HitlerS Willing Executioners Ordinary Germans And The

Hitler`S Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust Essay, Research Paper

Title: Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

1996 622p. $30.00

Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf , Inc.

New York

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of a widespread, profound, unquestioned, and virulent anti-Semitism that led them to regard the Jews as a demonic enemy whose extermination was not only necessary but also just.”1 The author proposes to show that the phenomenon of German anti-Semitism was already deep-rooted and pervasive in German society before Hitler came to power, and that there was a widely shared view that the Jews ought to be eliminated in some way from German society. When Hitler chose mass extermination as the only final solution, he was easily able to enlist vast numbers of Germans to carry it out.

About the Author – Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University and an Associate of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. His doctoral dissertation, which is the basis for his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics.2

Summary – For the extermination of the Jews to occur, four principal things were necessary:

1.The Nazis – that is, the leadership, specifically Hitler – had to decide to undertake the extermination.

2. They had to gain control over the Jews, namely over the territory in which they resided.

3. They had to organize the extermination and devote to it sufficient resources.

4. They had to induce a large number of people to carry out the killings.

The vast literature on Nazism and the Holocaust treats in great depth the first three elements, the focus of this book, is the last element. Until recently, virtually no research has been done on the perpetrators, save on the leaders of the Nazi regime. In the last few years, some publications have appeared that treats one group or another, yet the state of our knowledge about the perpetrators remains incomplete. We know little about many of the institutions of killing, little about many aspects of the perpetration of the genocide, and still less about the perpetrators themselves. As a consequence, popular and scholarly myths and misconceptions about the perpetrators abound, including the following. It is commonly believed that the Germans slaughtered Jews by and large in the gas chambers, and that without gas chambers, modern means of transportation, and efficient bureaucracies, the Germans would have been unable to kill millions of Jews. The belief persists that somehow only technology made horror on this scale possible. It is generally believed that gas chambers, because of their efficiency, were a necessary instrument for the genocidal slaughter, and that the Germans chose to construct the gas chambers in the first place because they needed more efficient means of killing the Jews. It has been generally believed that the perpetrators were primarily, overwhelmingly SS men, the most devoted and brutal Nazis. It has been held that had a German refused to kill Jews, then he himself would have been killed, sent to a concentration camp, or severely punished. All of these views, views that fundamentally shape people’s understanding of the Holocaust, have been believed as though they were self-evident truths. They have been virtual articles of faith, have substituted for knowledge, and have distorted the way in which this period is understood.

The absence of attention to the perpetrators is surprising for a host of reasons, only one of which is the existence of a now over-ten-year-long debate about the genesis of the initiation of the Holocaust, which has come to be called by the misnomer the “intentionalist-functionalist”2 debate. For better or worse, this debate has become the organizing debate for much of the scholarship on the Holocaust. The limited character of our knowledge of this period is highlighted by the simple fact the number of people who were perpetrators is unknown. No estimate of any kind exists of the number of people who knowingly contributed to the genocidal killing in some intimate way. Scholars who discuss them, inexplicably, neither attempt such an estimate nor point out that this, a topic of such great significance, is an important gap in our knowledge. Depending on the number and identity of the Germans who contributed to the genocidal slaughter, different sorts of questions, inquiries, and bodies of theory might be a