Rating: 
Summary: Anti-German Diatribe
Review: This is one of the poorest books I have read in a long time, both in terms of content and style. Although the book is supposed to be an objective evaluation, it contains virtually nothing objective about ordinary Germans. Goldenhagen lays out an unconvincing premise of a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism in Germany. He the uses a series of anecdotes as "proof" of his points. "Academic" writing often is stylistically wanting, and this book is no exception. Goldenhagen repeats the same points over and over again, as it repetition makes them true. This book contributes little or nothing to the understanding of the Holocaust.
Rating: 
Summary: Eye-opening, if somewhat dry
Review: Before this book I was basically ignorant of the holocaust of the Jews during WWII. Because education had to be soft and politically correct, we were denied the hard facts lest we be offended. I was assigned an open paper and was browsing the bookstore when I came across a copy of this book. Really not intending to do a report on anything concerning boring history, I picked up a copy and began thumbing through, pausing at the pictures. I was shocked. I subsequently wrote a paper on the mind of the "normal" German during the second World War, and this book served well as a resource. While the book was somewhat dry and overly scholastic, it made me ashamed that I was ignorant of such a slaughter. I'd recommend the book to anyone who doesn't get nauseated at the thought of racism, however seemingly innocuous.
Rating:
Summary: Read it first year in college...
Review: And I must say that it left me with a negative impression of German people as a whole. I saw Germans as a people that had been fed anti-semitism throughout their lives and were dying to get rid of all the Jews. This may have been true for a significant amount of the population, but I believe Goldhagen takes it too far in the book. Also neglecting the other groups that were also killed and sent to concentration camps, or the failure to mention the people that willingly risked their lives to save Jews, makes her seem even more anti-German or anti-Eastern Europeans (Poland and Lithuania to be more specific). Just as many Poles were killed during Hitler's reign as Jews in Poland. She fails to mention that, which I feel is a drawback. Yes, some Germans were active in sending many Jews to their death, but that was not the only group that they were sending to their death, and also not all Germans wanted to get rid of the Jews. Many of them feared for their own lives, and fear always leads people to become bystanders. Also a few risked their lives to save Jews, but imagine how difficult and fearful of an experience that must've been. Humans are the same everywhere, and Goldhagen is making the mistake of singling out Germans and other Eastern Europeans as the worst people ever. Overall a controversial book, with her views being too extreme.
Rating:
Summary: A pontificating, biased account
Review: Unlike Goldhagen, I will be succinct. This work is a very boring read as the author writes in an academia style and not in simple prose. Additionally he reverts to the same idea over and over again - all Germans in the war were bigots and happily took part in the Holocaust. One of the most biased and unenlightening books I have read on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling, yet horrific in its detail
Review: Mr. Goldenhagen casts doubts on those ordinary German in the countless documentaries claiming they had no knowledge of the killing going on all around them. Covers in detail the activities of the "police squads" behind the lines in occupied countries. This is a subject that has not been covered as extensively as other facets of the Holocaust. I thank Mr. Goldenhagen for this.
Rating:
Summary: This is a profoundly insightful book on the holocaust
Review: This is a profoundly insightful book on the holocaust which is based on considerable scholarship. Its central thesis is that the main cause of the holocaust was a cognitive cultural model pervasive then in German society, that Jews posed a great threat to Germany and had to be eliminated, the "final solution" of the "Jewish problem". This thesis of Goldhagen's is the only explanation for the holocaust that makes sense and which can effectively explain all of its unique features. My only criticism is that Goldhagen did not address the central relationship between authoritarianism and antisemitism.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't ring quite true with other things I've read...
Review: As someone who is American, non-Jewish, and is a post WWII "boomer" all I really know about the war and what went on inside the third reich is what I've read different places. This book doesn't go into the effort that the Nazis took to keep the Final Solution secret, to the point of killing ordinary Germans who discovered the truth by accident. It doesn't emphasize the fact that once the German clergy denounced the euthenasia program that was started just before the war, Hitler had it stopped, at least inside of Germany.I grew up around German-Americans and Polish-Americans and I am well aware of the anti-semitic opinions that many of them had. I can only assume that such attitudes were in place with at least equal force in Europe itself. But I do also think that this book goes too far, and it also minimizes the suffering and atrocities commited against other groups that the Nazis slaughtered as well, such as the gypsies and whatever clergy, Slavs or partisans that tried to stand up to them.
Rating: 
Summary: Captivating, yet resentful
Review: Not being a scholar of the Holocaust, I cannot and will not judge the correctness of the facts and hypotheses presented here. This is a captivating book, yet it left me with a sour aftertaste: it seems to be motivated, at least in part, by resentment. And this (however justified) often spoils the pleasure of reading.
Rating:
Summary: A must for Jewish youth.
Review: It cant be forgoten, what Goldhagen has done is to remind the world that anti-semitism is a desease, as is any form of racism. It also teaches us that the a nation as a whole is responsible for the war crimes of their leaders.
Rating:
Summary: A provoking but not really scientific book
Review: Probably, I must apologize because I am only a "normal German student" so I only want to add two quotations from famous men before I say something in favor of Germany: First, I witnessed a brilliant lecture by Prof. Dr. Alfred Grosser on the future of Europe (Grosser is a great Jewish scientist from the Sorbonne University in Paris who fled from Germany when he was a child and who became a famous advocate of French-German friendship since the sixties). In this lecture at the university of Trier in autumn 1998, he said incidentally: "In my opinion, Goldhagen's book is not honorable. There were also thousands of purely German victims in the German Nazi concentration camps, for example other religious Christian minorities, pacifists and religious leaders (Bonhoeffer, killed), social democrats (Schumacher, survived and became the first German opposition leader after the war), communists (Thälmann, killed) and from a certain date on, everyone else who could be a German danger for Hitler's power. Certainly, the absolute majority of victims were Jews; but not to mention the German victims in an appropriate manner, too, those who were also tortured and murdered by Hitler's creatures in their camps, this is simply not a scientific way of research." Second quotation: Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Jewish-Austrian "hunter" of Nazi criminals: "When I am asked how all of this could happen in Germany and Austria, the countries of so much culture, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller etc., etc.; then I always say: This simply shows that under certain circumstances all of this could happen everywhere in our world!" Today, there are laws in Germany that also allow to punish people from other nations as the US-Nazi Gary Lauck (from Nebraska) in 1995 who denied the crimes of Auschwitz, who publicly called for hatred against Jews and "inferior races" and who would not have been punished in the USA for the same "crime". So, if you are a "Neo-Nazi", please be careful what you say when you enter today's Germany. Unfortunately, we still have enough of you and you may stay longer in Germany ('s prisons) than you expected. (By the way, the German branch of the so-called Scientology church is observed by German secret services because of it's propagated views of society that look like Hitler's party NSDAP-"social-darwinism" and not because of it's religious ideas. The Germans don't know how it looks like in the USA.) Thank you for your patience.
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