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''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'' (1996) is a book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen that argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were as the title indicates "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in the German political culture, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argued that this "eliminationist antisemitism" was the cornerstone of German national identity, and that this type of antisemitism was unique to Germany and because of it, ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized. The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's 1992 book ''Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland''. Much of Goldhagen's book is concerned with the actions of the same Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi German ''Ordnungspolizei''. His narrative challenges numerous aspects of Browning's book, however. Goldhagen had already indicated his opposition to Browning's thesis in a review of ''Ordinary Men'' in the July 13, 1992 edition of ''The New Republic'' titled "The Evil of Banality". 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", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians,〔Shatz, Adam. (April 8, 1998) (Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back ) ''Slate''. Accessed January 4, 2008.〕 who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg to whom ''Ordinary Men'' is dedicated, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".〔.〕〔.〕 ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics, and the Democracy Prize of the ''Journal for German and International Politics''. The ''Journal'' asserted that the debate fostered by Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.〔.〕 ==''The Evil of Banality''== In 1992, the American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled ''Ordinary Men'' about the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which had been used in 1942 to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.〔Browning, Chris. ''Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland'', New York : HarperCollins, 1992. p. 57〕 In his review of ''Ordinary Men'' published in July 1992,〔Goldhagen, Daniel (July 1992), ("The Evil of Banality" (excerpts from Goldhagen's Review, H-NET List on German History). ) Originally in ''The New Republic'', July 13–20, 1992. Retrieved June 15, 2014.〕 Goldhagen expressed agreement with several of Browning's findings, namely, that the killings were not, as many people believe, done entirely by SS men, but also by Trawnikis; that the men of Unit 101 had the option not to kill, and – a point Goldhagen emphasizes – that no German was ever punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews.〔Goldhagen (1992), p.49.〕 But Goldhagen disagreed with Browning's "central interpretation" that the killing was done in the context of the ordinary sociological phenomenon of obedience to authority.〔 Goldhagen instead contended that "for the vast majority of the perpetrators a monocausal explanation does suffice".〔Guttenplan, D. D. (2002), ( ''The Holocaust on Trial'' ) (Google Books preview) W. W. Norton, p.214. ISBN 0393346056 .〕 They were not ordinary men as we usually understand men to be, but "ordinary members of an extraordinary political culture, the culture of Nazi Germany, which was possessed of a hallucinatory, lethal view of the Jews. That view was the mainspring of what was, in essence, voluntary barbarism."〔Goldhagen (1992), pp.51–52.〕 Goldhagen stated that he would write a book that would rebut ''Ordinary Men'' and Browning's thesis, and prove instead that it was the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture that led the men of Reserve Battalion 101 to murder Jews. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hitler's Willing Executioners」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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