Hitler's Willing Executioners
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen that argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identity, that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly and happily. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.
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".
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 is concerned with the same reserve battalion 101 of the Ordnungspolizei, during which Goldhagen attacks every aspect 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 entitled "The Evil of Banality".
Hitler's Willing Executioners won the American Political Science Association's 1997 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics and the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. The Journal asserted that the debate fostered by Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.
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