Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen | Highly biased and ill-informed

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Hitler's Willing E...

	Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Vintage, 1997 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 201 reviews view larger image
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Probably can't talk about it enough.

Several criticisms of the book, while accurate, may miss the point. The fact remains that the Third Reich, the Reich that was to last for a thousand years, selected a race to be exterminated.

Granted, the extermination policy as well included a variey of hundreds of thousands of others. Like the genocides of the early Greeks placing newborns on the hillside if they failed at a wonderous, historical, subjective "normalcy," the Reich also included homosexuals, the disabled, artists, early dissidents, lawyers, and as one reviewer pointed out, 'we shouldn't forget the Slavs.'

The horror perpetrated by Stalin probably exceeds that. But we did not have nor do we have now access to Moscow as we did with Berlin and so, while they were more guilty of crimes against humanity the Russians escaped indictment in exchange for conjecture.

Having said all of that, the Nazis stand alone in numbers and in methods for attempting to exterminate an entire race. If it's the details we are concerned about, then we should agree that this supercedes the racial genocides in the Middle East, 6000 years old, those in Africa and those in Eastern Europe.

So we need to know how this happened and perhaps not punish but somehow understand what the world did, including the Germans, to permit this atrocity to fulminate. And this is one Irish Catholic kid from New York who weighs in with the great Nazi hunters who say, "Never Again."

We have to understand so that we cannot ever let this happen again. And whether it's Hussein in Iraq or Milovan Slobovich or some potentate in Africa, we must be forewarned and forearmed as to how it begins. It is the apathhy of the world that allows humans in power to destroy humans who aren't. We must protect humans who are racial victems with as much zeal as we bring forth protection of plants and animals facing extinction.

Now as a book, Daniel, the red pencil, where was it? Too long, tiring, repetitive. Because you have an axe to grind that not all of your listeners are willing to accept doesn't mean you have to talk them to death. A little less could be more. You don't need to repeat, repeat, repeat. Non-fiction for the public should not be a Doctoral thesis. Three stars. Larry Scantlebury

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Highly biased and ill-informed

"Hitler's Willing Executioners" reflects Mr Goldhagen's biases which have led him to leave out the testimony of centuries of history of the German people. He ignores or is ignorant of contemporary accounts of Germany up to and during World War II. Even worse he displays no knowledge of the high standing of Jews in Germany prior to the Nazis coming to power. Indeed Jewish people were better integrated into German society and politics than in most of the neighboring countries.

Thomas Sowell has written a short essay "Germans and History" that provides an unbiased account that is better researched than this book. It is contained in Professor Sowell's new collection "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" which contains other essays that also illuminate 20th century history in a way that Goldhagen is unwilling or incapable of doing.

Note: Mr Goldhagen also wrote "A Moral Reckoning" an ill-informed book about the role of the Catholic Church in saving Jews during World War II (that book has been convincingly refuted in "The Myth of Hitler's Pope" by Rabbi David Dalin).

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