Define Regarding Books Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
| Title | : | Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust |
| Author | : | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 634 pages |
| Published | : | January 28th 1997 by Vintage (first published 1996) |
| Categories | : | History. Nonfiction. World War II. Holocaust. War. Cultural. Germany |
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Paperback | Pages: 634 pages Rating: 3.68 | 4262 Users | 227 Reviews
Commentary Conducive To Books Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival material, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units to the camps to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioners is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
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| Original Title: | Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust |
| ISBN: | 0679772685 (ISBN13: 9780679772682) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (1996) |
Rating Regarding Books Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Ratings: 3.68 From 4262 Users | 227 ReviewsCrit Regarding Books Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
This book really has pissed people off. Goldhagen takes a very different view of Germans, Nazi or not, who actively helped in brutalizing and murdering Jews. He claims they weren't forced to do it, but chose to. They were not automatons blindly following orders, rather their particular brand of Jew hatred made them willing exterminators of people who had no power. He does acknowledge other victims of Nazism, but this book is about German anti-semitism and Jews. That is a long enough story. ManyIt always amazes me that people, who have constructed their own paradigms, and have worked vigorously at maintaining it, can ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary. At most Goldhagen provides an explanation as to why people do the things they do regardless of their social or economic background. At worse Goldhagen brings to light one possibility in explaining how one, if not the most learned and advanced country in the world could fall from grace in a matter of a few years of Financial
[Deep breath] This is a difficult book to review as the subject matter is so contentious and horrific. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. Of course they were willing participants in the sense
This should, for many reasons, get only one star. It gets two for the occasional flashes of actual, legitimate historical scholarship and for some of the evidence he has dug up. Nonetheless, it is a truly terrible work, made even more so by its persuasive and populist tone, and the large numbers of copies sold. It is an almost textbook example of the dangers of creating a thesis, and then selecting and interpreting evidence to fit that thesis. His conclusions are simply wrong, and not backed up
The author makes a strong case for the proposition that the mass of gentile Germans (and Austrians) held very strongly hostile attitudes towards their Jewish fellow citizens and Jews in general. Drawing evidence from a wide array of sources, but especially from Police Battalions primarily made up from German males raised before the Nazi seizure of power, he demonstrates how gratuitously cruel and vicious ordinary people were towards what amounted to only a tiny minority of their population and
Ive read a lot of books about WWII looking for the answer to one question why did the German people ever allow the Nazis to attempt to exterminate Jews? This book finally gave me the answer. This is a very in-depth look at the German culture before and during the war. I learned that since the 1800s Germans had been blaming the Jewish people for the problems of their country and that this blame became even stronger after World War I. Most Germans considered Jews to be parasites and not even
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