Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. (31 photos, not seen 8 maps)Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. By comparing Nazi policies toward Jews, Slavs, and the infirm (the Euthanasia Program was denounced and resisted by the Germans), we can more clearly see and understand the enormity of the crime and the complicity of ``ordinary Germans.'' A profoundly revolutionary work that demands a reexamination of the central moral problem of the 20th century. Both aspects support his thesis that the genocidal plans of the Nazis found an eagerly receptive audience in Germany. Further strengthening his case, Goldhagen focuses on hitherto neglected aspects of the Holocaust: the police battalions and the death marches that occurred toward the end of the war.

Its documentation will make refutation nearly impossible. Goldhagen thus offers a new conceptual framework for thinking about the Holocaust. One of the book's many virtues is that it insists on placing antisemitism in a larger context it permeated all segments of German society, including the proletariat, the professions, and the churches. By carefully studying the personnel of the death camps and police battalions, the author reveals that they were not forced to participate, nor were they brainwashed by the Nazi regime. In this exhaustively documented and richly researched work, Goldhagen documents conclusively that the people who actively participated in the extermination program were indeed ``ordinary Germans,'' neither fanatical Nazis nor members of the dreaded SS. Traditional explorations tended to accept at face value the usual defenses offered by the Germans: Either they did not know of the genocide or they were compelled to participate against their will.

Goldhagen (Government and Social Studies/Harvard) offers irrefutable proof that will force us to reconsider our previous understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. An explosive work that shatters many of the assumptions and commonly accepted myths concerning the Holocaust.

Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen