NP Re: Willing Executioners?

[davemarc]

Considering comments made by Daniel Goldhagen, I suspect that I would not be
convinced by at least some of his arguments but I also note that he takes
great pains to make sure that he does not condemn Germans without
distinction.

He does take issue with a convention of referring to German perpetrators as
Nazis because he's concerned that that convention suggests that  those
perpetrators who were not Nazis were free from responsibility.

Sometimes he says "Germans did this..." and "Germans did that..." but it
seems clear that he does not mean "All Germans...." (Especially, if like me,
you recall that many Holocaust victims were Germans themselves.) He argues
that the non-Nazi German perpetrators numbered at least 100,000 and that
they readily fell in line with the Nazi agenda regarding Jews. (For what
it's worth, I believe that the German population in 1939 numbered about 79
million, so Goldhagen's 100,000 ordinary Germans comprised less than 1% of
the population.)

*

Letter by Goldhagen in the NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/19/letters/letters.html:

Max Frankel is correct that I ''did not originate the theory of collective
ethnic guilt'' because, contrary to his assertion, I have never espoused
such a view. In ''Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' I write: ''I reject
categorically the notion of collective guilt. . . . Not collective groups
but only individuals are to be deemed guilty and only for their own
individual deeds.''

*

Statement by Goldhagen at his publisher's website
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679772682&view=rg:
Against much of the literature on the Holocaust, my book shifts the focus of
the investigation of the Holocaust from where it has been--namely, on
abstract structures like the S.S., the Nazi Party, and the terror
apparatus--to the human beings who actually perpetrated the crimes. A very
large number of ordinary Germans were involved--a minimum figure of
100,000--and until this point, you have probably read close to nothing about
the actual people who carried out the killings, manned the camps, and
guarded the ghettos. I have shifted the investigation to them, the
perpetrators, in an effort to explain their actions, uncover their
motivations, and explicate how such a thing could have happened in an
otherwise civilized country such as Germany.

I am very pleased that the publication of my book has produced widespread,
international discussion and that so many people seem to feel compelled to
come to grips with its contents.  Whatever exact conclusions people arrive
at after reading my book--and some continuing disagreements are
inevitable--that the issues it raises are being discussed so vigorously can
be seen as being only a good thing."

*

Interviews:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/goldhagen.html
"Hitler and the Nazi Party were instrumental for the initiation and
commission of the Holocaust. Without the Nazis, there would have never been
a Holocaust in Germany; however, they came to power in a country which was
already virulently anti-semitic, and so, therefore, they were easily able to
mobilize ordinary Germans first in the persecutions of the 30's, the radical
persecution of the Jews in the 30's, and then in the extermination of the
40's."

>From the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem:
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:37RVQQ2geNYJ:www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf
/Microsoft%2520Word%2520-%25203724.pdf+goldhagen+interview&hl=en

*

d.