Why was “Hitlers willing executioners” so popular in Germany when it first came out?
Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen (Jewish) that posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent “eliminationist antisemitism” in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. 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”,[1] achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its “mostly scathing” reception among historians,[2] who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg (Jewish), “totally wron
