Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

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Summary: Racist Shmonzes
Review: I have a PhD in history and know how personal agendas can distort scholarship. In the 1930s, Dr. Goebbels used widespread Jewish support for the Communist movement to construct a Jewish collective guilt for the Stalinist massacres-- ludicrously blaming even anti-communist Jews, or the vast unpolitical majority. Now Dr. Goldhagen uses the same techniques of tendencious and selective picking of sources to give a scholarly sheen to racist prejudice against Germans. That is why scholars, e.g. Norman Finkelstein and Alfred de Zayas, have condemned the book (just look at the damning reviews in Harvard's H-Net, written by people who actually know the subject). But since Amazon Books thought it ethical to sell this racist diatribe, what is next? Scholarship from the KKK, or from the Black Goldhagen, Leonard Jeffries, who indicted "ordinary Whites" as murderous "ice-people", without, though, getting so much media applause?

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Summary: Collective Guilt Absurd
Review: Goldhagen espouses the absurd viewpoint of collective guilt (much like Levi Primo). The work is overstated and should be taken with a dose of Browning or another author grounded in historical fact. Book sure to stimulate conversation, which is good, but is also just as suredly going to mislead novices in holocaust studies who read this book only because of its noteriety

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Summary: Hitler's Willing Executioners
Review: This book is one of the first books that I have read about the Holocaust. Though Daniel Goldhagen was ridiculed by the German population, I really believed in some of the things he had to say. I really did not have much prior historical knowledge of many of the events in this book. When I was done reading it, with a little explaining from my teacher, I really understood this book. I thought that it was very well written, even though there were some complicated and slow places. It showed me that Dr. Goldhagen felt quite passionate about his position. Some of his views were qutie radical, and were understandibly insulting to the German people. I did enjoy this book, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in this area

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Summary: Poor Scholarship
Review: I think this book is not trustworthy. Prof. Goldhagen is certainly not wrong in his depiction of the horrifying, voluntary cruelty practiced by the perpetrators of the Holocaust, nor is he mistaken in his claim that complicity in the Holocaust was widespread in Nazi Germany. But his claim to be the first to discover these facts is false, and his references to the existing historical literature on the Holocaust grossly distort the interpretations of other researchers. Goldhagen mentions on several occasions how much he dislikes the work of one of the greatest scholars of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, whose book *The Destruction of the European Jews* is regarded as the most comprehensive study of the German "bureaucracy of annihilation" ever to appear. No wonder Goldhagen doesn't like it: his claims to "the utmost originality" appear pretty weak to anyone who knows Hilberg's work. The book appeared in 1961, and Hilberg established immediately the immense scope of German complicity in the Holocaust: "The machinery of destruction, then, was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole: the difference was only one of function. The machinery of destruction *was* the organized community in one of its special roles." I warn readers of *Hitler's Willing Executioners* that they simply cannot trust Goldhagen's discussions of the works of other scholars of the Holocaust: accuracy and fairness appear to have been sacrificed to Goldhagen's insistence that he, and only he, can be right. I have no way of knowing whether Goldhagen's references to the archival material that he has read are more reliable, but a recent reviewer (Ruth Bettina Birn, Chief Historian of the War Crimes Investigation Section of the Canadian Government) who has used the same documents has claimed that his use of those sources is questionable (see her review in the *Historical Journal*, published by Cambridge University in 1997). I wish this had been a better book: Prof. Goldhagen is obviously talented, and we could use a book that examines anew how much of the participation in the Holocaust was voluntary. But this book is not good, and it will lead readers unfamiliar with the historiography of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism astray

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Summary: History Gone Awry
Review: Yet another book about an overworked topic, this time arriving at the hate-filled conclusion of every German being guilty of the Holocaust. This book is not written by a historian. It is a biased attempt to revive past prejudices against the German people. Most people already know the author has an agenda, and only the press praises the book. The people, after having paid the exorbitant price and read the book, are too intelligent to believe the fairytale-like conclusions drawn by the author

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Summary: Very Bad History
Review: I took an MA degree in modern European history at a little midwest University 40 years ago. I have not worked in the field since, but maintained a hobbyist's interest. I read this book when it first came out and I thought it was interesting. But the scholarly journals have just torn it apart with an avalance of revealed distortions by Goldhagen. What surely must pound in the final coffin nail and bury this book is now out in the July issue of NEW LEFT REVIEW in an article by Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein leaves you wondering if anything beyond the copyright date in HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS can be believed. Also, ORDINARY MEN by Browning, referred to frequently in the review above, was based largely on THE RISE OF POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA by Peter Pulzer

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Summary: Well substantiated study.
Review: I was lucky. My family and I left Germany just before the war. I was young, but not too young not to remember the excesses of the Nazi regime personally including Kristallnacht. After reading this book, I thought that perhaps my wife is right. She refuses to set foot on German soil. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust.Goldhagen's book is well researched.It is about time to revive the subject and to show that these crimes were not only perpetrated by a small gang of Nazis. Its style is bloated however, and he could have made his case in 2/3 the space.And what gives him the right to coin new English words such as "immiserate"? I could not find these in any standard English dictionary

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Summary: Lacks of Depth of Thinking
Review: Goldhaven is an historian with an agenda despite protestations of the opposite. The first two chapters are illuminating as they cover the narrative and political rationales for holocaust thinking. But he relies heavily on this event as a "German thing . . . " rather than a human thing. He fails to account for "other" archetypes as a human response to social and cultural conditions or the Jungian idea of transmission of the "shadow" archetype to another. Thus, Goldhaven stumbles as he indicts the "German" character as flawed and lets humanity off the hook. Indeed, he glazes over the Allies ignoring reports of the concentration camps when deciding on troop deployment. The book title promises that "ordinary" people will be the focus of the book. He goes to great lengths to prove that the police squads were not mouth foaming SS Troops or Hitler goons. Luckly Goldhaven avoids the myth of Hitleresque hypnotism as propogated first by Shirer in "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". But the proof is self-serving. History is only useful when accuracy leads to truth. While Goldhaven is accurate, he avoids the truth of "humanity" in favor of indicting "Germanity". Thus, he folds into Jewish angst the style of which is described by Friedman in "From Beruit to Jerusalem." Goldhaven's tome is a dream unfullfilled; like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep.

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Summary: Beneath the horror
Review: A starving, shrunken remnant of a man staggers and collapses before you. He falls perhaps in a street, or perhaps in a desolate field, or perhaps in the ash white dust amidst the barbed wire - it is now of little consequence, for his entire world has become a killing ground.
And later, after the day has ended, after the routines wind down, after the barracks chatter and the edgy laughter, after the letter to your wife and daughter, after a final cigarette, this by now not so singular event will barely cross your mind. And when it does at all, it merely echoes the contempt that rose like bile as your boot had crashed down on his ribs, rousing him to rise up to meet his appointed end.
This twisted portrait of horror, officially bred, culturally born, has now become the stuff of everyday 1942 life. For the skeletal creature is a common Jew, a defiler of the Nation, and his past stretches back through other beatings, other imprisonments, back through the robbing of his home and his livelihood, through the torment, the taunts, the jeers, back to his proscribed "otherness". And you, you are a common German, a defender of the Volk, whose past also stretches back, through other murders, other tortures, other venomous cleansings, to all the ranting lessons that were learned so early, so easily and so well, of mindless fear and hate.
Such are tales of madness.
Such are the lessons of Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust".

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Summary: Interesting and controversial viewpoint atrociously written
Review: This book examines the role of ordinary Germans in the development and implementation of mass murder against jews and other groups judged "non-Aryan" prior to and during World War II. Though unpalatable to today's society. especially modern Germans, the assertion that the majority of the Deutsche Volk, living in the participatory democracy of 1932 that brought the National Socialist party actually approved of their policies should not be all that surprising. National Socialist and Communist terror strategies helped polarized the electorate of the period producing a clamor for order which the Nazi's promised. Other Western powers, intent upon exacting revenge on Germany for its role in precipitating WWI did not permit the international framework that might have led to reduced extremism. As it was however, the German people wanted a strong leader and, given the abject poverty brought to many by increasingly onerous wartime reparations and the onset of the Great Depression,it is not surprising that many people, from all levels of society, focused their despair on those groups viewed as different or playing a role in their misery. The book is badly written with long, rambling sentences (sadly not even Faulkneresque) detracting from the interesting underlying body of good research