Rating: 
Summary: An Eye-opening Thesis
Review: Author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen set about a daunting task in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners". He sets out to debunk many previous writings on the perpetrators of the Holocaust that leave out, in his opinion, the entire climate of Germany prior to WWII. Germany was a vastly anitsemitic country that permitted the persecution of the Jews to occur because they believed the Jews to be 'subhuman' and 'unworthy of living'. Goldhagen argues that most writings on the perpetrators of the Holocaust don't examine the beliefs of the vast majority of the German people.
He undertakes various examinations of who exactly is to be held responsible for the attrocities that were committed against the Jewish nation. He examines how deep the roots of antisemitism were before Hitler's rise to power, that ordinary Germans were willing to accept Hitler's belief that the only way to be rid of the evil Jews was wholesale slaughter. Did ordinary Germans bat an eye at this malicious intent? Goldhagen argues that they didn't and provides vast evidence to support his theory that Germans were not coerced into their treatment of the Jews, but abused and killed them willingly. He examines various records that support his thesis as well and gives strong treatment to the role of police battalions, work camps and death marches. There is plenty of evidence that demonstrates that the men and women who carried out these crimes were ordinary Germans, not necessarily Nazi party members or even supporters of Hitler. They were memebers of a nation of people who had been brainwashed through generations of teaching that Jews were subhuman and the cause of their misery. They truly believed that their lives would be better without Jews, and they went to any means imaginable to make that a reality.
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" is a well-written look into the German culture that existed prior to and during WWII. Goldhagen argues that too many people were involved in the crimes that they could not have been ignorant of the day-to-day killings of Jews, nor could they have been coerced into committing crimes they were morally opposed to - the evidence isn't there to support these prior claims. Although well-written, Goldhagen tends to weigh his writing down in redundancy. The opening thesis and ending conclusion are repetitive and long-winded. "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is at its strongest when Goldhagen examines the records of the crimes against the Jews, and allows the facts to speak for themselves. Anyone who has studied or read about the Holocaust always asks the same question - "How could this have happened?". I believe that Goldhagen's thesis holds many of those answers.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning! Please Read Critically
Review: Generalizations are a dangerous occupational hazard for historians. Unfortunately, Daniel Goldhagen's book is full of them. Goldhagen is not an historian. Regardless, this does not excuse poor scholarship. Had Mr. Goldhagen been trained in the historical profession for any length of time, he obviously would have been aware that themes of an historical and political nature do not fit nicely into compartmentalized categories of black and white; there are always noticeable shades of gray. Historians, social scientists and political scientists, could collectively and unanimously advise Mr. Goldhagen that in the realm of scholarly endeavors, not to mention the world in general, there are no absolutes. Having said that, Goldhagen's thesis, expressed here in plain language, that all Germans possessed a peculiar brand of anti-Semitism ("eliminationist anti-Semitism") to the extent that, given the chance, all Germans would willingly murder Jews, is almost comical in its implications. But this is no joke. In fairness, the author's intentions for writing this book are admirable, however, his methods and conclusions fall short. Goldhagen focuses his attention on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, "the men and women who in some intimate way (and the author's list is staggering) knowingly contributed to the slaughter of Jews." The author attempts to systematically reveal the motivations of the perpetrators and has established some models in which to study their actions, beliefs, rationalizations and justifications for those actions. Goldhagen categorizes the motivations of "ordinary Germans" into five types: (1) coercion, (2) blindly following orders, (3) psychological peer pressure, (4) fulfilling bureaucratic procedures with total disregard for the victims, and (5) ignorance to the real nature of their actions. Goldhagen then attempts to categorize the actions of the perpetrators by degrees of cruelty. Finally, the author asks what actions could the perpetrators have taken to avoid killings or acts of cruelty. For example, could the perpetrators have disobeyed orders or simply refused to partake in the acts of brutality? Goldhagen formulates this methodology then totally dismisses the legitimacy of this model and concludes: "the perpetrators (German society as a whole) ... having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say 'no'" They thus became, "willing executioners." Another weak contention Goldhagen makes involves labelling German anti-Semitism as particularly unique to that of other European nations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anti-Semitism surely existed in other European countries, yet Goldhagen makes no comparison between German anti-Semitism and that of other European states at all. Instead, he lumps all Germans into one basket. Another gross generalization involves Goldhagen's assertion that the members of Polizeibataillon 101 represented a fair cross-section of German society from a political standpoint anyway. As Goldhagen's critics have pointed out, the historian Christopher Browning had already conducted a study of this particular unit. Browning shows that many of the members of this unit belonged to non-German ethnic groups, particularly Czechs, were well known for their brutality towards Jews. In addition, Browning suggests that most of the members of this unit may have had psychological repercussions for their actions as was evident in the rampant alcoholism that permeated Police Battalion 101. Goldhagen waves over much of Browning's conclusions, however, and tends to select them to suit his own argument. These critiques are not meant to justify or minimize the actions of the perpetrators. The Holocaust was a horrible chapter in the history of human kind. Goldhagen's intentions were noble and this could have been a great scholarly contribution to Holocaust literature had it been written differently. This is a dangerous book. Dangerous, because it redirects hatred back at a specific nationality-Germans. Dangerous also, because of the possibility of a vast audience, not conditioned to read critically, may take Goldhagen's contentions at face value. Not many of us will ever know what it is like to have our whole family murdered at the hands of a fanatical regime. Many still remember, however, and it is this emotional chord that Goldhagen aims at that will not let the hatred toward a new, and, some may argue, an undeserving generation of Germans subside. Goldhagen's road to "reconsideration" may be paved with good intentions; however, there are many pot holes to be filled before the last chapter in this sad story is written.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but Correct
Review: Goldhagen committed the cardinal sin in academia: he made money. This, to me, seems to be the primary rationale for the heavy-handed dismissal encountered so often when the subject of "Hitler's Willing Executioners" comes up. What Goldhagen does is present the fact that many people would rather avoid--that ordinary German condoned, supported and actively participated in the mass slaughter of European Jews. He unflinchingly presents a picture of pre-war Germany and the long line of anti-Semitic behavior present in Europe, especially Germany. There is no escaping blame under Goldhagen's view--any German who did not actively resist were as guilty as those who participated, and that, in essence, is what made the Shoah the tragedy on the grand scale that it was. Goldhagen's scathing view of Germany as well as his conviction often comes across as negative, especially to those who are more willing to forgive and forget, to consign the actions of the Nazis to a different time and place. However, what Goldhagen makes evident is the truism so often repeated in Holocaust Studies: All evil requires to flourish is that good men do nothing. So it was in Hitler's Germany, and so it is in "Hitler's Willing Executioners".
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating But Ultimately Unsatisfying
Review: Goldhagen dismisses a simple thesis (that the Germans who participated in the Holocaust did so unwillingly and were under duress) and replaces it with another simple thesis (that the same Germans were eager participants whose actions were the culmination of hundreds of years of history). He deserves points for the first but loses a few for the second. Sorry, it's not that simple. Germans spent ten years under Nazi rule before the Holocaust started, that was ample preparation. Hitler (whose rise to power was not inevitable) had restored some measure of prosperity and security to Germany. Ordinary people remembered defeat during WW1 and the depression which followed. I think this led to a kind of blind faith, people didn't question, especially once Germany went to war. One could write a book called "Hitler's Unwilling Executioners" and stitch together evidence of the uncertainty of Nazi leaders (not just the rank and file) every time Hitler made a major change in policy. Such an argument would be facile but one could do it. I think Goldhagen did something similar in reverse. Still, it's a fascinating book, the author did his research, and anyone who is interested in the subject should read it. I'm still of the opinion that if Hitler had been hit by that car in 1938 the holocaust (and probably WW2) wouldn't have happened.
Rating:
Summary: Was it a question of racism? Or was it multifactorial?
Review: Goldhagen's case is simple but not simplistic. Anti-Semitism was more developed and more publicly spread out in Germany than in other European states. The extermination of Jews under auspices of the Nazis was only viable because Germans had so embraced Anti-Semitism that they categorized Jews as non-human beings - the sum of all fears, the "Other". According to Goldhagen, the ground-trooper or foot man (and foot woman) of Shoah were not just Nazis in the concentration camps and Einsatzgruppen, but hundreds of thousands of run of the mill `ordinary Germans' - in a move similar to Christopher Browning - `Volk' in the police battalions, whom - problematic as this might be -- Goldhagen regards as a representative sample of the German nation. As an amateur - who was not aware, until I read the `Afterword' and the `Foreword to the German Edition' in Appendix 3 about all the buzz this book created [...] I find it unproblematic to appreciate why: Goldhagen's unyielding avowal that the extermination of the Jews could not have happened without the active cooperation, involvement and at least tacit support of a vast majority of `ordinary Germans'. Despite the vigorous denial of an accusation of `collective guilt' (Goldhagen 481), the accusation by Goldhagen harkens back to the days of Zola's J'accuse almost 100 years ago. The very extent, character and bureaucratic nature (reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's utterance of the `Banality of Evil' in `Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil' and Christopher Browning's writing in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) [both also available on Amazon.com]) of Shoah `on the ground' makes the claim of collaboration a very believable one. One thing does resonate with me - that despite the universal claim that Goldhagen makes from such a particularistic sample - he does `deconstruct' the common sense understanding/theory of a monocausal top down scenario. Goldhagen writes: `The conventional explanation cannot account for the findings of this study, for the evidence from the cases presented here. They belied by the actions of the perpetrators, glaringly and irrefutably. The notions that the perpetrators contributed to genocide because they were coerced, because they were unthinking, obedient executors of state orders, because of social psychological pressure, because of the prospects of personal advancement, or because they did not comprehend or feel responsible for what they were doing, owing to the putative fragmentation of tasks, can each be demonstrated in quick order to be untenable. These conventional explanations cannot account for the perpetrator's killing activities, which, it must be emphasized, are generally the only type of action that they directly address. The other perpetrator actions that have been specified and described here, especially the endemic cruelty, the conventional explanations all but ignore. Even the most cursory glance shows that they are inadequate for explaining these actions. The conventional explanations' enormous shortcomings, moreover, are not only empirical. They suffer from common conceptual and theoretical failings' (Goldhagen 379). Having referred to that massive quote, my sense is that Goldhagen's colossal and vexing documentation is indisputably significant and forever expands our knowledge and understanding of the unjustified sadistic violence meted out to and which eventually led to the extermination of the majority of European Jewry. The arguments laid out though raises serious doubts about the historiography of the book. Taking into account the disinclination to account for the contributions of other scholars - in what seems like a move to foist the freshness of his own thesis (which is no doubt relevant) - about the incalculable extent and nature of ordinary German anti-Semitism coming into 1993 - that there was the need to have the Nazis in place for this type of genocide to occur - sounds like an inherent contradiction. Of the belief that yes, there were at least three crucial elements that needed to be in place in order for this horror to have occurred the way it did: (1) The festering malignancy of anti-Semitism, (3) the economic conditions and (3) the war experience prior to 1933, and the role of Hitler and the Nazi party; the almost implied monocausal nature of the book lends itself to a shift in emphasis, a previously stated - to the `ordinary German.' Coming back to my original premise, as an amateur coming into this discourse, I still found the book extremely relevant in its topic as well as approach and would encourage everyone to purchase and read the book - lest we forget.
Miguel Llora
Rating:
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.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed, but Correct
Review: I read many of the reviews of the Goldhagen book and I am amazed at how evident people's prejudices and political views are in their opinion of it. One must be dispassionate when criticizing a book, especially when it concerns a topic of intense emotion. Most of the accusations aimed at the book are emotionally charged and have no basis in fact. The reviewers obviously have an axe to grind and are using that axe to chop Goldhagen off at the knees. Many people cite Goldhagen's view as incomplete because he only focuses on the Jewish plight. He goes to extremes (repetition is annoying throughout the book) to say that he chose to restrict himself to that topic. Why isn't that assertion enough? Does it detract from his conclusions because he doesn't write about gypsies,gays, arrested clerics, Pol Pot, American Indians, or other atrocities? Each incident of genocide is specific to its place and time and deserves its own book. Goldhagen makes it clear that he did not write a generalized book. His focus was clear, even though his proof of it was diffused and overwritten. I'm not an apologist for Goldhaden. I found the book to be written in a leaden manner with so many repetitious parts that I started to skim through it until I found a different topic. The book reads like a college term paper that needed to be a certain length, so the author padded out the writing to reach the assigned number of words. His use of language was utterly pedantic and stilted. It seemed as if the book was not edited very well. The book was well researched. Goldhagen spent a year in Germany reading the original transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. Some Amazon reviewers faulted his research. That is ridiculous. Other reviewers dismiss the book because it focuses only on Jewish suffering. The Hitler regime, whether legally elected or not, had a specific agenda in killing Jews as its second most important policy behind the conquest of territory for
"Lebensraum." Murdering handicapped people was the trial run for
cleansing the German people of deficiencies that clearly focused on eliminating Jews as the main problem facing the German nation.
The persecution of political prisoners, homosexuals, gypsies, and Slavs was a byproduct of Hitlerism, not a major subject as shown in his anti-semitic rantings spoken and published from 1921 onward. Too many people focused on irrelevant points such as Ukraninans and others helping the Nazis. These countries have their long history of anti-semitism, but none had the extermination of one group of people as a political policy followed through with such fervor and achievement. There were other reviews that seemed to deny the Holocaust happened or play a number game refuting the six million or comparing other holocaust death counts. The less said about them the better. For a diligently researched account of German anti-semitism read Klaus P. Fischer's "The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust." Education is the key to understanding.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing and Deeply Misunderstood Book
Review: I suspect that the many detractors of this book have not really read it, at least not all of it, based on their misinformed and ad hominem attacks on the author. Goldhagen's premise (thesis) is pretty logical and straightforward: the palpable and continuous history of Anti-Semitism generally in Europe and in Germany particular, created the conditions for the Holocaust. Germans generally had no regard for the Jews, a distorted "cognitive model" Goldhagen calls it, bolstered by centuries of Anti-Semitic apoplexy. It's difficult to swallow, perhaps, for modern readers, that human beings could detest other human beings, or at the least, have such little regard for their annhilation, but Goldhagen provides evidence, reams of it, all of it footnoted, and unlike Finkelstein, his chief critic, Goldhagen actually knows German and has pored through hitherto neglected documentation to bolster his premise. (It is an argument, remember folks, and you can always feel free to disagree with him after you've "read" the book...) He shows that ordinary Germans, despite what many scholars of the Holocaust have said, were not just people simply following orders, or who provided little or no hindrance to the killing of the Jews because they were "afraid" of the Nazis, but that they in fact actively resented and contributed willingly to their murders. How? Goldhagen gives a litany of examples -- focusing on the police battallions -- of how average and "ordinary" Germans assisted in the kinds of crimes that we liken to killers like Henry Lee Lucas. But unlike that psychopath, these were Germans (cops) who had families and children and who played sports and even went to the theater. How could they do such things? Some of the police battallions Goldhagen mentions even had the option not to perform killings, but they chose to do so, including the murdering of women and children. Why? They had been programmed to despise Jews; from the Reichstag to the church, Anti-Semitism was brayed at them constantly by German officials. Goldhagen does in fact mention other genocides, other mass murders, but shows how this particular genocide was a specific and programmatic one reducible to one simple fact: the hatred of Jews. Yes, he says perhaps not every German hated them, that some even acted on their own to help them, but this evidence is drastically overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary; for every Schindler there were millions of compliant killers. The book isn't perfect; it's too long, by at least a hundred pages, and as other reviewers have already commented, extremely repetitive, but Goldhagen obviously felt he really needed to hammer his points home. I will next read Christopher Browning's book on the same subject (and police battallion) and see how he reaches a different conclusion, but for anybody who really wants to know why and how the Holocaust could have happened, Goldhagen is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Hannah Arendt
Review: I think that the author suffers from a misunderstanding of the human condition. Yes, I think he was right to focus on the NAZI murders of the Jews over all the other groups. In the midst of the Soviet onslaught, the death's head SS and other groups were fanatically requsitioning trains to bring Jews to death camps for death before it was too late. I believe the author's error was in assuming that people are motivated. They they want to do, and will do good, or want to do, and will do evil. I believe his position comes out, on one hand from an understandable pregidice against the Germans, but on the other hand, an extreme desire to shield humanity, even America, from the horrible conclusions non ideological writers like Hannah Arendt. She claimed, and I think with good reason and evidence, that many Germans did not care about the fate of the Jews. As members of a society, they sided with the norm. I divide German 1940 society into 4 groups. Jew haters(Hitler/Himmler/street thugs). Opportunists(Hans Frank). Regular I don't cares(factory workers who watched their Jewish neabours get rounded up--with varing attitudes--but loved Hitler for fixing the economy, and apparently making Germany into a victorious superpower), and actively engaged heroic types(i.e. average people who took their ethics seriously)(about 18,000 Jews survived in Germany--this could only have occured as the result of non-Jewish Germans). For a specialists the book is recommended(but so is every book dealing with their specialty). I do not believe it deserves to be a best seller(although I agree with its stance against a PC attitude), but again, if you read it and believe it, you might feel better, that dark monstor in your heart may only exist in German hearts. Its a horrible and unfortunate truth, that many people look to common culture and values for truth, and often such things turn them into monstors(Jung extroverts).
Rating:
Summary: My two cents
Review: I'd like to affer a few more comments about this book.
1. Several reviewers below have complained that the book is ponderously, repetitiously written. I was struck by this, too, but I can explain it. It's because it was Goldhagen's PhD thesis. That's how theses are written. To convince the examining committee you deserve a PhD, you pound out the points of each chapter repetitively. Then you stand up at your public thesis defense and do the same thing. He should have pruned for publication.
2. Opinions about the culpability of the German people in the Holocaust run the gamut from "a small elite carried everything out in secret" to "they all hated Jews and participated willingly". Clearly, Goldhagen comes down towards the latter end of this continuum, and this has generated a lot of resistance here and in Germany. However, in the rejection of this strong interpretation, and in the reasonable desire not to blame the sons for the sins of the fathers, I think there is too much of tendency to go to the other extreme. Let's face it: the Nazi's plans were grandiose. They planned to mobilize history's strongest army, conquer the world, kill all Jews and most slavs, and colonize the entire east out beyond Moscow (an excellent source: "Wenn Hitler den Kreig gewonnen haette", by Ralph Giordano). This kind of plan cannot be carried out in secret by a small elite. It requires the participation of all segments of society, from workers to academics to financiers. And the Nazis got this participation, at least for the "public" part of their plans, namely world war and conquest. To imagine that the rest of their program was kept secret from, and did not have support from, a population that stood idle during public persecution of German Jews is not realistic.
There's a worse problem. There seems to be a great desire to concentrate all the guilt for the Holocaust into a small group of fanatical Nazis, and this is just historically unfair. This is certainly the gist of German excuses made just after the war, and it has not really gone away as an excuse. Remember, for example, Ronald Reagan's speech at Bitburg, where he more more less absolved the entire SS. You can also perceive this in the German press, which, in its renewed interest in the Holocaust, tends to use the pronoun "they" a lot more frequently than "we" (or, more fairly, "our parents"). Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 is routinely referred to in German sources as his "siezure of power" (Machtergreifung) when it is well known that he became chancellor through democratic processes, to the cheers of nearly all. Goldhagen's book has its exaggerations and flaws, and clearly one book cannot make the definitive judgement on this historical issue. But it makes an important statement against a widely-accepted and unfair view of history.
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