Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

A brilliant and damning exposure of anti-Semitism in Germany even before the rise of the Nazis. It is also a damning indictment of the German churches that failed to speak up. However, it is important to set the record straight regarding the origins of anti-Semitism. The Early Church started life as a (persecuted) sect within Judaism. It was only in the second half of the first century that Messianic Jews were excluded from the synagogue and placed under an anathema in the formal synagogue liturgy. From the second century onwards during persecutions Jews frequently denounced Christians to the Roman authorities thus leading to their deaths. The Jews became the bitter enemies of Christianity and not the other way round, at least at that stage. This was the beginning of anti-Semitism which eventually, during the Middle Ages, grew into a hysterical and irrational phenomenon actively encouraged by popular Catholic teaching. At the Reformation, things were not helped by Luther’s anti-Semitic outbursts. Then in the 19th century it was Hegelianism (a revival of pagan aristotelianism) and its outgrowth, Darwinism, which gave the movement a racial flavour, which coincided with the rise of German nationalism. The author well summarizes the situation at the end of the 19th century, when he says that: “It is thus incontestable that the fundamentals of Nazi anti-Semitism which had deep roots in Germany,…..were integral to German political culture.” From then on it was but a short step to the horrors of the holocaust, which the author documents in such damning detail. However, the author further reveals that “Anti-Semitism was endemic even to Weimar Germany, so widespread that nearly every political group in the country shunned the Jews”, and that “The centrality of anti-Semitism to the (Nazi) Party’s world view …..mirrored the sentiments of German culture.” The remaining two thirds of the book are really about how the killing machine worked and which excuses the Germans appealed to in trials after the war. This section contains much original material on the execution squads, the camps and the death marches. What transpires is that many of those involved were not Nazis but “ordinary” Germans and that in many cases, they did not have to kill, were given the option of opting out, and could easily have got away with disobeying orders. They were often aided in their gruesome tasks by “Catholic” Poles or Lithuanians who were equally anti-Semitic. Investigations indicate that “no one was ever executed or sent to a concentration camp for refusing to kill Jews.” Some say that the Germans were conditioned by their culture to blindly obey orders, but this is not so as there were many cases in the 20th century of Germans disobeying orders. Germans were wantonly cruel because they perceived Jews to be subhuman. Killing the Jews was for many a deed done not for Nazism but for Germany. The book wisely ends, in the foreword to the German edition, with the observation that a new generation has now grown up in Germany with a democratic mindset. However, the book needs to be slightly updated as in the Eastern part of Germany, where the problem of the holocaust was never honestly faced during the period of communist rule, there have been disquieting revivals of anti-Semitism.

One of the best books on the Holocaust. While I normally read different nonfiction books to swap the topics, couldn’t put this one down. Very well researched. Useful to everyone who is asking how could someone get so many institutions and ordinary citizens involved in a genocidal slaughter from getting them to carry out hostilities against Jews to committing genocide. It’s great that the crucial years leading to the war are briefly covered as well. Highly recommend.

This book has been described as one of the most important books ever written on the Holocaust, and I'd have to agree with that statement, but not necessarily because I agree with everything written here, more for that debate it has ignited. Goldhagen basically sets out to defuse the myth that the majority of Germans had no culpability as regards the Holocaust, did not know about it, did not participate in it and could not have stopped it. He argues, in many places quite convincingly, that it was impossible for the majority of Germans not to have had at the very least a vague idea of what was going on; that German society had been for many years before the Nazis came to power permeated by an 'eliminationist antisemitism' that advocated exterminating the Jews; that had Germans shown any disgust or opposition to the initial treatment the Jews received, after Kristellnacht, for example, before the Holocaust began properly, it could have been stopped, just as the Nazis backed down over the Euthanasia program or the hostility to the Church. He also argues against the idea that there would have been repercussions for refusing to participate, and highlights the fact that there was almost no instances of anyone being sent to a concentration camp or suffering in any way for refusing to kill. However, I must point out this is analytical history, theoretical history - if one if looking for a narrative history, this is not the book. You can tell this book began as a PhD thesis - it very much reads like one. Many reviewers have complained about the dry and excessively academic style - but perhaps that is a failing of publicity, not the book. You cannot expect academic theses to read like popular history, and if this book has been marketed at the 'average reader', ie. not historians, that's hardly a failing of the author. It's a worthy book, and worth persevering with, if only for the very interesting questions it raises about just how much one can extend the 'guilt' of the Holocaust to Germany as a whole, and not just the Nazis. After all, there were only somewhere in the region of 8 million Nazi Party members, and many millions more 'ordinary Germans'. This is definitely not the final word in this debate, but it must receive praise for igniting it and highlighting it, if nothing else.

It's sad to see this book misrepresented in so many reviews here. Goldhagen does not say that Germans are inherently racist or antisemitic. He does not say - indeed, he explicitly rejects the idea - that they share 'collective responsibility' for the Holocaust. He does not claim that the Jews were the Nazis' only victims, but he does say - backed up by ample evidence - that the Jews were persecuted with a frenzied and brutal zeal that was unmatched. He does not claim that every German was complicit, although he does show that opposition to anti-Jewish laws was expressed only by a minority, even in private. He does not claim that antisemitism did not exist elsewhere, nor that the Holocaust couldn't have happened in any other countries had a Hitlerian government got into power. His basic thesis is repeated so often in the text that it is hard to see how any reader could miss it. It is that the Holocaust was not the work of a relatively small group of people who were either ideologically crazed or 'only following orders'. The evidence he provides for this is, in my view, incontrovertible. He does not study the actions of hardened SS thugs or longtime Nazi party members, but instead looks at massacres committed by groups whose members were drawn from a cross-section of German society. He looks at torture and murder carried out by people who gladly volunteered for these duties. He looks at the savagery of people who were not following orders and who, indeed, sometimes disobeyed orders to carry on killing. If soldiers, camp guards and - in many cases - civilians were not being forced to engage in excessive violence against Jews then the obvious explanation is that they wanted to engage in excessive violence against Jews. Why? Because a combination of a longstanding antisemitic culture and a fanatically antisemitic government had convinced very large numbers of them that antisemitic fantasies were the truth. The virtual extermination of the Jews in Europe was a massive enterprise of which most Germans were aware and huge numbers were actively involved. Goldhagen's thesis - that the perpetrators of the Holocaust believed in what they were doing - should not be controversial. It is Occam's Razor. Other explanations might be more forgiving, but they do not stand up against the facts.

Thought provoking and intriguing book. Covers a lesser studied part of the Holocaust. Will be valuable for teaching my secondary school students.

This was to have been required reading for the Holocaust class offered at Western Kentucky University and Dr. Jack Thacker. However, Dr Thacker suffered serious health problems and the class was cancelled. I wanted to learn more about the horrors of the Holocaust and how it happened so I ordered the book to read and learn. Dr Goldhagen has really stuck his neck out to discuss openly some of the sociological patterns of Europe over the past few centuries in a study of antisemitism. It seems most people had a negative viewpoint of the Jews, even though most had never even met a Jew. This long term sociological "brainwashing" of Europe naturally led to actions which took place during World War 2. This book made me feel uncomfortable because I now have to reexamine my attitudes about various people groups and if my attitudes are based on truth and experience or on generalities and gossip. In our world of 2015, there is no shortage of hate between people groups and political ideologies. If more people today were to learn from the mistakes of the past, which Dr. Goldhagen so boldly points out, there may be hope for just settlement of today's massive and complex problems.

Verbose and erudite. The small print and the inane circumambulation around a subject that has emotionally griped the author, as the son of an Holocaust survivor, had me angry long before I stumbled over his cultural based hypocrisy. The central thesis is sound: that ordinary Germans willingly perpetrated the holocaust, and were culturally prepared to execute the culmination of centuries of Christian based anti-Semitism to its nth degree. Accepting the thesis however doesn't allow acceptance of the cultural baggage that the author brings to his thesis. His hypocrisy about American and Israeli anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism (faith based 'magical thinking'), while criticising twentieth century German society, in his opening introduction, made the idea of a well balanced Harvard historian's study mute. Much of what he has to say needs to be read and understood by the average reader interested in the holocaust, which leads to my general criticism of content over style. The book strikes the average reader as dull and too far up his own intellectual assumptions to be worth reading. Compared to Haffner, Hilberg, or even Gilbert, this book will be a struggle to read and will make this reader far angrier about the authors prejudices and self-righteous hypocrisy by the end of the journey. The Holocaust was an inevitable extension of human history in an industrial age where god is dead. Centuries of pogroms perpetrated by Christian dominated countries against the Jewish (Christ-killers) communities in their midst, in a society where the majority of the population still uses faith as a means of pretending to know stuff, inevitably leads to genocide. The genocide and concentration camps of the British Empire, The American genocide of native Americans, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by modern Israel, The genocide of Bosnian muslims by Christian dominated Serbian and Croatian populations, would suggest this all too human trait is not isolated to the Germans in particular. This book is looking at perhaps the worst example of industrial scale genocide of a social group based on religion, and yet compared to the Soviet extermination excesses under Stalin, the scale of genocide is not the worst in history. The Jewish holocaust became the expression of the desire of the majority of Europeans to be Judenrein (free of Jews). Like the muslims of today, all social ills, subversions, warmongering, and terrorism, were blamed on the immigrant population as an easy scapegoat. The attitude to migrants, savages (indigenous populations), and minority ethnic groups, in all societies today bear all the hallmarks of the German people in the 20's and 30's of last century. The point is 'we' are not so different. Our 'modern' societies are still riddled with racism, fear, and faith based magical thinking. The popularist politicians like Trump and Farrage thrive by playing to the fears and prejudices of the average citizens of their electorate. The emergence of the far-right nationalist parties, in response to fears of terrorism, and the inadequacy of democracies to deal with them, are a repeat of the same propaganda that swept national socialism to power in Germany. We are not so different. Yet this author fails to see this in his focus on Germany as 'the' example from his lofty judgemental perch. Perhaps he mistakenly thinks the majority of Americans think like he does, in the rarified air of academia, but the evidence for the anti-intellectualism and faith based science denialism of the majority of the population in America would suggest he is wrong in this assumption. The problem for Germany was that it allowed the Nazis to destroy the better aspects, of what it means to be German (read Haffner), whilst emphasising the worst traits of jingoistic nationalist egotism, with lies about making the country great again and destroying the enemies within. How you turn 'ordinary' people into hate-filled racists requires the repeating of lies, scapegoating, and the legal state apparatus to implement the worst excesses of human nature, against minority groups, blamed for all the social ills of your nation. What is worrying is how many nations in the world today are already far along the same path of the 'willing Germans' we make 'monsters' of at our own peril. Sorry, but humans in general don't get off the hook that easily. If you think it can't happen here, then you are sadly mistaken. Scapegoating migrant communities for your societies problems is merely the beginning steps towards an elimination of the problem style solution of which the Jewish holocaust is the obvious go-to example.

I mean I bought this for my A-Level History coursework, I only refer to 2 chapters because it's a bit heavy going and I aren't particularly interested in this area of history personally. My teacher swears by him though so I guess give him a whirl.

The print is tiny and on most pages and also appears for fuzzy/blurred. Such a pity, because it seems like a very interesting subject.

Excellent book, must read

How could a book like this be a page turner? How could it be riveting? You read it, and then you wish you could abandon everything else and finish it. Have a pen in your hand to annotate it, take notes; this book is going to change your entire understanding of the Final Solution. There is something else that is perhaps unique about this book that I have found very rarely in reading. As a writer Goldhagen has the ability to say in a sentence what many writers require paragraphs to say. He can say in a paragraph what others require pages to say. His choice of words as such is so remarkable that when he is done writing, you realize that you could not have said it better yourself if you had a year to think about it. At the same time, there are problems with the organization of the book and it seems it could have been substantially shorter had the author wished it to be. Having said the aforesaid, let's get into it. Just when you thought you had read all the necessary books on the holocaust including the required biographies of Hitler by William Shirer, Ian Kershaw and Allan Bullock, you come across Daniel Goldhagen's work on Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust, and everything you thought you knew is turned upside down. A half century ago the philosopher Hannah Arendt was a writer based in New York. She went to Israel and was an observer at the trial of Adolph Eichmann who was discovered by the Mossad living in Argentina. He was living in Argentina where Israeli agents discreetly spirited him away to Israel to stand trial as one of Hitler's chief organizers of the concentration camps. His specific responsibility was for the transportation system used in the holocaust. Arendt spent day after day looking at Eichmann in a glass booth during the trail and trying to understand what was unique about this man that allowed him to be involved in such mass killing? She could not figure it out. She finally came up with a famous concept which she referred to as the BANALITY OF EVIL. This man was nothing special. He could have been a cook or a dishwasher, or a tailor. He was simply plucked to do a job and he tried to do it well, with no thought whatsoever to the moral issues involved. Eichmann was a product of the German culture, and in the end this culture provided the impetus for the Final Solution and it is this culture which Goldhagen explores for 461 pages and 125 pages of well-crafted footnotes. The book is divided into six parts and 16 chapters. Goldhagen presents a detailed history of German anti-Semitism going back two centuries, and it this history which changes our understanding and perspective on this terrible event. Much has already been written good and bad about the author's narrative on this website. This reader's problem with so much that has been written is that it certainly appears that the reviews are being colored by the reader's subjective opinions on this subject before they even read the book. The only subject that has generated as much anger on both sides in my opinion is the subject of the JFK assassination where pro and non-pro conspiracy theorists rant and rave against each other without either side legitimately searching for truth. Goldhagen's research and book deserve an objective reading before people form opinions. This reader for one has no axe to grind on this subject as having been born after this tragedy took place, I have tried to look at this as history and figure out what really happened and how. Goldhagen has added demonstrably to literature and should be applauded for his efforts. Now having said this, here are a few of the highlights of the book in case you never read it, frankly this is a painful book to read. This is not a walk in the park. Having said that, this is what you need to know: * Hitler and his followers were the only future mass murderers to be FREELY elected into office. It never happened with Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, or anyone to my knowledge. * It is a myth that Germans who refused to participate in the mass killings had no choice but to participate. The evidence demonstrates that they could have asked to be re-assigned. They could have walked away. In certain instances superiors specifically told their underlings if you can't handle this, step forward. Very few took that step. * It is a myth that the common German was not aware of the mass killing that was taking place (page 8). Soldiers and police who were highly active in the slaughter constantly sent back pictures that were taken of the slaughter to their sweet hearts, wives and families. They were proud of the Final Solution. * It is a myth that Hitler only dreamed of creating this killing apparatus late in the war during the 1940's. Hitler during every step of his leadership constantly tried to stay in tune with the German people and not get too far out in front of them. As an example he instituted a euthanasia program for the infirm, mentally imbalance, and others during the 1930's. He was forced to back away from it because of the public backlash against it. There was not such backlash in his campaigns and operations against those who were Jewish. It was only with the war that Hitler found himself with constrains removed against his pursuit of the Final Solution. It was then that he was able to gain control of territories with millions of Jews as in Poland and the western Soviet Union. He was then able to act upon his already embedded philosophy of KILLILNG the Jewish race. Page 376 * It was a myth that only the most dedicated of Nazis performed the killing tasks. These were ORDINARY Germans as personified by the members of the police battalions who were older men in their mid to late 30's, not eligible for military service who volunteered for the task of following the German troops into Poland and the Soviet Union once the areas were secured and executed hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children who were not part of the war effort. There were certain things exposed by Goldhagen that this reader personally found amazing. As an example there came a point shortly before the end of the war where Himmler was attempting to negotiate an end to the war with the Americans. He gave the order no more killing of the Jews. Himmler simply did not want the continued killings to interfere with his negotiations. German guards nevertheless continued to slaughter Jewish people on forced marches in the last days of the war exercising their zeal and lust for killing even while under orders not to kill. This one act alone blows out the door the argument that the Germans only killed out of fear of reprisals of their leaders, and for their careers and families. In many instances officers brought their wives along on their killing sprees to watch the executioners in action. There were pictures of this activity in the book. CONCLUSION: Hitler's Willing Executioners is a book we must read to begin to understand the underlying anti-Semitism that was pervasive to the German culture that set the whole ambience for how Hitler was able to harness the energy of the German people to support him in what anyone living today should view as insanity run wild. It is precisely because this happened in an advanced civilization and culture that was 20th century Germany that this tragedy must be studied again and again. Where were the churches and the doctors, the lawyers, the intellectuals, the people of good cheer while the atmosphere of killing was developing and then took place? How did the guards spend their days activating their most primitive instincts for one on one cruelty and then go home and have dinner with their families? Read Daniel Goldhagen's work and find out, and thank you for reading this review. Richard Stoyeck

Very insightfulad to how ordinary people become killing machines through coercion.

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