¶ … Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen
In his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen attempts to explain why the Holocaust happened. Central to his thesis is the notion that German citizens were essentially regular human beings, living conventional lives, with complex social relationships and family obligations, who also happened to be staffing police battalions, organizing death marches, working in concentration and slave labor camps and basically facilitating Hitler's overwhelmingly murderous plan.
Daniel Goldhagen explores the motives behind the seemingly normalized crimes of mainstream German society, using as examples thousands of ordinary people who tormented, starved and murdered their former friends and neighbors. The author suggests that the nature of anti-Semitism at the time offered a palpable motive to German society, and partly explains the perpetrators' actions. Furthermore, Goldhagen tracks the history of anti-Semitism in Germany for several centuries and points out that it was a sentiment so deeply rooted in the collective conscience, for so many generations, that Germans were willing to kill Jews even when they would not have been penalized for refusing to do so.
The Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, was "the defining feature of German society during its Nazi period"; "No analysis of German society," he continues, "no understanding or characterization of it, can be made without placing the persecution and extermination of the Jews at its center" (p. 8).
Because the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany...
Goldhagen and Browning: How the Holocaust Could Have Happened The Jewish Holocaust has inspired countless theories on how such an atrocity could take place in a seemingly humane and otherwise "normal" society, as Germany was in the 20th century. In other words, it was not really any different from any other society or culture in the modern era -- and yet understanding how the Holocaust could have happened, how human beings
" (Jahoda 1998). Consequently, such points-of-view may be difficult to back. Anti-Semitism had ancient beginnings throughout Europe, but the Nazi's added a more modern scientific twist to these long-held beliefs: "The adversary is not Judaism, but Jewish genes. Nazism inverts the crucial diagnosis: the carrier of pollution is not ideology, religious dogmatics, discrete beliefs in and about God, it is, instead, the carnal being of the Jew, his or her very
Administrative Evil Review of Unmasking Administrative Evil In Understanding Administrative Evil, authors Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour explore the idea and evolution of the concept of evil. Adams and Balfour begin by defining historical evil as "knowingly and deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on other human being" (xix). However, in modern times, this idea has undergone a critical change. Historical evil has evolved into administrative evil, a form of evil
This makes his argument less-than-convincing and too vague and philosophical in tone. Even many of his citations merely note authors, rather than actual page numbers. He references the authors' general ideas, rather than specific evidence they present. And some of the sources are in German, which make it difficult to trace his sources or even read the titles of many of the articles used in writing his piece. The most
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