As expected, this was a hard book to read. It starts with a quotation from de Toqueville about how a person cannot be convinced to have ideas contrary to the general culture of his society. At first, I read this and though "That's comforting," because you can't force people to think bad things if it doesn't go with their cultural beliefs. Then, I realized how horrifying it is: what it really says is that if people believe bad things, it's because their culture makes it possible, and that makes it all the harder to eradicate--it would be one thing if one bad person had bad ideas and could be shouted down by all the others. It's another for those bad ideas to be generally held and enforced.

From there, I think the book is extremely well-argued. It points out that the ahistorical interpretations of why Germans participated in the Holocaust are flawed, because they don't provide proof for themselves. That people (maybe even Germans specifically) are naturally obedient to authority, that the population was terrorized by few truly evil leaders, that people acquiesced or felt indifferent to Jewish suffering because it didn't directly affect them (or because they could actually benefit from it in their careers), or that peer pressure produced all of the torture and death: one by one, he shows how this wasn't the case. Germans objected to orders they found morally objectionable and also had many well-known options to avoid killing duty, that Nazi anti-semitic policies were widely approved of (including by clergy), people's careers didn't depend on their willingness to kill, and people by and large were not indifferent to the plight of Jews. He suggests that anyone offering general social-psychological explanations for Germans' actions should have to provide PROOF. The proof we have, even from the testimony of people after the war who had every reason to try and justify themselves, minimize their participation, and make themselves look good, suggests that anti-semitism was widespread and virulent, not merely the province of a small elite terrorizing everyone else. He traces the rise of this anti-semitism in a convincing way. The records are spotty, but he makes use of what he has. Overall, his conceptual framework of describing what we DO know and requiring any challengers to refute it actively is important and well-rendered.

He does not say all Germans are evil or should feel collective guilt. He merely points out that the conversation of the Holocaust needs to be historically rooted and those roots examined unflinchingly. Complicity is something that should be studied. The threads of cognitive models that allow for such complicity deserve analysis. It's interesting reading this book in our current political climate, with plenty of people making claims about different groups of people based on limited direct information. And reading it at the same time as Stephen King's It, in which the town itself, its willingness to look away from murder and death, also resonates. It's worth understanding the motive to categorize and generalize and justify the suffering of others. His analysis does not leave me very hopeful--even while the Holocaust was going on, plenty of Germans clung to their anti-semitic beliefs that even undermined their war effort (using Jews as labor--not fake labor meant to kill them slowly--could have prolonged Germany's ability to fight, plus the attention diverted from the war effort to round up, guard, and kill Jews also took war materiel and personnel away from military fighting) and should have/could have been overturned by USING THEIR ACTUAL EYEBALLS: living skeletons who fall down on death marches are not a mortal threat to the German Volk. It's after the Holocaust and decades after that Germany rethinks all of this and gradually changes (although he does point out that views go underground and reemerge when the political moment is more auspicious). I hate to think that it takes the slaughter of millions of people to make the vast majority of a population go "Huh, maybe I was wrong about that." That especially scares me in this moment in our history. So much doubling-down, so little self-reflection.

The picture of the naked women being led to their deaths, one woman holding a still relatively fat baby, whose little butt pressed on the woman's arm--I'll be thinking about that for a long time.

goldhagen is more about proving his point than actually looking at the history that proves him wrong. although antisemitisim was strong in germany and much of europe and the united states, it cannot be said that all germans were willing executioners and took part in the holocaust.

awfully written book that provides nothing new

Yes I am german and this book , while full of itself, doesn’t add anything new, makes sweeping generalizations and broadly dismisses views the author disagrees with without much proof. Mostly this book is just awefully written, a typical professor who thinks using fancy words makes him look smart. Yet he can’t articulate simple points. Having had the benefit to meet both my grandparents (one nazis one no) as well as the Jewish friends of the non nazi grandparents and heard first hand accounts of nazi germany this book on the one side adds nothing new while also adding nothing to the way we use history , as a way to prevent things in the future. An early example of the ignorance of the author is his generalization of “Germans” including “Germans from the Middle Ages forward”. A little newsflash, there were no Germans in the Middle Ages. Germany as a country is younger than the US. And regions vary quite a bit. I would have loved to learn something new about the holocaust but this book is just a plain waste of time.

I could not manage to wade through the ranting about how he was going to completely reinvent the way the Holocaust is viewed, in regards to culpability of the 'average' German citizen - to get to the actual data that was supposed to prove it.
Summation: Ugh.

Important and worth talking about; also disturbing and sometimes takes a strong force of will to get through the material.

The language is scholarly but easy to read, and the tone is matter of fact. The book is very well focussed, and does much to prove the central thesis - that the German people as a whole were responsible for the Holocaust, and that the perpetrators were not villains or evil incarnate, but "ordinary Germans". Does much to explain how such a monumental crime could have occurred - the simple math, for example, showing how many concentration camps in the country was eye opening on its own and makes one think about how broad and enormous these crimes against humanity were.

However, Goldhagen is obviously not impartial and evidence may be presented only when it fits his thesis. Best read in conjunction with other works, though I don't know of one as masterful as this that would creditably present "the other side" of the story without being revisionist or sympathetic to the Nazis. Many have suggested ORDINARY MEN, from which much of Goldhagen's research was drawn from in any event.

This is one of those books that makes you question your general optimism about the nature of humanity. But it is not a well-thought through book.

Much of the book takes the same individual / unit-level view of events employed by (for example) Anthony Beevor in his World War II histories about D-day and Stalingrad. Instead of focusing on military actions, however, Goldhagen describes in graphic detail the inhumane deeds of the German perpetrators of the genocide against the Jews. His descriptions are largely taken from written accounts by survivors and confessions from perpetrators alike. I do not want to dwell on these descriptions; the retold events are endless scenes of gruesome, inhumane, wantonly cruel deeds - well over two hundred dense pages long and yet only a fraction of all that must have transpired.

The smaller part of the book is used by Goldberg to introduce the background to the genocide and to discuss the causes as he sees them. In essence, he argues that the reason that so many ordinary Germans consented to perpetrate genocide against the Jews was because they felt justified, even compelled, to do so as a consequence of being in a society that espoused a particular type of radical antisemitism unique to Germany at that very point of its cultural history. Goldberg goes so far as to state that this historical radical antisemitism was not only a sufficient but also a necessary cause of broad participation of ordinary Germans in the holocaust. (See: chapter 18 and elsewhere.)

I take exception to this view. Not only because the eyewitness accounts in this book mention quite a number of non-Germans wholeheartedly participating in genocidal acts with at least equal cruelty as the Germans, but also because it makes the likelihood of genocidal events seem small whereas in fact history bears witness to genocidal event after genocidal event. "Homo homini lupus est" - only worse.

In my view, genocide is just one of several kinds of collective mass-murder that humanity has shown itself capable of time and again, regardless of culture or cause. The majority of killings in history were not individual acts of "passion and jealousy" but occurred as one group took on another. Soldiers slaughtering overmatched opponents and civilians. Religious groups suppressing outsiders. Tribes eliminating tribes. Violence at an industrial scale enacted all throughout history.

For all its research, good penmanship, and the relevance of the questions it seeks to answer, the author's simplistic and restrictive conclusions ("they did it because they were born and raised in the Germany of 1900-1945") present a missed opportunity to ask and seek to answer poignant questions such as "what can we do to prevent the next organized mass-murder?"; "how can we empower the individual to stand up to a system of organized cruelty?"; and "what would you have done?".

I'm not going to argue that Goldhagen's prose is golden, or claim that his writing isn't incredibly repetitive, but the one and two star reviews of this book are staggeringly off the mark. I am not particularly well-informed about the Holocaust, and certainly came into this book with a vague notion of events that roughly corresponded with what Goldhagen cites as the standard view of the Holocaust. Namely:

1) The Nazi party was, although voted into power democratically, not representative of the German populace.
2) The majority of "regular" Germans were casual bystanders, or at worst, unwitting cogs in the genocidal machine.
3) Nazis victimized Jews alongside other groups - homosexuals, Gypsies, Catholics, Russians, communists, etc.

I don't know how I developed these views, but the wealth of evidence Goldhagen brings against each is catastrophic. The German populace as a whole were enthusiastically on board with what Goldhagen calls "eliminationist antisemitism", even the MANY who disagreed with and protested other aspects of Nazi policy. An enormous number of "ordinary" Germans were directly involved in the genocide of European Jewry, and many who weren't directly involved were aware of and approving of it. (I had picked up the notion somewhere that death camps were basically kept secret - they weren't. And the number of soldiers who rotated in and out of service on the Eastern front during the mass shootings of Soviet Jews makes it incredible to believe that this wasn't general knowledge among their girlfriends, wives, and families back home.) More - the idea that the Jews, though the most numerous by far of the Holocaust's victims, were only one group among many - how on earth did I come to believe that?!? Yes, other groups were kept interned in concentration camps, but the camps were constructed for the Jews. The mortality rates among different groups of prisoners is extremely telling - single digits for Poles, Slavs, political prisoners. 100% for Jews. This was the monthly death rate.

The negative reviews entirely miss the point of this book (which . . . I can hardly believe, given that Goldhagen's writing is really very repetitive). The Holocaust could not have happened without willing, enthusiastic support from the general German population. That support came about due to centuries of antisemitic propaganda that FAR predated Hitler. It's far easier to point a finger at Hitler and other major figures of power, but the Holocaust simply wouldn't have been possible without the consent of the German people. We, the people, are important. It's on us to not give power to genocidal maniacs, but also on us to make sure racial hatred doesn't permeate the entire culture to a point where things like the Holocaust become possible. (And yes, I'm aware that Goldhagen would take issue with the phrase "things like the Holocaust." I do agree with his point about the ultimate distinction of the Holocaust - but also think the extension to other acts of racial hatred holds true.)

I just started reading ... Goldhagen's thesis is that the men and women who murdered Jews were not forced to do so, nor were they just following orders ... after years of conditioning by the Catholic and Lutheran churches and others, and Hitler's maniacal Jew-hatred, they were quite willing to kill Jews they thought should die.

UPDATED ... The book is vastly detailed, and not easy to read, but IMO it clearly proves Goldhagen's point that ordinary Germans, conditioned first by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches and then by relentless propaganda, were quite willing to murder Jews in the service, not of the Nazis, but of Germany

I will use examples from the book to have my fictional character Berthold question the other prisoners at Spandau (where Berthold is serving a 20 year sentence) as to their knowledge and reaction to the horrors which constituted the mass murder of "the Jews." The book I'm writing follows A Flood of Evil and A Promise Kept: 1934 to 1946 with the post-war reflections and analysis of Berthold and Anna regarding both Hitler and God.

a few excerpts ...

... the Catholic Church viewed Jews as violating their order of the world ... denigrating and defiling their concept of God and everything they held sacred ... Jews were self-willed agents of evil ... opposed to the fundamental Christian good ... demons bent on desecration and defilement

... Christian Jew-hatred is not based on any familiarity with real Jews ... the need to hate Jews is woven into the fabric of Christianity itself ... the underlying Christian premise was that Jews, who killed Christ, are capable of all heinous acts

... German cruelty and murder of Jews ... served no military necessity (in fact, the opposite) ... had nothing to do with bombing raids on Germany, which the murders of Jews mostly preceded ... but ... because of a set of beliefs that defined Jewish suffering as retribution and created a profound hatred

... Germans killed Jews because they wanted to

It 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 despair. At the same time it should be understood that it was the created genus of Hitler and his party in capturing with total control such a country in the first six months as Chancellor of Germany. Goldhagen has written an outstanding book that to this reader explains not just the German question in which I am a descendent, but the overall question throughout history being, “What the hell were they thinking!”

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. Many critics fault him for not discussing Gypsies and homosexuals, but who has? Probably the same despising of "the Other" that underlies Jew hatred also explains these victims. In any event, he never pretends to be discussing anything except Jew hatred. The history of it in Germany is well-known as is the form it took. Moreover, as he shows, none of the other groups targeted by the Nazis were treated with anything approaching the cruelty towards Jews from infancy on.

Now that I've finished, here is my final assessment:

When the German soldiers who were tried at Nuremburg after World War II said they weren’t guilty because they were “following orders,” I and millions of others believed them. If that were true, then were they guilty? After all, even in America, soldiers had to follow orders.

Later, when the horrors that Stalin visited upon the Russians became known, I understood that was the result of a dictatorship. Since the American Press also called Hitler a dictator, I assumed that Germans, like Russians, had no say in what their government did. As an American, my cognitive model of a dictator was that of a totalitarian government, one in which people had no freedom of choice at all. Indeed, based I now realize on the Stalinist model, I presumed that Germans who protested Hitler’s policies would be imprisoned. Worse, I thought was that their families would be harmed. Just recently I said to a friend, not Jewish, who made a remark about the German people, “Well, Barnaby, I’d like to think I’d have helped out Jews, but if they would punish my family, I don’t think I would have.

Most Americans thought that Stalin’s rule and Hitler’s were pretty much the same: blind obedience or else. However, Daniel Goldhagen shows convincingly that living under Hitler was quite different from living under Stalin, especially if you weren’t Jewish. Hitler wasn’t a dictator as Stalin was. He was voted into office by Germans, who were weary of the democracy that was forced on them after their defeat in 1918. The vote for Hitler was not a slim plurality and it was not a vote by lowlifes and thugs. Germans of all classes not only voted for Hitler, and, as Goldhagen argues, they agreed wholeheartedly with the need to exterminate all the Jews in the world. Goldhagen proves that this idea was rampant in Germany from the early 19th century on. When Nazi troops marched into Austria, the cultured Viennese cheered with glee and immediately dragged the assimilated Austrian Jews out in the streets and made them scrub sidewalks while wearing their finest dress-up clothes. Meanwhile the oh so cultured Aryans laughed and enjoyed the show. No, Hitler wasn’t foisted on these people.

Moreover, Germans could and did protest Hitler’s policies and get them changed. Goldhagen presents data from German records that prove this. Three examples suffice. One was Hitler’s policy of killing mental defectives. The Churches and the people protested and the so-called euthanasia was stopped. Second, when husbands of Aryan women were rounded up for deportation to death camps, the women demonstrated in the streets, even confronting the Gestapo—and their husbands were released and spent the rest of the war in Germany in their homes with their wives. Third, when Poles were brought in as forced laborers, Germans were ordered not to fraternize with them as they were inferior Slavs. However, the Germans refused to obey, and, after a while, the restrictions were lifted.
The most compelling evidence that the author provides is that which shows how much both soldiers and citizens enjoyed what they were doing to Jews. He relies not only on eye witness accounts, but German records and even pictures that they took.
Goldhagen doesn’t specifically mention Now Dwor, Poland, my grandfather’s home town, but in researching my family history website, http://elaineostrachchaika.com, I came across a vivid account of what happened there at
http://www.knecht.ca/history/nowydwor... . If you click on it, you’ll find what a source for hilarity the Jews provided the German soldiers with for five unbelievable, but apparently rollicking years for the cultured Aryans. What delights even the German officers thought up for amusement! These delights involved the most degrading, cruel, foul, and depraved tortures I have ever heard of. This site lends even more credence to Goldhagen’s claims.

In sum, I found Hitler’s Willing Executioners a solidly researched book, based upon the records that the Nazis themselves kept, as well as his careful research into German anti-Semitism.

Don't bother this book sucks.

In parts, it was a bit repetitive, however, it is a question that I've always wondered about. How does a totalitarian regime manage to turn one group against another? It's terrifying, almost nightmarish. In the end, individuals make decisions that can have serious implications. The scary part is that such events are generally reproducible.