SHOAH page 3 umph is that it returns the Holo- caust to the people who suffered most: ordinary Jews. Today, Hitler's Willing Execu- tioners is on 12 bestseller lists throughout the world. Over a half- million copies are in print in 14 different languages. In Germany, where Dr. Goldhagen recently re- ceived the prestigious Democracy Prize, 170,000 copies are on the shelves — at $40 apiece. During a 10-day book tour there last Sep- tember, thousands of cheering people turned up for each of six panel discussions in which he was a participant. Hitler's Willing Ex- ecutioners has also spawned some- thing of a cottage industry in Europe: Two books, one French, the other German, examine the phenomenal success of Dr. Gold- hagen's book and the responses it has engendered. Hitler's Willing Executioners, a revision of Dr. Goldhagen's doc- toral dissertation, is based on the assertion that approximately 100,000 Germans — many of them unaffiliated with the Nazi Party — gleefully brutalized and killed Jews, even without orders to do so, because of a profound, in- tractable anti-Semitism that had been alive since the Middle Ages. In looking to the perpetrators who made it possible for the Nazis to exterminate so many millions, Dr. Goldhagen has turned previ- ous Holocaust scholarship on its head. Germans, he shows, had choices to kill or not to kill. The state was not a terrorist entity. Dissent against the regime was tolerated. Nobody was punished for refusing to take part in the bloodbath. Scholars have failed to ade- quately explain the most horrific event of the 20th century because they have ignored, by and large, survivor testimony. "I know of no other historical Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: event where people say the vic- Individual choice. tims of oppression, brutality or vi- "I think one reason it is not used olence have nothing to tell us about the people who oppressed, much is that what survivors have brutalized and victimized them. to say just falsifies the theories Imagine if an historian of slavery that have prevailed in the field, said the testimony of slaves about which hold that the perpetrators the slaveholders had little value. essentially did not want to do This has been the practice and has what they did, that they didn't even been said explicitly by schol- hate Jews, that they did what they did because they were coerced or ars of the Holocaust. pressured or were merely follow- ing orders," Dr. Goldhagen said. 5 Two-thirds of Germanys Jew- o ish population converted to r,'", Christianity in the 19th century }<>-. because that was the only way they could find acceptance by the larger society. But it took state- sanctioned anti-Semitism for the simmering hatred of Jews to come to a boil, he explained. "What [Jews] believed in the first part of the 20th century was that however much anti-Semitism there was, this state would not al- low them to be attacked. They were right about the regimes in place until the Nazis came to pow- er. For Jews, it seemed things were getting better. "The principle issue for Jews has always been, 'Are we in phys- ical danger?' not, 'Is there anti- Semitism?' because there always was. That's why Germany seemed like quite a hospitable place," he said. And while the Federal Repub- lic of Germany has been trans- formed into a democracy in which public anti-Semitism is outlawed, Hitler's Willing Executioners gen- GREAT BAGELS. GREAT CAUSE. 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The first story in (the national newsmagazine) Speigel was on collective guilt. This was said rou- tinely. They said it was about some enduring German charac- ter, which it is not. It is about the political culture of Germany at the time." Some critics in Germany ac- cused him of "getting revenge" on Germans for the harm suffered by his father, Dr. Erich Goldhagen, who survived the war in a Ro- manian ghetto. The accusation rankles him, probably more than any other. "I wrote this book as a scholar, and everything in the book is dri- , ven by the desire to analyze and understand what happened, and every sentence in the book is there for analytical reasons. My back- ground has been dragged into this 20000 W. Ten Mile Rd. NW Corner Evergreen off Lodge Frwy., 1 Mi. 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