Hitler's Willing Executioners
... had the name “killer” or “perpetrators;” as long as it was understood that “these men and women were Germans first, and SS men, policemen, or camp guards second.” It was thought that “the men and women who become the Holocaust’s perpetrators were shaped by and operated in a particular social and historical setting,” and that this had an influence that made them this way toward the Jews. Also, at this time, “Hitler announced many times that the war would end in the extermination of the Jews. No other policy was carried out with more persistence and zeal, and with fewer difficulties, than the genocide, except perhaps the war itself. The Holocaust defines not only the history of the Jews during the middle of the twentieth century but also the history of the Germans.” Hitler’s Willing Executioners consist fundamentally of three subjects: the perpetrators of the Holocaust, German anti-Semitism, and the nature of German society during the Nazi period. This book explains why the Holocaust occurred and that the cause of the Holocaust is found in the beliefs of the Germans. It tells non-Jewish Germans that the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers and was not perpetrated solely by SS officials in the death camps. Goldhagen says that the persecution began in schools, at the workplace, in stores, at every street corner. Germans tortured and killed the Jews not because they were ordered to but because they wanted to. The German’s “beliefs seemed to be so self-evidently true that they formed part of the people’s “natural world,” of the “natural order” of things.” In Germany during the Nazi period, “anti-Semitism was shouted from the rooftops: “The Jews are our misfortune,” we must rid ourselves of them.” This shows a lot about how the German society was at this time. On occasion after occasion, Germans took pride in the massacre of Jews. Goldhagen’s theory explains the wide discrepancy in monthly death rates among groups in the work camps “(e.g. 100% for Jews and 4% for Poles)” and is the only explanation that creates a tenable motive for the perpetrators' actions. Overall, Hitler's Willing Executioners presents a coherent, well-supported argument that ordinary Germans, motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism, knowingly and willingly took part in the Holocaust. One gruesome story was from the concentration camps, and it talked about how the “SS men” would shoot the Jews once in the back of the neck; which caused their brains to fly everywhere and over everyone. The camp system exposed not just Nazism’s but also Germany’s true face. “The notion that Germany during the Nazi period was an normal society which had the misfortune to have been governed by evil and ruthless rulers who, using the institutions of modern societies, moved people to commit acts that they abhorred, is in its essence false.” Germany during this time period was a society very different from ours today. It was a “different ontology and cosmology, inhabited by people whose general understanding of important realms of social existence was not ordinary by our standards.” Germans political culture had changed to the point where an enormous number of ordinary Germans became, and “most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be”, Hitler’s willing executioners. “The camp world reveals the essence of the Germany that gave itself to Nazism, no less than the perpetrators reveal the slaughter and barbarism that ordinary Germans were willing to perpetrate in order to save Germany and the German people from ultimate danger.” Most of Goldhagen’s information came from his intensive study over the Holocaust. He compared different interrogations from the soldiers, as well as, interviews of the Jewish victims. He studied the information and thought through his viewpoint on, “why the Holocaust occurred?” I believe that Goldhagen was predudice toward the Jews because he was totally against the actions that the Nazi’s took during this time period. I believe that Goldhagens thesis was to prov...