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Why Read Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust - Online Essays

Why Read Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

A book I have never read, but hope to read eventually is Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. My father, who bought a copy of the book when it first came out years ago, told me that the main idea of the book is that the Holocaust happened because ordinary German people had accepted and tolerated anti-Semitism already for so long. For example, ordinary people manned the police battalions, not just crazy, Nazi-indoctrinated SS workers. My father told me that he doesn't agree with everything Goldhagen wrote, but that Goldhagen makes a good attempt at answering an interesting and disturbing riddle in history: Why did this happen in ...

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think they're supposed to do so for purposes of the study, will repeated electrically shock another person, even when the other person looks like they're in pain. Cruelty and aggression abound on the playground, yet the way we've been taught in history has been to see certain events as isolated, rather than symptomatic of a larger, more pervasive problem in how people view difference. We're taught to believe that Hitler and the men who carried out his schemes were lunatics who happened to get into power. Maybe. But just saying that Hitler was Evil, without understanding why so many people followed his lead won't really help us in the future. If we don't examine it, Evil will probably happen again. I don't know if I'll agree with the book's conclusions, but I want to read it because it actually examines the problem without putting on gloves or looking away.
It's important to me to read books that taken on important issues, because all of history is filled with examples of people ...

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Why Read Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. (2015, October 16). Retrieved January 10, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Why-Read-Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary/105087

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Added: 10/16/2015 01:20:52 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 697
Pages: 3

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