Question 5;
Goldhagen claims the Germans were Hitler’s “Willing Executioners”.
In my opinion I do not agree with this claim, there is evidence to prove that a lot of the Germans knew what was going on but did not have the guts to stand up to what was happening, this doesn’t mean that they would have killed the Jews willingly for Hitler. The Nazi movement was very powerful and most people would have been very frightened to stand up against it.
According to Daniel “an enormous number of ordinary representative Germans became- and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be- Hitler’s willing executioners”. Daniel claims that the Germans were willing executioners. Just like the crowd of people did not kill Jesus, they merely called for it to happen, the same was with the Germans and Jews, and if they were given the chance they would have. There are no statistics involved in this source; it just talks of a large number of people. Even the German children were taught about the topic in school. This source caused a lot of controversy.
No one person knows the amount of people who were involved in the Final Solution, and none of the sources give these numbers, due to the consideration of the number of Jews murdered and the amount of planning that went into their murders we infer that it was a very large number of people involved in the mass genocide. These sources suggest that many Germans were guilty of the deaths of the Jews because they knew what was happening to them yet did nothing at all to stop it. There was not much stopping the Germans from figuring out what was going on with the Jews, Allide leaflets were dropped into Germany, there was so much propaganda which would have become obvious and also they would hear through word of mouth. However these sources on their on do not prove that the German people were Hitler’s “willing executioners”
Source J is a sentence from David Goldhagen’s book published in 1966; “Hitler the Willing Executioner”....