Hitler's Willing Executioners Essay

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen born in 1959 is an American political scientist most famous for his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which hypothesizes that all ordinary Germans were actively in favor of the holocaust because of the supposedly unique and virulent "eliminationist" anti-Semitism that was a part of the common consciousness in Germany throughout history. He claims that this special mentality cannot be fully understood by non-Germans and that it was unique to Germany; eliminationist anti-Semitism grew out of medieval attitudes that were religiously based. Later they became more secularly based, but the anti-Semitism remained the same. Goldhagen holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and was a professor at Harvard for many years. He is the winner of Germany's highly prestigious triennial Democracy Prize and currently a member of Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. In the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen uses primary and secondary sources. Goldhagen traces origin & scrutinizes
The slaughter is said to have expressed the will of a small circle of lunatic Nazi and not the will of the German people, who were antisemetic but not murderously so. It is said that the killing was conducted out of the sight of the nation and with industrial efficiency by a relatively small number of people insane with ideology. The effect of these premises is to make the Holocaust a political and not a social event, with the happy consequence that responsibility for it rests squarely on a small number of identifiable political and military operatives and not on the German nation as a