Hitler’s Volunteer Executives

Hitler’s Willing Executioners ( 1996 ) a book writer is American Daniel Goldhagen proposed that ordinary Germans not only knew but also supported the Holocaust because of an ” anti - Semitism unique and virulent eliminationist” in German identity, which had Developed in previous centuries. Goldhagen states that this special mentality arose from medieval attitudes of a religious basis, but was eventually secularized .

This work aroused controversy and debate in Germany and the United States . Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension ofHistorikerstreit , the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history . The book became a “publishing phenomenon” ¹ and achieved fame both in the States and in Germany, despite its biting reception among historians, ² who condemned it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg , “totally Wrong about everything “and” worthless. ” ^{3 4}

The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral thesis , was written largely in response to a publication by Christopher Browning . In 1994 , he won the Gabriel A. Almond Award in Comparative Politics by the American Political Science Association and the Democracy Award of the Journal for German and International Politics . This magazine argued that the debate promoted by Goldhagen’s book helped to perfect the public’s understanding of the past during a period of radical change in Germany. ⁵

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