Hitler's Willing Executioners
Encyclopedia
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen
that argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist
antisemitism" in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identitiy, that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly and happily. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.
Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate, in Germany and the United States. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit
, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".
The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning
's 1992 book Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the same reserve battalion 101 of the Ordnungspolizei
, during which Goldhagen attacks every aspect of Browning's book. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of Ordinary Men in the July 13, 1992 edition of the New Republic entited "The Evil of Banality".
Hitler's Willing Executioners won the American Political Science Association's
1997 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics and the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. The Journal asserted that the debate fostered by Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.
characterizes him as "the darling of the German public". Many media voices noted that, while the book launched passionate national discussion about the Holocaust, this discussion was carried out civilly and respectfully. Goldhagen's book tour became, in the opinion of some German media voices, "a triumphant march", as "the open-mindedness that Goldhagen encountered in the land of the perpetrators" was "gratifying" and something of which Germans ought to be proud, even in the context of a book which sought, according to some critics, to "erase the distinction between Germans and Nazis".
Goldhagen was awarded the Democracy Prize in 1997 by the German Journal for German and International Politics, which asserted that "because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public." The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jürgen Habermas
and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Elie Wiesel
praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read.
Debate about Goldhagen's theory has been intense. Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed" or "bad history". Some historians have criticized or simply dismissed the text, citing among other deficiencies Goldhagen's "neglect of decades of research in favour of his own preconceptions", which he proceeds to articulate in an "intemperate, emotional, and accusatory tone". In a 1997 interview, the German historian Hans Mommsen
said about Goldhagen:
Others have contended that, despite the book's "undeniable flaws", it "served to refocus the debate on the question of German national responsibility and guilt", in the context of a reemergence of a German political right, which may have sought to "relativize" or "normalize" Nazi history.
Goldhagen's assertion that the Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
, as "patent nonsense". Common complaints suggest that Goldhagen's primary hypothesis is either "oversimplified", or represents "a bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews" turned back upon the Germans. One German commentator suggested that Goldhagen's book "pushes us again and again headfirst into the nasty anti-Semitic mud. This is his revenge..." Eberhard Jäckel
wrote a very hostile book review in the Die Zeit
newspaper in May 1996 that called Hitler's Willing Executioners "simply a bad book". The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw
wrote that he fully agreed with Jäckel on the merits of Hitler's Willing Executioners".
In 1996, the American historian David Schoenbaum
wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review
of Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis. Furthermore, Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread anti-semitism. Finally, Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 was relatively ineffective or why the Kristallnacht
needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular anti-semitism. Using an example from his family history, Schoenbaum wrote his mother in law, a Polish Jew who lived in Germany between 1928–47 never considered the National Socialists and the Germans synonymous, and expressed regret that Goldhagen could not see the same.
Hitler's Willing Executioners also drew controversy with the publication of two critical articles: "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis", by the American political science professor Norman Finkelstein
and initially published in the UK political journal New Left Review
, and "Historiographical review: Revising the Holocaust", written by the Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn and initially published in the Historical Journal of Cambridge
. These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. In response to their book, Goldhagen sought a retraction and apology from Birn, threatening at one point to sue her for libel and according to Salon
declaring Finkelstein "a supporter of Hamas".
The Austrian-born American historian Raul Hilberg
has stated that Goldhagen is "totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong." Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. It can do nothing of the sort. To me it is worthless, all the hype by the publisher notwithstanding". Yehuda Bauer
was similarly condemnatory, questioning how an institute such as Harvard could award a doctorate for a work which so "slipped through the filter of critical scholarly assessment". Bauer also suggested that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English
or German
, which thereby excluded research from Polish
and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew
, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis.
Goldhagen replied to his critics in an article Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics:
Goldhagen has asserted that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. Some of his critics are agreed with him that his thesis is "not intrinsically racist", including Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein.
published an eight-part series of opinions of the book before its German publication in August 1996. Goldhagen arrived in Germany in September 1996 for a book tour, and appeared on several television talk shows, as well as a number of sold-out panel discussions.
The overwhelming majority of American scholars have dismissed the book as racist, unscholarly and irresponsible. Its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern
denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist
Germanophobia.
Steve Crawshaw writes that although the German readership was keenly aware of certain "professional failings" in Goldhagen's book,
Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers.
American historian Gordon A. Craig
and Der Spiegel
have argued that whatever the book's flaws, it should be welcomed because it will reinvigorate the debate on the Holocaust and stimulate new scholarship.
Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners and...
that argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist
Eliminationism
Eliminationism is the belief that one's political opponents are "a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation"....
antisemitism" in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identitiy, that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary Germans killed Jews willingly and happily. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.
Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate, in Germany and the United States. Some historians have characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit
Historikerstreit
The Historikerstreit was an intellectual and political controversy in late 20th-century West Germany about the historical interpretation of the Holocaust. The German word Streit translates variously as "quarrel", "dispute", or "conflict"...
, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".
The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning
Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.-Education:Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming...
's 1992 book Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the same reserve battalion 101 of the Ordnungspolizei
Ordnungspolizei
The Ordnungspolizei or Orpo were the uniformed regular police force in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1945. It was increasingly absorbed into the Nazi police system. Owing to their green uniforms, they were also referred to as Grüne Polizei...
, during which Goldhagen attacks every aspect of Browning's book. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of Ordinary Men in the July 13, 1992 edition of the New Republic entited "The Evil of Banality".
Hitler's Willing Executioners won the American Political Science Association's
American Political Science Association
The American Political Science Association is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903, it publishes three academic journals...
1997 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics and the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. The Journal asserted that the debate fostered by Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.
Goldhagen's thesis
Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism, which he called "eliminationist antisemitism", which developed over centuries prior to the 20th century. Goldhagen contends,The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent antisemitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews somehow from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between antisemitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and supported.
Reception
What some commentators termed "The Goldhagen Affair" began in late 1996, when Goldhagen visited Berlin to participate in debate on television and in lecture halls before capacity crowds, on a book tour. Although Hitler's Willing Executioners was sharply criticized in Germany at its debut, the intense public interest in the book secured the author much celebrity among Germans, so much so that Harold MarcuseHarold Marcuse
Harold Marcuse is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.- Education :...
characterizes him as "the darling of the German public". Many media voices noted that, while the book launched passionate national discussion about the Holocaust, this discussion was carried out civilly and respectfully. Goldhagen's book tour became, in the opinion of some German media voices, "a triumphant march", as "the open-mindedness that Goldhagen encountered in the land of the perpetrators" was "gratifying" and something of which Germans ought to be proud, even in the context of a book which sought, according to some critics, to "erase the distinction between Germans and Nazis".
Goldhagen was awarded the Democracy Prize in 1997 by the German Journal for German and International Politics, which asserted that "because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public." The laudatio, awarded for the first time since 1990, was given by Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...
praised the work as something every German schoolchild should read.
Debate about Goldhagen's theory has been intense. Detractors have contended that the book is "profoundly flawed" or "bad history". Some historians have criticized or simply dismissed the text, citing among other deficiencies Goldhagen's "neglect of decades of research in favour of his own preconceptions", which he proceeds to articulate in an "intemperate, emotional, and accusatory tone". In a 1997 interview, the German historian Hans Mommsen
Hans Mommsen
Hans Mommsen is a left-wing German historian. He is the twin brother of the late Wolfgang Mommsen.-Biography:He was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of...
said about Goldhagen:
Others have contended that, despite the book's "undeniable flaws", it "served to refocus the debate on the question of German national responsibility and guilt", in the context of a reemergence of a German political right, which may have sought to "relativize" or "normalize" Nazi history.
Goldhagen's assertion that the Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
, as "patent nonsense". Common complaints suggest that Goldhagen's primary hypothesis is either "oversimplified", or represents "a bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews" turned back upon the Germans. One German commentator suggested that Goldhagen's book "pushes us again and again headfirst into the nasty anti-Semitic mud. This is his revenge..." Eberhard Jäckel
Eberhard Jäckel
Eberhard Jäckel is a Social Democratic German historian, noted for his studies of Adolf Hitler's role in German history. Jäckel sees Hitler as being the historical equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.-Career:...
wrote a very hostile book review in the Die Zeit
Die Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...
newspaper in May 1996 that called Hitler's Willing Executioners "simply a bad book". The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw
Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
wrote that he fully agreed with Jäckel on the merits of Hitler's Willing Executioners".
In 1996, the American historian David Schoenbaum
David Schoenbaum
David Schoenbaum is an American social scientist and historian.He was teaching as a professor of History at the University of Iowa until 2008. Schoenbaum received his BA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison...
wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
of Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis. Furthermore, Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread anti-semitism. Finally, Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 was relatively ineffective or why the Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular anti-semitism. Using an example from his family history, Schoenbaum wrote his mother in law, a Polish Jew who lived in Germany between 1928–47 never considered the National Socialists and the Germans synonymous, and expressed regret that Goldhagen could not see the same.
Hitler's Willing Executioners also drew controversy with the publication of two critical articles: "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis", by the American political science professor Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
and initially published in the UK political journal New Left Review
New Left Review
New Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...
, and "Historiographical review: Revising the Holocaust", written by the Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn and initially published in the Historical Journal of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
. These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. In response to their book, Goldhagen sought a retraction and apology from Birn, threatening at one point to sue her for libel and according to Salon
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
declaring Finkelstein "a supporter of Hamas".
The Austrian-born American historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
has stated that Goldhagen is "totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong." Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. It can do nothing of the sort. To me it is worthless, all the hype by the publisher notwithstanding". Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
was similarly condemnatory, questioning how an institute such as Harvard could award a doctorate for a work which so "slipped through the filter of critical scholarly assessment". Bauer also suggested that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
or German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, which thereby excluded research from Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis.
Goldhagen replied to his critics in an article Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics:
Accusations of racism
Several critics have characterized Goldhagen's text as adopting Nazi concepts of identity, and utilizing them to slur Germans. David North wrote,Goldhagen has asserted that there is no racist or ethnic argument about Germans in his text. Some of his critics are agreed with him that his thesis is "not intrinsically racist", including Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein.
Popular response
When the English edition of Hitler's Willing Executioners was published in March 1996, numerous German reviews ensued. The most widely read German weekly newspaper Die ZeitDie Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...
published an eight-part series of opinions of the book before its German publication in August 1996. Goldhagen arrived in Germany in September 1996 for a book tour, and appeared on several television talk shows, as well as a number of sold-out panel discussions.
The overwhelming majority of American scholars have dismissed the book as racist, unscholarly and irresponsible. Its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless". The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern
Fritz Stern
Fritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
Germanophobia.
Steve Crawshaw writes that although the German readership was keenly aware of certain "professional failings" in Goldhagen's book,
Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers.
American historian Gordon A. Craig
Gordon A. Craig
Gordon Alexander Craig was a Scottish-American historian of German history and of diplomatic history.-Early life:...
and Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
have argued that whatever the book's flaws, it should be welcomed because it will reinvigorate the debate on the Holocaust and stimulate new scholarship.
Further reading
- Bauer, YehudaYehuda BauerYehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-300-08256-8 - Eley, GeoffGeoff EleyGeoff Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974, and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1979...
(ed.) The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. ISBN 0-472-06752-4. - Feldkamp, Michael F.Michael F. FeldkampMichael F. Feldkamp, is a German historian and journalist.-Career:Feldkamp was born in Kiel. After completing his high school studies at the Gymnasium Carolinum in Osnabrück, he studied history, Catholic theology, teaching, and philosophy at the Rhineland Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn...
Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft. München: Olzog-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3‐7892‐8127‐1 - FinkelsteinNorman FinkelsteinNorman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
, Norman & Birn, Ruth Bettina. A Nation On Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ISBN 0-8050-5871-0 - Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-393-02044-4
- Kwiet, Konrad: “‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and ‘Ordinary Germans’: Some Comments on Goldhagen’s Ideas”. Jewish Studies Yearbook 1 (2000).
- LaCapra, Dominick. “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in LaCapra, D. Writing History, Writing Trauma Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 114–40.
- Pohl, Dieter. "Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997).
- Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds.) Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8166-3101-8
- Stern, FritzFritz SternFritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
. "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted" in Einstein's German World, 272–88. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-691-05939-X - Wehler, Hans-UlrichHans-Ulrich WehlerHans-Ulrich Wehler is a German historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th century Germany.-Career:...
"The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonising Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension" in German History, Vol. 15, 1997, pp. 80–91. - Wesley, Frank. The Holocaust and Anti-semitism: the Goldhagen Argument and Its Effects. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999. ISBN 1-57309-235-5
- The “Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men” Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8, 1996, introduced by Michael Berenbaum (Washington, DC: USHMM, 2001).
Popular response
as mentioned in- Goldhagen, Daniel & Joffe, Joseph. "'Hitler's Willing Executioners': An Exchange," The New York Review of Books, vol 44, no, 2, February 6, 1997. as mentioned in