This book has its flaws but the author proves his thesis. His thesis is that broadly held views about Jews, (murderous antisemitism) were the main reason that hundreds of thousands of Germans took part in the Holocaust and that millions more supported the idea. Other reasons that have been given, such as peer pressure, just following orders, or fear of punishment may have been true sometimes, but they were not sufficient in and of themselves. Further, rather than just Nazis, Germans as a whole were responsible. Germans were not an ordinary people governed by an evil regime: rather, they broadly accepted an evil ideology, and the evil regime was its logical conclusion. To support his thesis, he details the historical fact of the Holocaust: The rise of German "eliminist antisemitism", the institutions that carried out the Holocaust, and actual episodes of what the Holocaust was really like.
The author says that the Holocaust is "the most difficult event to explain in all of German history." Not at all. Rather, it is quite easy to explain the Holocaust: Human nature. The Holocaust shatters our illusions about inherent human goodness. It forces us to confront the darkness within us all. The people who commit these deeds always think they are justified. The author says that it was extraordinary that a powerful and civilized European state spiraled down into a black moral void, but I do not find it extraordinary because we overestimate the fact that we are always closer to the moral edge than we want to admit. We seek scapegoats: "Capitalist roadsters" "Hutus" or "Tutsis" "Colonizers" "Feminazis". We dehumanize them and then we no longer must treat them like human beings. The Holocaust stands out because a powerful state gave its backing to something inhuman to destroy a culture on a scale never before seen, but in the emotions it unleashed, it is one of a certain kind of situation much more common in human history than most people want to know.
Further, the author has a Black Lives Matter attitude towards antisemitism. We can assume all Germans of the period were antisemitic, unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary, Or, to put it in more modern wording, everyone was antisemitic all the time and so the only thing to do is describe how that antisemitism was expressed in any particular situation. Those are not the kind of assumptions historians should make. To go along with this, he employs a certain kind of social-justice lexicon "verbal violence" "socially dead" "The psychic equivalent of genocide". Then there is his sometimes-garbled prose. "The overlay of official and obsessive public racial antisemitism that had more or less governed the ideational life of German civil society in its recent pre-Nazi history cemented into place the hegemonic racist antisemitic ideology, from which few dissented." George Orwell said never to use several Latin-derived words when everyday English words will do.
If we want to understand the “Why” of the Holocaust, it is necessary to take the perspective of the perpetrators, and that is what the author does. He seeks to examine the ideology that led to the Holocaust and how that ideology expressed itself in action. It is also what I am more interested in because it should add to our collective humility. The Holocaust was a specific historical event, and it is important to understand it in detail in itself. However, the urge to collectivize ourselves and dehumanize and exterminate our enemies is something that anyone who seriously studies history will encounter routinely. If we cannot recognize it in history, we cannot guard against it in the present.
On the other hand, in order to fully understand the Holocaust (as much as that is possible), it is necessary to also take the perspective of a victim, a son, daughter, father, or mother, a person with a web of kin and work and school and friendship relations, killed. In all the various ways it could have happened, suddenly, roused out of bed, debilitatingly in a camp, starved and beaten and worked to death, crushed in a cattle car, shot from behind in a pit you were forced to dig yourself, or gassed. Or some other way. Hunted. Times six million. It is unimaginable and yet it has to be imagined. The book is difficult reading, as any good history of the Holocaust should be.
t The book has been called racist because of its portrayal of German society. It is not. It is not racist because the author is explaining a historical phenomenon through a specific historical explanation. He does not claim that it was in the Germans' nature to carry out the Holocaust but rather the product of a widely held ideology combined with a license or encouragement to act in brutal ways. If the thesis can be supported, it stands.
The book is worth reading not only for its thesis, but also a reader will encounter facts that are not generally known. Most murders were not done at death camps but rather more up close by rather more ordinary soldiers and police who were not punished if they refused to participate. Even opponents of Naziism were antisemitic. Further, resistance to some Nazi policies was possible. Workers went on strike, people protested the economy, when the Nazis started killing disabled people, their relatives protested and successfully. To give one of his better examples, the churches in Germany, the organizations one would think would most uphold Christian ideas such as charity, love, and brotherhood were thoroughly antisemitic. Not only did they spew antisemitism themselves, they also applauded the Nazis' policies towards the Jews and expelled converted Jews to the tender embrace of the Nazis.
The author’s style is overblown, he sledgehammers the reader with reality, but he does not state that murderous German antisemitism was the only cause of the Holocaust, or the only reason individual actors participated in it, only that was the most important cause. Humans can build organizational and governmental structures that try to reward the better sides of human nature, and in the West, we congratulate ourselves that we have done that, mostly. However, these structures may be more fragile than we think, and the Holocaust is one of the better examples of that.

This is a deep, academic work which states that the Holocaust engaged the energy and enthusiasm of thousands of ordinary Germans – not just Nazi party members / SS men. Goldhagen states that ordinary Germans killed Jews not because they were forced to but because they wanted to. And he devotes over 600 pages to prove his point. The book was path-breaking at the time of its release because it was the first serious work to propose this line of thinking. Since then many works have tried to demonstrate that virulent anti-semitism was widespread throughout Europe in those days and was by no means limited to Nazi officials. Goldhagen makes his book persuasive by offering lots of primary and secondary research. The 630-page book has 132 pages of notes!

“Hitler’s Willing Executioners” by Daniel Goldhagen is a dense text examining the average German in Nazi Germany. This critical text examines who the average German was, what his place in the Holocaust was, and how he furthered the goals of the Holocaust with his actions. Importantly, Goldhagen contends that the average German was an active and willing participant in the extermination of Jews. This causative examination falls flat of full explanatory power, misses some historical context, and generally is overstated to the point of insanity.

So, I’ll start with what I liked. Goldhagen does a good job in summarizing the medieval source of anti-Semitism. This parts on history in the beginning of the book are entertaining to read and are well researched. All of the book has good citations, though that doesn’t mean everything. More on that later.

Secondly, the parts on Death Marched and the “work” camps are probably the most interesting factually. The first hand accounts of German murder is interesting and incredibly dark.

Okay, now my problems. There is a big one. Namely, Goldhagen’s primary thesis. He contends that Germans were willing murderers because of an extended anti-Semitic history. That German views on the Jews were uniquely eliminationist, uniquely violent, and unique to the Germans.

There’s two major problems with this. Firstly, eliminationist rhetoric is not unique to the Nazis of the 1930’s. In fact, the Nazis were inspired by the Jim Crow laws and “Manifest Destiny” of the United States. The existence of another eliminationist ideology (and government action, by the USA) cheapens the explanatory power of Goldhagen’s thesis.

Secondly, perhaps more importantly, is that the eliminationist anti-Semitism is NOT unique to Germany in Goldhagen’s own book. Lithuanians, Poles, Slavs, and Ukranians all willingly help Nazis kill Jews in their countries. In fact, on multiple accounts, they killed the Jews themselves. These countries lack the medieval anti-Semitism described by Goldhagen so…what gives? Goldhagen offers no explanation for this in his own text. Merely, he offers that those groups should be studied too.

This is baffling to me. These are not historical coincidences - they are direct refutations of Goldhagen’s primary argument. The idea that this book could be published, let alone a thesis work, with such a glaring logical hole is somewhat astounding to me.

I’m not the only one astounded. There are many critiques on how Goldhagen handles his sources, namely an argument of “cherry picking” by other historians. One notes that Police Battalion 101, a Goldhagen focus in his novel, also spends a day slaughtering the Poles in 1941. This is completely ignored by Goldhagen, probably because it is in exact violation of his thesis. So while I found the book well cited, I had good reason to worry Goldhagen’s treatment of sources. What else is being excluded?

Beyond the academic, this book is really repetitive and somewhat dry. I understand it was a thesis turned into a book: maybe it should have been edited down into an actual book. Put simply, it’s not fun to read and becomes a chore. The last 70 pages or so continually retread what was already said. For a thesis, it’s a functional conclusion. For a book, it’s torture!

In the end, a book I initially enjoyed quickly soured as it reached its end. The very basic holes in Goldhagen’s explanation never get filled. Seemingly, they get larger. But beyond academic issues, the book itself becomes incredibly repetitive. I think more prose or emotion alongside cutting the conclusion, would really increase the readability. All in all, I give it a 2.25/5. This book has some good information, but requires a critical reader with lots of patience. Would only recommend to well read Holocaust history fans, and even then, would recommend reading some critiques after.

Did not find this book to be a particularly interesting perspective on the Holocaust and the tone of the author was incredibly patronising towards anyone who might have a different perspective. There have been other books on how ordinary people can participate in events as horrific as the Holocaust which, from my perspective, have a lot more merit.

This book has been controversial, but overall it presents a convincing case that the Germans were much more willing partners and enablers of the Nazi project of eliminating European Jews than is often presented.

It shows a picture of a holocaust mostly involving bullets and burning and beatings, not just the industrial style mass murder of gas chambers. It shows a picture of the holocaust much closer to other more primitive episodes of ethnic cleansing such as those in Rwanda in 1994, where one didn't need very modern technology or a dehumanising industrial approach to mass murder...Where mass murder became a very natural, emotional, human affair of executionners who often took pleasure in torturing and killing their victims.

Goldhagen's main thesis is that the Germans were culturally predisposed to accept and participate in the holocaust because of a very strong anti-semitism that was willing to entertain the eliminationnist solutions and did not see Jews as fully human to be respected as such.

The book has been dismissed by some German scholars as highly misleading, but Goldhagen probably touched a raw nerve in a German society which in the 1990's had still not fully absorbed its true level of participation in the 3rd Reich, which had a strong interest in the myth that the holocaust was an affair of ardent Nazis/SS people, that most Germans were just passive bystanders afraid of arrest by the Gestapo and that the Wehrmacht was just competent army with little involvement in the attrocities on the Eastern front. We now know, that these are myths.

Goldhagen is careful to emphasize that this is a problem of German pre WW2 culture, nothing innate or inherent to Germans. Therefore, the strong social/cultural transformation after 1945 has transformed Germans away from antisemitism and intense nationalism (though the current wave of right wing populism and growing distance from WW2 suggest a risk of some revival fo those attitudes).

What is missing? Goldhagen and others studying such episodes of great evil implicitly emphasise but without being fully explicit about it the importance of urges to violence and dominance over others that's maybe as important a part of innate human nature resulting from evolution as our other urges to empathy and altruism. I got a sense from this book (and some childhood experiences with bullying) that ordinary, normal non psychopathic, humans can easily be evil and cruel, just like they can be empathic and altruistic. Culture can serve as a brake to those violent and cruel urges, or it can facilitate them and encourage them to the surface. German culture pre ww2 plaeyd the later role.

Finally, some people have interpreted the book as a very specific critique or character assault on Germans. But a similar book/2nd volume could have been written about the many non-German collaborators in the holocaust in central and Eastern Europe: about the Baltics, the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia or Slovakia. This strengthens the thesis of the book: eliminationnist anti-semitism wasn't just a German phenomenon, it was a wider Eastern/Central European phenomenon, though Horthy successfully blocked it in Hungary until 1944, and Antonescu decided to avoid mass extermination of the Jews of the kingdom or Romania for economic and political reasons (Romanian economy was much more dependent on Jews for its functionning, and Antonescu had a sense that the Axis would ultimately lose the war and Romania would have a better status if it didn't participate in the final solution). But Antonescu had no problems with mass murder of Jews in Basserabia and the Ukraine.

Overall, a gripping, mostly convincing and provocative read.

Slow reading and hard to get through. Did not seem to me that it was written with full honesty.

I almost finished it. A very difficult book to read on many levels.

A book that won't leave you. Goldhagen's theory has created a firestorm when it came out, but he's extremely convincing and his view of Nazi Germany is as sad as it's terrifying. It will make you think, it will make you cringe, it will make you wonder - not only about history, but also about yourself, about what you'd have done, about you'd do if similar circumstances were to happen again. It's one of those books.

This book examines how the people of Germany could have taken part in the Holocaust. It starts by giving the history of antisemetism in Germany, which lays a good foundation for the evidence of how people could have done what they did so willingly. The book shows how generations of hate can lead a society to the extremes seen in Germany. The only thing negative about the book is that some points are made over and over, which makes it repetitive.

Some of the reviews I read about the book make it sound like this book bashes Germans. But what it does is show how any society that lets hate go uncheck can create a morality where a group of people are seen as disposable.

I felt, that although his arguments were backup with solid evidence, it interfered with the narative presentation which cause the book to be on the boring side.

Daniel J Goldhagen - Hitler's Willing Executioners.
The ordinary German: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty screams the book!
The curse of Judgement is ubiquitous, often unintentional, yet immutably inscribed in our DNA.
"This shocking and well documented book is an indictment of the vast number ordinary Germans who directly or indirectly took part in Hitler's extermination of the Jews" is for the majority of readers a representative summation of a work that remains to this day, as controversial as when it was published more than 20 years ago. Today's righteous singular universal "world view" as codified in 'The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" leads us to no other conclusion. The critics sentiment illuminates the books reception and persistence of understanding thereof, for the vast majority. The book presents a logic, a depth of study and an attention to detail that attempts to eliminate and refute any form of doubt as to the "intended" supposition. Indeed Goldhagen concludes:
"The inescapable truth is that, regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became - and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were - fit to be Hitler's willing executioners".
By extension Goldhagen directs us to the inescapable conclusion that the "collective guilt" of the German people is real and profound, (Goldhagen categorically denies this extension of meaning in the Forward to the 1996 German edition) but is of little consolation with regard to the books received unintended meaning. Goldhagen's stated personal disassociation of intentional judgement belies the nature of his prose:
"The will to kill the Jews was not infused into Hitler and his followers by external conditions, but, embedded deep in their beliefs about Jews, it welled up from within them, driving them forward to action... Demological racial antisemitism was the motive force..."
In his seeming denunciation of clemency for the ordinary German people he identifies and refutes five of the 'Apologist' arguments in the 'Intentionalist-Functionalist' debate whilst conceding they contain "some truth". In particular he attacks Ian Kershaw's claim of "indifference" as well as Christopher R Browning's "pressure to conform". In bolstering his argument emphasis is given to the espousing of the antisemitic preconditions in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century without regard for the parallels in the rest of the world. Goldhagen also fails to illuminate the strong notion of kinship and homeland (heimat - a word of no equivalent meaning in the English language), which was particular to German identity. Indeed the Nazi regime, understood its power only too well, and were masterful in their program of propaganda, transforming folk songs into tunes for their cause, and thereby wielding the force of belonging in tune and in the dogma of slogans: "One Reich, One Volk, One Fuhrer". In the end, the notion of killing innocent men, women and children, without the intricacies of the whole picture can only but bring one to concur with Goldhagen's findings.
The need to attribute blame addresses the human right to justice, a mechanism of retribution or, in the extreme, the urge to revenge. This process of enumerating rights, is inextricably bound to, and serves to consolidate the notion of a "world view" and in particular a singular universal "world view" of human righteousness. (Humans have forever thought of themselves as the all knowing centre of the universe). Such notions are at the heart of our collective concept of civilization and individual self. It defines who we are as a collective and as a member of that collective. It is the most vehement component of our identity, and of our belonging. Those who refuse its form of compliance are abandoned, banished, or punished. It is in essence a force of inclusion as much as a force of exclusion and it is this mechanism that drives us all.. and indeed what drove the ordinary German of that time. It must be remembered that prior to the middle of the 20th century there was not one singular universal "world view" but instead a broad overlapping commonality of values that existed between the major "civilized" communities and countries. Each individual government had sole authority and right to author or adjust those values and implement them as their own flavour of a universal "world view". As an example of this, the act of killing could be deemed either good or bad (right or wrong), depending on how it is framed. In todays world it is commonly understood that killing is unacceptable yet to send soldiers off to war to engage in the act of killing in defence of your country is an accepted act which is not simply incidental to ones notion of belonging. Our "way of seeing" today, our "world view" today, cannot be assumed to be that which existed in the past, moreover, neither should we "see" or judge that era through the same lens. As such, it is for this very reason that one today is seemingly baffled by the choices that were made then.
The key to this understanding is not a question of the test of an individuals morality to challenge (what we see as) a corrupt "world view", but rather the cataclysm of the clash of opposing "world views" and the individuals somewhat immutable bond to one or the other (or both). It was an individuals struggle to come to terms with their concept of self, who they were, and where they would belong. This need to affirm and reaffirm one's belonging within the calamity of the resolve of that clash is what drove millions of ordinary Germans to persist with their stubborn adherence to the dictate of a regime, enslaved to its own ideals. In the end the regime knowingly brought to fruition the destruction of its own people in the cataclysm of the Gotterdammerung. What many Germans knew was a hopeless, pointless battle to the end, was dutifully pursued to its culminating chapter, the final act of their duty to self and country - their expression of a belonging. The "guilt" of the ordinary German was their conviction to belong. Therefore In absence of coercion, Hitler's willing executioners may only be those "who pulled the trigger" or indeed those who authored an evil and corrupt "world view".

There are many reasons why this book is almost universally condemned by historians. That's not to say that Goldhagen is entirely full of shit (he's not), but the bad far outweighs the good in Hitler's Willing Executioners.