News
Dr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the influential book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," spoke about the role of the ordinary German under the Nazi regime to students and community members at the Roth Center for Jewish Life last night.
Refuting the traditional explanations given by historians for the Holocaust, Goldhagen said that the mass genocide of European Jews and other groups could only be understood through the lens of the ordinary German's attitudes.
Previous explanations reasoned that the perpetrators were coerced, that they were blindly obedient to authority, that they were subjected to extreme social psychological pressure, and that they operated under the mindset of bureaucrats trying to complete their job orders.
However, Goldhagen said it is individual responsibility that caused the violence of that era.
"[The perpetrators] were moral agents ... they had the capacity to know what they were doing, to judge what they were doing according to their values, whatever they were, and that they had the capacity to say no," he said.
It was this emphasis that Goldhagen placed on the role of the individual and the individual's own anti-Semitism that won his 1997 book extensive publicity, acclaim and criticism.
Preceding his book, literature on the Holocaust did not focus on the nature of the perpetrators themselves, he said.
"It seems to me that without knowing who the people are, you can't understand why the Holocaust took place," Goldhagen explained.
Drawing primarily from the testimony of both the perpetrators and survivors, Goldhagen sought to explain why the German people did not object when Hitler gave the order to annihilate the European Jews.
