Those of you who know me, know that I've never handed out a 1-star review before today. I was replying to my friend Mark when I remembered this embarrassment. Seriously, I blush when I recall that the author and I are of the same SPECIES.

He took relationships that were either nonexistent, or at best, spurious, and stretched them out into this "book." It's awful. To suggest that there was something about the German people that somehow perfectly primed them for accepting with open arms Hitler, Nazis, torture, wide-scale murder and genocide, and the contention that the arians were meant to rule the world would be LAUGHABLE had not so many millions suffered and died as a result.

I read this in grad school. I remember wondering then as I still wonder today whether it was written to serve as a polemic. Terrible. Please. Don't waste your time.

[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 that they consciously carried out their actions as humans with as much "free will" as anyone else. The better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it?

Goldhagen spends much of the book building a case for a history of the German people that made them unique and more capable of this atrocity than other nations/cultures/peoples. Not only is this wrong but it does a disservice to humanity by providing an argument that could be used to state that only in Germany could the Holocaust have occurred nor could it occur again as circumstances and the German national temperament have changed. As any cursory review of recent history will show, the German people do not have a monopoly on genocide. The importance in studying the Holocaust is to prevent its re-occurrence. Any "scholarship" that purports to explain the Holocaust only as a unique event fails in this purpose.

Goldhagen's book is frequently contrasted with Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. Goldhagen and Browning used much of the same source material. Goldhagen's work got the headlines through his incendiary claims but it is Browning's work that is the illuminating one. Browning shows us something that is both more plausible and horrifying than Goldhagen does - Browning shows that the men who committed these murders were just that, men, as complex and conflicted as any other man, who nonetheless were able to justify their actions to themselves and carry them out. It is crucial that we understand this. Browning attempts to provide understanding; Goldhagen attempts to provide denunciation and facile explanations.

I quote from the preface to Browning's book, page xx: "Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations...were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader -- both were human -- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive...Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature."

Goldhagen's book is the antithesis of what Browning wrote in his preface. Goldhagen believes the study of the Holocaust demands the demonization of those that carried it out. He does not believe the perpetrators were human beings like you and me. He does not believe others would have acted the same under the same circumstances. He believes that to empathize is to forgive so instead we have a book that at every turn tries to impart that the Nazi was beyond understanding, beyond humanity. This is a comforting thought, it is a glib thought, and it is wrong.

If you are looking for a polemic that explains the Holocaust as unique to a given country and a given people, then Goldhagen's book is the one you want. If you are looking for a history book that actually attempts to explore and understand how humanity can undertake horrific acts, then Browning's book is the one you want.

This book was a rather cumbersome read, not only for its subject matter, but also for the way it was written.
I found it to be repetitive unnecessarily when the point was already proven - I am assuming it is because this was a PhD thesis. I am not academically equipped to have an opinion on his premise on eliminationist antisemitism, but as a reader I think he over-pushed that point in order to make his own.
An interesting read at parts, but overall uneven.

It's very easy to see the scholarly bones of this book, the old "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you've told them." It's meticulously documented, and seems to be thoroughly researched. Clearly, from the GR reviews alone, the content is a great deal more controversial than the style.

As painstakingly researched and scholarly as this book is, I am disinclined to believe the author's assertions about the German people as a whole. As a former English major (ha, first time my degree has had a practical use!), I'm certainly aware of the vast amount of anti-Semitism in European literature through the nineteenth century. However, that seems to me to argue more against Goldhagen's conclusions than otherwise.

Granted that all of Europe (and to a large extent, the US) was anti-Semitic, why were there not hundreds of Holocausts?

On an emotional level, although my German ancestors arrived in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, as the bearer of a German surname, I do not want to believe Goldhagen's assertions on an emotional level as well.

I think that my next step is going to be reading
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland to get the other side, and take it from there.

For me, this was the book equivalent of the movies Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List--it gave me a lot to think about, I'm glad I read it, but I don't ever want to repeat this particular experience.

A creepy moment of this book is a snapshot, a pocket photo, of the young wife of an SS officer, decked out in the latest fashion. It could have been a candidate print for a vogue spread. Creepy because it removes part of the veneer of 'it can't happen here, it can't happen now.'

No one should really be surprised by the premise, concent, and conclusion of this well written history: genocide requires a broad-based complicity.

A closely and meticulously argued account of how ordinary Germans actively participated in the killing of Jews because of a deep-seeded eliminationist mindset that was endemic to German society. They killed not because they were commanded to kill, nor because they feared reprisals for refusing to kill, but because they wanted to, because they believed killing Jews was good and right.

By examining three particular institutions of killing: work camps, police battalions, and death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans were involved in each, and how they willingly carried out the genocide of Europe's Jews. When given opportunities to opt out of killing, they did not; When told not to kill, they did anyway. Judaism was viewed as an intractable blight whose only solution was extermination. This view was not only held by Nazi elites or select SS men; it was pervasive and it was ultimately responsible for the death of millions.

How do you know you wouldn’t have been a Nazi?

The largest portion of my family has lived in East Tennessee since 1759. It is a fact I view with gratitude and great pride. America’s birth in 1776, was followed by Tennessee joining the union in 1796, and McMinn County, Tennessee, my family’s home for the majority of the last three generations, was chartered in 1819. Slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws and the universal discrimination that followed the Civil War, all took place on my family’s doorstep.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a cold and clinical description of the role played by ordinary Germans in the 20th century’s greatest genocide. It is objective, academic, and dispassionate in its clarity. There was no assertion I would argue with, but I was disappointed the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust was not compared more directly to the role ordinary folk have played in history's other shameful nightmares.

I’m sure I’m no different than most, believing the coordinates of my moral compass are good and true, and that I am beyond the reach of any idea so abhorrent as a master race. These are the same bearings passed on to my children in their raising, and I feel certain that likewise, they will give these teachings and beliefs to their children.

However, history argues that there is a dark side to man’s universal nature and that no society has ever fully escaped its gravity. Our DNA, childhood experiences, and many other elements of our lives happen outside of the reach of our control, but injustice is not one of them. My fear is that the first signpost marking any path of cruelty is speed with which it is dismissed. Today we remember the March to Selma, and the shameful brutality that occurred. The blood spilled on Edmund Pettus Bridge forced us to see reality. The notion that we could never treat others this way was make-believe.

We did treat others as “less than” even as we were saying, “all are created equal.” We did ignore the teaching that we are to treat others as we would want to be treated, and love as we have been loved, even our enemies. Every time we talk about what they did, arrogantly allowing history or geography to provide a safe distance from the attitudes and actions of the family that preceded us, our family, we move dangerously closer to repeating their horrors.

The anti-Christ of history - a truly shocking effort by a misleading author.

I once had to write a 5000 word piece for my history degree and this utter tosh was mentioned several times. The topic I was researching was West German memory in the post-war period, looking at how the German public aligned itself with its Nazi past. As part of this I looked at different historians views on how involved "ordinary" Germans actually were.

Goldhagen's problem is he does not understand the German society of the time, it's different groups, attitudes and responsibilities within the regime. The result is he groups "Germans" as one united regime with one opinion and role within the war.

Goldhagen thus groups the nation as all involved in the Hollocaust in some way, and thus responsible for it, and should feel guilt within the post-war period.

"Goldhagen implied that the whole nation was involved; phrases such as `the Germans' slaughter of Jews; were left uncontextualised." Taken from Bill Niven's 'Facing The Nazi Past' (p129), which is well worth a read.

This is worth reading if you need an example of how not to be a historian. Otherwise it is misleading and almost racist in its conclusions. If you would like a true insight into the period, then this is a miss. Read the book I have mentioned.

I find it really disappointing that some people have given this a good review. It is not just an opinion in stating this book is terrible!

Ironically the German public, perhaps trying to distance itself from its past, liked the book!

The most unremittingly grim book I have ever read. This makes Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad book look like Harry Potter, so dark and depressing is it.

I read this years ago and was shocked at the implications of the author's premise, although not unwilling to accept it. Nevertheless, this author has been accused of twisting sources to support a point (see Lewis Weinstein's review of Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning on Goodreads), and that makes me wonder about the credibility of his statements here. Other books, such as Browning's Ordinary Men, make the possibilities that Goldhagen describes all too likely for some Nazi-era Germans, although they were not the universal response of the Germans to the Holocaust. Some people actively tried to oppose the Nazi regime and its actions and to help the persecuted Jews; others saw what was going on and knew it was wrong, but were (in many cases justifiably) afraid to act lest they lose all that they loved or valued. It is easy to be judgmental from the safe harbor of twenty-first century America, but the terrors and horror of the time are something we can only indirectly know.

I have never understood many aspects of the greatest crime in history. How could a cultured industrial nation like Germany create essentially a continental industry devoted to killing human beings? Where did the idea come from? Who planned the Holocaust, and who carried it out? This book answers some of those questions and sheds light on others.

Almost as good as Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' as to how ordinary people can be brought to serve evil while believing in a common good. The say "they didn't know". But how true was that? While it was no secret that the SS were killing Jews- or at least, "putting them someplace we can't see them"- the actual machinery of death was something the Reich could not bear making general public knowledge- individual German Army members who protested participation were generally persecuted for "revealing state secrets" and reassigned, quietly. Goldhagen's book delves into how the psychology of a "mass struggle" was used in order to find acquiescence in one of the most disgusting chapters of human history.