UNIT 1012 BOOK CLUB - HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONER: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST BY DANIEL GOLDHAGEN

"We live in an age which is raging throughout with mad ideas and demons, no less than the Middle Ages. Our allegedly "enlightened" age, instead of indulging in an orgy of crazed witch-hunting, feasts itself in an orgy of maniacal Jew-hatred. Today the Jew-hating madness, which had already raged frightfully in the Middle Ages, has entered upon its acute stage. This, the church, the community of Jesus Christ, must acknowledge. If she does not do it, then she will have failed, just as she had failed them, during the time of the witch-hunts. Today, the blood of millions of slaughtered Jews, of men, women, and children, cries to heaven. The Church is not permitted to be silent. She is not permitted to say that the settlement of the Jewish Problem is a matter for the state, the right to perform this function having been granted to it by Romans 13. The Church is also not permitted to say that in our time just punishment is being carried out upon the Jews for their sins . . . . There is no such thing as a moderate Christian antisemitism. Even when it is set forth seemingly convincingly by means of reasonable arguments (say, national ones) or even with scientific (read pseudo-scientific) arguments. The witch craze also was once scientifically justified by leading authorities of the theological, legal, and medical faculties. The battle against Jewry proceeds from the same muddy source from which the witch craze proceeded. Contemporary mankind has not overcome its proclivity to look for a 'scapegoat." Therefore it searches for all kinds of guilty parties---the Jews, the Freemasons and supra-state powers. This is the background of the hymns of hate of our time.

. . . Who gives us the right to lay the blame solely on the Jews? A Christian is forbidden to do this. A Christian is not allowed to be an antisemite, and he is not allowed to be a moderate antisemite. The objection that, without the [defensive] reaction of "moderate" antisemitism, the Jewification of the life of the Volk [Verjudung des Volkslebens] would become a horrible danger originates from an unbelieving and purely secular outlook, which Christians ought to overcome.

. . . The Church ought to live of love. Woe to her if she does not do that! Woe to her if by her silence and by all sorts of dubious excuses she becomes jointly guilty of the world's outbursts of hatred! Woe to her if she adopts words and slogans that originate in the sphere of hatred . . ."

- The letter of Pastor Walter Hochstadter, admonishing the German's that they cannot embrace a Christian, non-criminal antisemitism.

            We, the comrades of Unit 1012, endorse this book, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. This book will not only educate people about the Holocaust, it will also teach people on how evil exists in this world when people get manipulated.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners

Author	Daniel Goldhagen
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	The Holocaust
Genre	History
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	1996
Media type	Print
Pages	622
ISBN	0679446958
OCLC	33103054
Dewey Decimal	940.5318
LC Class	D804.3 .G648

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 political culture, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identity, and that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.

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 actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. His narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book, however. 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".

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 to whom Ordinary Men is dedicated, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".

Hitler's Willing Executioners won the American Political Science Association's 1994 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.