Reddit reviews Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
We found 22 Reddit comments about Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Vintage
>You could say it wouldn't take a lot to turn America into an evil country like Germany became. But in a way, it already is. It's just not as poor and desperate as Germany was.
Whenever I see Trump and his supporters, I'm instantly reminded of this book. It's a really good read and shows that the people of Germany were just as culpable in their actions as Hitler was. It's astonishing to see how similar the social climate towards the Jews back then was to today's attitude towards Muslims.
No, it isn't. If you would like to know more I suggest you read "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and "Ordinary Men" by Christopher Browning
​
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3R1FH4PO6HEYJ&keywords=hitlers+willing+executioners+by+daniel+goldhagen&qid=1568991878&s=books&sprefix=hitlers+%2Cstripbooks%2C154&sr=1-1
​
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023/ref=asc_df_0062303023/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312028586631&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17934141838329272719&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002445&hvtargid=aud-801381245258:pla-417307105818&psc=1
My book recommendation for all of this shit.
Right, but he didn't experience the German's persecution directly, only their willing executioners.
Yes! For my money this is the most interesting historians' debate going (it's got just about everything - drama, intrigue, childish insults...); I wrote my final paper on it for a class on German memory. It's a particularly good paper topic because it's relatively straightforward in terms of your source material: Browning's book is a direct response to Goldhagen's - in fact, Browning sort of takes down the "fourth wall"/takes away his narrative voice in his afterword to address the debate with Goldhagen directly. (Of course,the issues involved and history of those issues is quite a bit more complex!)
The Browning/Goldhagen exchange (and it included other historians as well) embodies the gloriously dramatic Historikerstreit ("Historians' Quarrel") that had been going on in Germany since the late 1980s. (You could choose to include some of these other historians' written pieces reflecting on/responding to the Goldhagen book if you like as well. These appeared both as academic pieces of writing as well as non-academic pieces in publications like Der Spiegel.)
Agreed. The book Hitler’s Willing Executioners explains this really well.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679772685/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_.LEvCb7SXRHT8
A lot of people consciously/subconsciously want an excuse to exploit other people, and the easiest way is often to think of them as objects not people.
For sex:
For power:
For conquest:
For meaning:
For varying personal reasons:
It doesn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
Child porn is the moral panic of our age. Like Reagan's Welfare Queen, or the "satanic ritual" panics of the 80s and 90s, the stuff does not exist, but instead causes fear and terror in the population: Something Must Be Done!™.
I do not believe that child porn exists in real life: I have never seen it, nor has any person I have ever met in real life seen it. It only exists as some boogeyman to terrorize unsuspecting dupes into submission. Some "enemy" must exist for the fascists, whether that "enemy" exists in real life or not is irrelevant. The media shrills stuff up until everyone is willing to hand over all authority (and everything else) to those in power. One book to read on how this shit happens is Hitler's Willing Executioners
The logged data exists to find you guilty of something. Downloading, or wikilinks or filesharing - those are other moral panics. It will be used to testify against you when The Man wants to put you away for something. Anything.
Calling Japanese internment camps the "EXACT SAME THING" is ridiculous. Anyway, of course Germans knew about the death camps.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
>Robert Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, conducted a widely respected survey of the German media before and during the war, concluding that there was "substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans" in aspects of the Holocaust, and documenting that the sight of columns of slave laborers were common, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known.[20] The German scholar, Peter Longerich, in a study looking at what Germans knew about the mass murders concluded that: "General information concerning the mass murder of Jews was widespread in the German population."
Anne Frank was hiding in an attic, and still heard about it:
>"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed."
>- October 9, 1942
A book if you would like to know more: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679772685/qid=1075330351/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7592414-1779069?v=glance&s=books
I understand how pervasive propaganda was in Germany, but if you stepped outside into the rest of Europe, it was all over the papers, all over the radio, everyone knew. If you have evidence that they were somehow still ignorant, please share it.
Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, was in part a response to Browning's book. It has been a while since I read it, but he basically argued that the ideas of antisemitism were so deeply rooted in the German psyche that the NSDAP just had to exploit that in order to get followers. So, the question arises whether or not centuries-old antisemitism is a part of mid-twentieth century German national identity/nationalism or if it is something else as a legitimate reason for action.
Edited for grammar.
To put themselves into power Hitler and the Nazis built on long-standing cultural Antisemitism and blamed the Jews for the humiliating outcome of the First World War and the economic crisis that came after it. Check out this book: Hitler's Willing Executioners for a better understanding of how average Germans were capable of atrocities.
Psychology or abuse, you say? Why not try Hitler's Willing Executioners? It's a disturbing non-fiction book about the Holocaust and the role of ordinary Germans in it.
I think Gitmo is at once a good and a poor good analogy. Poor in that it has housed perhaps 10-50,000 fewer people, and that it lies outside of the United States. Good in that we know of it's existence and, myself as an American, are culpable for its crimes.
Many believe the German concentration/work/death camps were outside of Germany. To some extent that is true--the major killing camps were in Poland. But many of the labor camps were in Germany and their death rates were non trivial.
A link to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps
As I'm sure you know Hitler was not secretive about his attitude towards the Jews; it was one of the reasons he was elected. You cannot fully absolve a democracy of the crimes that its leadership commits. Krystalnacht was a nationwide phenomenon of "common Germans." Some believe it was a test to see how willing Germans would be to embrace violence towards Jews.
A book you may find of interest:
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685
And if you are of the documentary generation (or even if you aren't), this one is excellent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)
You said there is a lot of evidence that the death camps were widely unknown outside of their operation. Can you point me in the direction of that data?
Thanks.
Your discussion of Nazi Germany is accurate, but the crushing economic situation after World War I is but one factor which led to the Holocaust. I recommend Hitler's Willing Executions: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
I don't think you meant to say that regular folks only turn to murder because they feel economically oppressed. American Southerners mounted a campaign of terror and murder post-Reconstruction, which again roped in ordinary people to kill based on ideology.
A country with 3.5% unemployment is not attracted to fascism for primarily economic reasons. The economy was a mess in 2008 - people didn't go all Blood and Soil, because the Party in charge was promoting hope, not fear of the other.
Those struggling the hardest pay the least attention to politics in America. The economy is good. Trump's followers are not destitute. We have to grapple with the fact that economics is not the motivating factor for people voting for Republicans and fascism.
I suggest you read " Hitlers willing executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685
It provides a lot of convincing evidence that European nations that were occupied by the Germans in many ways did not do enough and often times the local citizens contributed greatly to the effort to eliminate Jews. Look at the local authorities in Vichy France for instance.
It’s a pretty broad statement but I’d be happy to share my reasoning.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Wehrmacht
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zsshhyc
https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-did-germans-know-secret-anti-nazi-diary-gives-voice-to-man-in-the-street/
The last one is pretty important because it’s an example of the exception to the rule, a German who was disgusted by what his countrymen allowed.
You also have to remember that complicity isn’t all equal. I’m not saying all germans were killers or even necessarily active in their antisemitism. The holocaust led to the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil.”
I could tell you that the fact that Hitler was elected into power or that millions joined his party was enough. I could tell you that the fact that so few fought back within Germany is evidence. But really all that it took was for the majority to simply allow and accept if not condone the mass atrocities.
I’ll leave you with this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068
This is perhaps the most damning evidence we have that the average German knew enough to know what was happening, and that it was overwhelmingly accepted by them.
There’s also this:
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685
I believe that his thesis that antisemitism was uniquely German is flawed but his arguments and evidence for an existence of virulent antisemitism embedded in the German national identity is pretty clear.
Edit: this article is also pretty interesting. https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/28/curt-schilling/schilling-throws-wild-pitch-nazi-stat/
There are plenty of books about the German populace's complicity in the Holocaust and many do make some controversial and arguable claims, but I think the book that stays closest to historical fact is this one. I understand you're not going to just order this book and read it because I disagree with your claims, but if you really want to understand how the Holocaust happened and why the Germans did it, read this. The book basically documents how the Nazis persuaded the German populace to along with its genocidal ideology. Thuggery, scapegoating, and good old fear were the main tools the party used.
This is also a fascinating read: The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
Try Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Hitlers Willing Executioners
Really good book on this subject.
You can run but you cannot hide...
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679772685/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_bDmUCbGFGZN4G
Similar scenario: http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685
If you people are interpreting a lecture devoted entirely to relentless criticism of the Nazis as some how being pro-nazi, then this subreddit has truly lost its way.
Do you people not have the ability to think for yourselves?
Edit: He states, at the beginning, that the source he is drawing from is "Hitler's Willing Executioners" so saying that he isn't aware that the Nazis enslaved people is entirely false.