An Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

Download or read book An Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners written by Simon Taylor and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively – and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents – forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.