Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen in

¶ … Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen In his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen attempts to explain why the Holocaust happened. Central to his thesis is the notion that German citizens were essentially regular human beings, living conventional lives, with complex social relationships and family obligations, who also happened to be staffing police battalions, organizing death marches, working in concentration and slave labor camps and basically facilitating Hitler's overwhelmingly murderous plan.

Daniel Goldhagen explores the motives behind the seemingly normalized crimes of mainstream German society, using as examples thousands of ordinary people who tormented, starved and murdered their former friends and neighbors. The author suggests that the nature of anti-Semitism at the time offered a palpable motive to German society, and partly explains the perpetrators' actions.

Furthermore, Goldhagen tracks the history of anti-Semitism in Germany for several centuries and points out that it was a sentiment so deeply rooted in the collective conscience, for so many generations, that Germans were willing to kill Jews even when they would not have been penalized for refusing to do so.

The Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, was "the defining feature of German society during its Nazi period"; "No analysis of German society," he continues, "no understanding or characterization of it, can be made without placing the persecution and extermination of the Jews at its center" (p. 8). Because the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany long predated Hitler, the dictator was able to appeal to this vulnerability and orchestrate the mechanism of the Holocaust with virtually no challenge from his constituents.

Anti-Semitism was a part of German culture, and the Nazis were able to introduce the concept of Holocaust with such ease, because for ordinary Germans, it simply made sense. On page one of his book, Goldhagen quotes a German (non SS) commander who vocally protests a decree calling for his men to sign a promise not to steal. The commander felt strongly that this was an insulting assumption, and an affront to their character, and he led his men in a protest refusing to sign.

This same commander was already responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews, but was not the least bit reluctant to vociferously protest issues that struck him as immoral. But annihilation of the Jews was different, according to Goldhagen, since it did not strike ordinary German citizens as being the least bit immoral. For much of his book, Goldhagen challenges conventional accounts of the Holocaust, which tend to focus on the few factory-like extermination camps such as Auschwitz.

Though he understands the morbid interest in these unbelievable killing machines, he argues that most of the killing of the Holocaust was much more personalized and mainstream. "Virtually no evidence exists," Goldhagen writes, "to contradict the notion that the intense and ubiquitous public declaration of anti-Semitism was mirrored in people's private beliefs" (p. 30). Goldhagen takes all previous scholarship to task, characterizing existing analysis as too timid to thoroughly explore the question of German culpability.

Previous analyses suggest that the slaughter of the Holocaust expressed the will of a small percentage of lunatic Nazis, and not the will of mainstream German society. Earlier works of scholarship relate that the killing was conducted largely with the knowledge of the nation by a fairly insignificant number of people, moved by misguided political ideology.

These theories, according to Golhagen, marginalize the Holocaust, interpreting it as a political and not a social event, with the comfortable conclusion that only a small number of identifiable political and military operatives were responsible. The author insists that we must revise and re-examine the nature of anti-Semitism in Germany and reconsider the character of German society during the Nazi period and before.

According to Goldhagen, "the absence of evidence that change occurred in Germany's cognitive model about Jews should be seen to suggest strongly that these models and the elaborate beliefs dependent upon them were reproduced and continued to exist" (p. 46). The author is also especially cynical of certain psychoanalytical analyses that herald the potential for evil in all of us. Goldhagen concedes that his radical interpretation presents a complicated proposition, and that his history of German anti-Semitism is not meant to be definitive.

Still, he offers an important theory in that ordinary perpetrators were motivated by a pervasive type of anti-Semitism that had taken root from the 19th century onward and was widespread in German society. By the 20th century, leaders like Hitler were able to leverage this seething, collective hatred and to transform it into a public desire for extermination. Chapters 13 and 14 of Hitler's Willing Executioners, focus on the westward.