Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues for collective guilt: that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and that as a result ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the Schutzstaffel (SS), and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents.
The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Much of Goldhagen's book focuses on the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. His narrative challenges various points of Browning's book. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of Ordinary Men in the July 13, 1992, edition of The New Republic titled "The Evil of Banality". His doctoral dissertation, The Nazi Executioners: A Study of Their Behavior and the Causation of Genocide, won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics.
Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate in Germany and the United States. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". Published by the Central European University, based on a public lecture series. Hitler's Willing Executioners won the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. The Harvard Gazette asserted that the selection was the result of Goldhagen's book having "helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany"..
"The Evil of Banality" In 1992, the American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland about the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which had been used in 1942 to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not bloodlust or primal hatred.Browning, Chris. Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins, 1992. p. 57
In his 1992 review of Ordinary Men entitled "The Evil of Banality",Goldhagen, Daniel (July 1992), "The Evil of Banality" (excerpts from Goldhagen's Review, H-NET List on German History). Originally in The New Republic, July 13–20, 1992. Retrieved June 15, 2014. Goldhagen expressed agreement with several of Browning's findings, namely, that the killings were not, as many people believe, done entirely by SS men, but also by Trawnikis; that the men of Unit 101 had the option not to kill, and – a point Goldhagen emphasizes – that no German was ever punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews.Goldhagen (1992), p.49. But Goldhagen disagreed with Browning's "central interpretation" that the killing was done in the context of the ordinary sociological phenomenon of obedience to authority. Goldhagen instead contended that "for the vast majority of the perpetrators a monocausal explanation does suffice".Guttenplan, D. D. (2002), The Holocaust on Trial (Google Books preview) W. W. Norton, p.214. . They were not ordinary men as we usually understand men to be, but "ordinary members of extraordinary political culture, the culture of Nazi Germany, which was possessed of a hallucinatory, lethal view of the Jews. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism."Goldhagen (1992), pp.51–52. Goldhagen stated that he would write a book that would rebut Ordinary Men and Browning's thesis and prove instead that it was the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture that led the men of Reserve Battalion 101 to murder Jews.
Goldhagen's thesis In Hitler's Willing Executioners Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism, which he called "eliminationist antisemitism," a virulent ideology stretching back through centuries of German history. Under its influence, the vast majority of Germans wanted to eliminate Jews from German society, and the perpetrators of the Holocaust did what they did because they thought it was "right and necessary." For Goldhagen the Holocaust, in which so many Germans participated, must be explained as a result of the specifically German brand of antisemitism.
Goldhagen charged that every other book written on the Holocaust was flawed by the fact that historians had treated Germans in the Third Reich as "more or less like us," wrongly believing that "their sensibilities had remotely approximated our own."Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, Alfred Knopf: New York, 1996 pp. 27, 269. Instead, Goldhagen argued that historians should examine ordinary Germans of the Nazi period, in the same way that they examined the Aztecs who believed in the necessity of human sacrifice to appease the gods, and ensure that the Sun would rise every day.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, Alfred Knopf: New York, 1996 p. 28. His thesis, he said, was based on the assumption that Germans were not a "normal" Western people influenced by the values of the Enlightenment. His approach would be anthropological, treating Germans the same way that an anthropologist would describe preindustrial people who believed in absurd things such as trees having magical powers.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, Alfred Knopf: New York, 1996 pp. 28, 30.
Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz.Clendinnean, Inga Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 p. 117. The violent antisemitic "cultural axiom" held by Martin Luther in the 16th century and expressed in his 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, according to Goldhagen, were the same as those held by Adolf Hitler in the 20th century.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, New York: Alfred Knopf 1996 p. 284. He argued that such was the ferocity of German "eliminationist antisemitism" that the situation in Germany had been "pregnant with murder" regarding the Jews since the mid-19th century and that all Hitler did was merely to unleash the deeply rooted murderous "eliminationist antisemitism" that had been brooding within the German people since at least Luther's time, if not earlier.Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler, New York: HarperCollins, 1998 p. 339.
Hitler's Willing Executioners marked a revisionist challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy surrounding the question of German public opinion and the Final Solution.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996 pp. 8–9 The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, a leading expert in the social history of the Third Reich, wrote, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference,"Evans, Richard In Hitler's Shadow, New York: Pantheon, 1989 p. 71Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 p. 91. that is, that the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by a vicious form of antisemitism on the part of the Nazi elite, but that it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was indifferent to what was happening.Browning, Christopher "Afterword", Ordinary Men, New York: HarperCollins, 1998 pp. 200–201. In several articles and books, most notably his 1983 book Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Kershaw argued that most Germans were at a minimum at least vaguely aware of the Holocaust, but did not much care about what their government was doing to the Jews.Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 pp. 90–91. Other historians, such as the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, the Israeli historian David Bankier, and the American historian Aron Rodrigue, while differing from Kershaw over many details about German public opinion, arguing that the term "passive complicity" is a better description than "indifference", have largely agreed with Kershaw that there was a chasm of opinion about the Jews between the Nazi "true believers" and the wider German public, whose views towards Jews seemed to have expressed more of a dislike than a hatred. Goldhagen, in contrast, declared the term "indifference" to be unacceptable, contending that the vast majority of Germans were active antisemites who wanted to kill Jews in the most "pitiless" and "callous" manner possible.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996 pp. 439–440.
As such, to prove his thesis Goldhagen focused on the behavior of ordinary Germans who killed Jews, especially the behavior of the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland in 1942 to argue ordinary Germans possessed by "eliminationist antisemitism" chose to willingly murder Jews.Clendinnean, Inga Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 pp. 115–117. The 450 or so men of Battalion 101 were mostly middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg who showed little interest in National Socialism and who had no special training to prepare them for genocide.Clendinnean, Inga Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 p. 119. Despite their very different interpretations of Battalion 101, both Browning and Goldhagen have argued that the men of the unit were a cross-sample of ordinary Germans.