is anti-Semitism that drove ordinary Germany to unspeakable murders. He shows that those who refused to become murderers were given the opportunity to opt out of the massacres and were not punished. The result is overwhelming and devastating, not only because of the detailed account of the crimes, but also because the author shows that tens of thousands of ordinary Germans - not just the SS or Nazis - took part in the Holocaust, and because he systematically and convincingly dismisses such standard explanations as the habit of obedience, coercion, and group pressure. Goldhagen has done prodigious research in order to find out who the ‘willing executioners’ were and what they did. The Holocaust was not simply the attempt to realize. Urn:oclc:262890670 Scandate 20090416195405 Scanfactors 51 Scanner scribe6.la.archive.A challenging, powerfully argued, and morally passionate account of the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Goldhagen proposed that by the time of Hitlers rise to power in 1933, Germanys Aryan population was already ready to murder all the Jews. OL2959673W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 94.02 Pages 652 Possible copyright status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0349107866 Urn:lcp:hitlerswillingex00gold:epub:15dcd84e-fff7-4646-a44c-3bcfa688490c Extramarc NYU Bobcat Foldoutcount 0 Identifier hitlerswillingex00gold Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6nz8jf3x Isbn 0679446958 Lccn 95038591 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 22:18:40 Boxid IA1637824 Boxid_2 CH113101 Camera Canon 5D City New York Donor

Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen