Goldhagen, D. (1996). Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Little, Brown and Co., London. Hardback: pp622, £22.50, ISBN 0-316-879-428. Paperback: pp640, £9.99, ISBN 0-349-107-866.
✍ Scribed by GEORGE W. ALBEE
- Book ID
- 101283828
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 169 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1052-9284
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
While I was reading Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the massacre of 16 young children and their teacher occurred in Dunblane, Scotland. Sympathy, flowers, letters, poured into this little town from all over the world. The Queen herself visited Dunblane and tried to help console the grieving relatives. The killer was recalled to be a strange sort of loner. The horrible deed clearly was seen to be that of a demented person. A short time later, there was a massacre of innocent strangers at a resort in Tasmania. Again, the killer was said to be a schizoid' young man whose mind had snapped'. In both Britain and Australia there was an immediate public outcry for legislation banning distribution and ownership of guns. But when the Germans killed millions of Jewish children and adults, often first torturing and humiliating them, little sorrow was expressed by people anywhere. No one suggested disarming the Germans or labelling them as mad. The enormity of the holocaust and the vast number of perpetrators make a `mental disorder' explanation hardly credible. And why did most of the world's people, religious leaders, government leaders, not speak out?
In trying to grasp somehow the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, there has been a temptation to blame the murders of 6,000,000 Jews on the twisted minds of sadistic and fanatic Nazis. Surely, it is often argued, the people responsible for planning and carrying out this extermination were uncivilized psychopaths recruited specifically for the purpose. Surely the good Germans, cultured, refined, scientifically sophisticated, lovers of art and music, did not participate, did not know what went on behind the barbed-wire fences around the `work camps', or in the death marches when the war clearly was lost. Not so, says Goldhagen. Anti-Semitism had been entrenched in the German culture for more than a century. Everyone knew what was happening and a great many ordinary Germans helped in the torment and the killing.