Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler’s Willing Executioners By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen starts this book with reflections on his opinion, the theme of his book, and the structure of his book. If you cannot finish the first 25 pages, set it down. This opening shows his tone and voice of his writing, it’s an indicator of your ability to bare the rest of the book. The question that Goldhagen tries to answer is how were the Germans able to participate in genocide, which becomes the theme throughout the book. Each section of the book brings another aspect of the war against the Jewish culture and each chapter brings a new aspect of that section. Each page comes back to this theme. Each page of this 454 page book relates to how that certain person was able to participate in the genocide of Jews, without this theme, the book would have no purpose than to let the author vent. The only difference between Hitler’s Willing Executioners and a history book is Goldhagen’s opinions on the neutral facts that can be interpreted in many different ways.

The theme of Hitler’s Willing Executioners is what made a German man become part of a police battalion that lines up children to kill; or become part of the SS that commands the rest of army; or become a neighbor that reports the community’s Jewish family to the Gestapo? Goldhagen does a good job in sticking to this underlying structure, which ends up driving his words. He uses different people’s lives to illuminate his theme. For example he goes into great detail of the police battalion 101. By the end of this section the reader has become a part of the battalion. The theme is strong through out the book and never loses its strength.

Daniel Goldhagen’s voice and tone in the book is very frustrating because of its arrogance. He makes it apparent that it’s his way or the highway. Every chapter begins why other people are wrong, then it goes into his opinion, and ends with why he is right. He also is a hypocritical writer. He begins his book with these long philosophical reasoning on why as a reader, our obligation is to only agree with ideas that are backed-up by strong evidence and facts. However, he seldom uses this rule and when he does, he uses facts that can be interpreted in many different ways.

This book is not far from a history book in that it has no feeling, just strong opinions that are based off of neutral facts. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen takes a topic that many people are interested in and makes it more boring than reading Chemistry. Goldhagen rips this period in time so much that it becomes monotonous to read. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a hypocritical writer that presumes that he is never wrong and the reader must agree with him because of the facts that he lists after each idea. However, these so called ‘facts’ are nothing more than mere ideas and numbers that can be used in any opinion. Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a poor way to waste time. The book is infuriating with its many observations with no true backing. The only interesting parts of his book are the quotes that he thrusts into his text.