Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

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

A couple of months ago, I read a novel by Thomas H Cook called The Orchids. It described a retired doctor who had fled to the South American rainforests after Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies. The slow, lazy prose sets us up to view this doctor as someone whose personal inclinations, as well as outside circumstance, placed him at a death camp, where he performed abominations upon the patients. I became curious about Hitler's reign from the perspective of everyday Germans. How willingly did they participate in the horrors dreamed up by Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goring ... and why?Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. As a result, he has done deep research into this phenomenon, and what he brings us in these pages is a painstaking analysis, showing that much of the conventional wisdom imparted through history books and newsreels is faulty.This book is a microscopic examination of antisemitism, which has roots going back to the first centuries of the Common Era (after the death of Jesus). When Christianity became the law of the land (decreed by the Emperor Constantine in 325), certain assumptions began to take shape about Jews. The fact that they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah cast a pall of suspicion over them, which only grew over time. By the time events conspired to bring Hitler to power, these negative stereotypes about Jews had become standard-issue thinking throughout Germany. Hitler simply shared the German view, but had the ability to stoke it and empower the Germans to weaponize it.In page after page, Goldhagen shows us Nazi institutions such as camps, police battalions and death marches. Besides the extermination camps, Jews were often sent to "labor" camps. It is often assumed that the plan was to make use of the Jews in building structures or making munitions, but under straitened circumstances, so that when they were weakened by hunger or overwork, they were then consigned to an extermination camp. As Goldhagen shows, this scenario is false and quite simplistic. The labor the Jews were subjected to was designed mainly for punishment. It was empty, pointless work -- e.g. carrying 50-lb bags of wet salt from one end of the camp to the other, while being beaten and verbally harassed, then turning around and carrying them back, over and over. This was classic antisemitism at work: Jews were stereotyped as not doing "honest" labor as the average German was said to, but instead collecting money and letting non-Jews do the heavy lifting. So during the Holocaust, those Jews who were not killed on the spot or sent to the gas chambers were worked this way as revenge for their mythical transgressions.The peculiar nature of German antisemitism classified Jews not only as "lesser" humans, as were the Slavs and southern Europeans, but as altogether non-human. They were described, literally, as the Devil's spawn, the "poisoned mushroom," the embodiment of evil. Goldhagen makes clear that this was taught in schools and churches, and flourished because Jews were already a society apart -- the average German had never even met a Jew, and so these misconceptions perpetuated themselves with no opportunity to be challenged. Perhaps this explains people like Oskar Schindler, who dealt with Jews on a routine basis and came to see them as not only human, but deserving of compassion and respect.In examining police battalions, who often raided Jewish ghettos or herded entire villages into the forest for slaughter, Goldhagen demolishes the idea that the average German was 1-unaware of the killing; 2-unwilling to kill, and 3-mindlessly inclined to follow orders. These battalions often employed the most ordinary of ordinary Germans - men over the usual age for military duty, men with more life experience, more independent of mind as a result. They were not impressionable youngsters with excess energy and ideals, unquestionably following a leader. No, the battalion members followed their own leads, and when the opportunity to brutalize and kill Jews -- either an individual fugitive or a ghetto of hundreds -- they rarely held back, jumping into the action with relish and abandon, collecting souvenirs of the campaigns, keeping score, and documenting the forays in photographs.Death marches often took place toward the very end of the war. In the early spring of 1945, as Russia advanced from the east and the Americans and British closed in from the west, the Germans manning the camps opted to flee -- but tellingly, they did not leave the Jewish prisoners behind to be rescued. In many cases, prisoners were simply executed en masse, but in other cases, the Jewish prisoners, often clad only in thin cotton pajamas and little or no footwear, were marched from one camp to another, but by the most insanely circuitous routes. A march that would logically have spanned 50 miles and taken three days was rerouted to many hundreds of miles over a month. Goldhagen details one group of female prisoners, under the supervision of female guards. During this time, the Jews were segregated from other prisoners -- the other prisoners were often enlisted as guards for the march -- and they were beaten, shot for minor infractions, and denied food or water. These wasteful marches kept up literally till the last day of the war. The only conclusion available to Goldhagen was that this was yet another example of an obsessive need on the part of even the most average, non-militant German under Hitler to harass, punish, brutalize and slaughter Jews, simply for the fact that they were Jews.It's a fascinating and compelling read.There is a downside to this book, and many readers have made note of it. The book began as a graduate thesis and is very heavy with graduate-level language. There are individual sentences that take up half a page or more; sentences are heavy with parentheses, dashes and semicolons, far more than the average example of literature for the non-academic reader.For all of this, anyone who cares about this subject will find it entirely worthwhile to pick through the dense verbiage (especially in the introduction). Millions have done so since the book was published in 1996, and it was a bestseller in Germany, where the postwar generations have continued grappling with this surreal part of their history, and the puzzle that is entrenched antisemitism.

Awful.. i have tried to get into this book but it is terrible to read. The way he waffles on and on and on is mind numbing. Out if the 45 books i have on the Nazi's, and ww2 etc... This is the one i regret purchasing. Waste of money and a waste of time trying to read

Five stars - not because I 'love' it - but because it is a most important piece of detailed research into the depravity of the 3rd Reich - and the collaboration of its ordinary people. Steel yourself for some very nasty reality.

Well it wasn't a pleasant read. However, it gave an insight into the Psychology of Germany, under the reign of Hitler..Very interesting read.

This book is, in my view, more for academic study than for the general population. I found it so overpowering in the brutality of the Nazis in Eastern Europe that I had to stop reading.

Excellent read. Thought provoking and well researched and written. Took a while to get through but really enjoyed it