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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

List Price: £12.99

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Used Price: £4.80
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN: 9780349107868
ISBN: 0349107866
Label: Abacus
Manufacturer: Abacus
Number Of Pages: 640
Publication Date: March 03, 1997
Publisher: Abacus
Studio: Abacus
Sales Rank: 49925

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A psychological tour de force.
This book is truly exceptional. An original. Just read it and digest this man's irresitable logic. Goldhagen is a genius. He has married the science of history to those of psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

What is clever about this book is how he makes the reader start thinking about the subject afresh from an analytical view point. Those without some background in psychiatry will have difficulty in accepting Goldhagen's descriptions of the delusions that underlay the actions of Germans and other Jew haters. The very concept of delusion is one that most people are ignorant of or if they are aware of will only ascribe to the obviously mentally ill. Goldhagen's argument is that Germans and others did the things they did willingly because ... Read More:

Rating:

- Ugly Sub-Text to the The World's Most Terrible Crime
The essential point to be gleaned from this tortuous book is quite simple: it's OK to be racist when you are pinning the label on Germans.

Goldhagen seems seriously to believe that only the Germans could have committed such an atrocity on such a scale.

Goldhagen, like the apologists for Holocaust Memorial Day, seems to think that the Nazis' crime was unique.

In quantative terms this is true, but ethics and morality are not statistically variable: it is the intent to wipe out a particular sub-group of humankind which is the crime, and it applies whether the intent is to kill a hundred people, or a hundred million people.

Ask the proponents of Holocaust Memorial Day why the Massacre of the Armenians in ... Read More:

Rating:

- The Goldhagen Debate- A Short Critique.
Although Daniel Goldhagen's interpretation of the Holocaust makes for interesting reading, his paradigm doesn't aid in our quest for 'historical truth'. By perpetuating 'sole' blame for the slaughter of nine million European Jews upon Ordinary Germans is inadequate and fundamentally flawed. Obviously, they played a 'role' within the mass genocide campaign, however, Goldhagen has taken this understanding to another level. To declare all German people were anti-semtic, as Christopher Browning wrote; they and Hitler were of one-mind, and Hitler's input was simply to come and unleash this pent-up anti-semitic hostility-an implosion within German society-and there the Holocaust was born, is unthinkable. Goldhagen went as-far-as to say Ordinary German ... Read More:

Rating:

- UNCONVINCING
Whatever the merits of Goldhagen's scholarship, the first thing to make clear about this book is that his ponderous, repetitious writing style does not make its 600-plus pages an easy read. However, his basic argument can be summed up as follows:

Because antisemitism was so integral to the psyche of ordinary Germans, Nazi policy unleashed their latent desire to exterminate the Jews, which they did with willingness and enthusiasm. Although most Germans would never have consciously considered acting in this way before the Nazis ascended to power, all the latter effectively had to do was provide the spark which then produced the fire.

To back this up the author first of all provides us with evidence that antisemitism was deeply ... Read More:

Rating:

- Fascinating But Sensationalist and Flawed.
The debate is growing regarding the place of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. From the publication, to critical acclaim, of "Hitler's Willing Executioners - Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" (USA: 1996) (hereinafter "HWE"), Goldhagen has shifted from relative obscurity, to the central figure in what has become known as the Goldhagen Debate. His argument, as the title of the book suggests, is first that the German people share a collective responsibility for the Holocaust, and second, that the death camp systems 'exposes not just Nazism's, but Germany's true face'. For the Holocaust to have happened the Nazis 'had to induce a large number of people to carry out the Killings'. With the premise that this had thus far been ignored in the academic ... Read More:

Books : Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust