There is no doubt that this is a major contribution to the vast literature on the Holocaust. Harrowing, emotionally charged reading that pulls no punches. It is also delightful to note that not all trade books need to shy away from theoretical discussion. Yet, it is the theory bit that is ultimately disappointing. There seems to be a minor cottage industry of Goldhagen criticisms, so I'll just add my first impressions. Goldhagen seems to be best characterised as a vulgar Weberian. Weberian, because the author's linchpin argument is that the explanation for the mass murder of Jews is a belief, an 'eliminationist antisemitism'. Vulgar, because Weber, while prioritising beliefs (vs. Marxist emphasis on material conditions) at least considered the social contexts of beliefs and action. Despite promising talk about beliefs as social constructions (implying social processes of construction), eliminationist antisemitism turns out to be a thing in the minds ('cognitive mindset')of *all* Germans; it is foundational and universal. Needless to say, the attempt at balancing more structural explanations is taken to an unsatisfying extreme in Goldhagen's hands. Nevertheless, an impressive book.

I have been waiting to read this book for years. The wait was not worth it and I am so disappointed.

First of all, the book is incredibly dense. Most non-fiction history books dense, but this was next level. I gave this book three stars because I could see it being valuable to students or others doing research on this topic. To read this whole book though was an undertaking and I would recommend taking it in little chunks or just jumping around to focus on parts most relevant to the reader. There’s no need to torture yourself reading cover to cover.

The reason I don’t recommend reading cover to cover leads me to my second reason for not particularly liking this book. He repeated a lot of information in the last couple of chapters that he already told us in the beginning. I understand he needed to conclude the book and wrap up his argument, but he didn’t summarize. It felt like he retold his whole argument over the final 50 pages. He also randomly brought up antisemitism in Christian communities at the end, but he didn’t talk about that anywhere else in the book. So while he spent a lot of time repeating himself, there were also times where he just started adding new information. Overall, I just don’t think the book wrapped up very cleanly.

Finally, he used the same big words over and over again. He used the word putative three times in one paragraph! There are so many synonyms he could have used that would have made that paragraph, and the rest of the book, so much less dense and less annoying. It felt like he was just trying to impress his audience with all these fancy words and in doing so he lost the readers focus on his actual argument. Learn new words, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

Overall, ok book, but mostly valuable for students doing research. Not meant for fun. New take on Germans approach to the holocaust, but so many things annoyed me about how he wrote the book that I couldn’t truly appreciate this new information.

A fascinatingly powerful description and analysis of how ordinary people could act in appalling ways. How successful is his explanation of this is another matter. For a firece criticism of this work read Fritz Stern's review. Worth investigating.

Since "A Nation on Trial" came out, it's hard to take this book seriously. I included it in my reading list more for the important debates which it inspired than for any quality held within. The "Time on the Cross" of German history.

This book is written to support the thesis that the Germans are bad and mean, all of them, and to support this hypothesis we have a framed version of the holocaust. Every psychology can explain you better than me why framing whatever is important and the behavior of Germans before and during the WWII can be explained in many different ways, but choosing this way is misleading people to sell more copies of this book. I have been living in Berlin in the last 7 years and I don't love my fellow citizen at all, mostly Berliner IMHO are rude and unsympathisch, but even if this book, in a way support what I think, even I wouldn't be so stupid to believe this generalization. So now I know that I will be called antisemite. Just a question: is there a word for a Jew who hates every other person who is not Hebrew?

Questo libro é stato scritto per supportare la tesi che tra gli anni compresi tra il 1920 e il 1945 tutti i tedeschi fossero cattivi, tutti, e per giustificare questa tesi l'autore inquadra l'olocausto in un contesto ben preciso. Qualsiasi psicologo che si rispetti puó spiegare le varie e tante ragioni per cui inquadrare una cosa in una specifica cornice puó cambiare il modo di vedere la cosa stessa, che rimane per lo piú la stessa. La spiegazioni che mi sono data io per questo comportamento é che Goldhagen avesse come scopo il vendere piú copie possibile di questo volume, e ci é riuscito visto che 20 anni dopo ancora se ne parla anche se storiograficamente parlando questo tomo non vale niente. Vivo a Berlino da 7 anni e non amo affatto i miei concittadini, li trovo per lo piú grezzi e maleducati, ma non é che posso apprezzare questo libro solo perché mi fa comodo né tanto meno considerare come plausibile la mia tanto facile quanto stupida generalizzazione. Ora sono pronta a farmi dare dell'antisemita, giusto una domanda: c'é per caso una parola che sta ad indicare una persona di religione ebraica che odia tutti quelli che invece non lo sono?

Though it was full of information and knowledge, I did feel it was a little dry, and had a difficult time captivating my interest. It was very informative though.

[Deep breath] This is a difficult book to review as the subject matter is so contentious and horrific. The thesis under question is nothing less than examining why Nazi and SS troops and officials carried out the Holocaust. Goldhagen wants to make the question simply whether the Germans were willing participants or not, and he argues they were. I'd agree -- but then point out that the phrase "willing participants" is misleading and wrong. Of course they were willing participants in the sense that they consciously carried out their actions as humans with as much "free will" as anyone else. The better question, the one that Goldhagen skips over is, why did they do it?

Goldhagen spends much of the book building a case for a history of the German people that made them unique and more capable of this atrocity than other nations/cultures/peoples. Not only is this wrong but it does a disservice to humanity by providing an argument that could be used to state that only in Germany could the Holocaust have occurred nor could it occur again as circumstances and the German national temperament have changed. As any cursory review of recent history will show, the German people do not have a monopoly on genocide. The importance in studying the Holocaust is to prevent its re-occurrence. Any "scholarship" that purports to explain the Holocaust only as a unique event fails in this purpose.

Goldhagen's book is frequently contrasted with Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. Goldhagen and Browning used much of the same source material. Goldhagen's work got the headlines through his incendiary claims but it is Browning's work that is the illuminating one. Browning shows us something that is both more plausible and horrifying than Goldhagen does - Browning shows that the men who committed these murders were just that, men, as complex and conflicted as any other man, who nonetheless were able to justify their actions to themselves and carry them out. It is crucial that we understand this. Browning attempts to provide understanding; Goldhagen attempts to provide denunciation and facile explanations.

I quote from the preface to Browning's book, page xx: "Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations...were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader -- both were human -- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive...Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature."

Goldhagen's book is the antithesis of what Browning wrote in his preface. Goldhagen believes the study of the Holocaust demands the demonization of those that carried it out. He does not believe the perpetrators were human beings like you and me. He does not believe others would have acted the same under the same circumstances. He believes that to empathize is to forgive so instead we have a book that at every turn tries to impart that the Nazi was beyond understanding, beyond humanity. This is a comforting thought, it is a glib thought, and it is wrong.

If you are looking for a polemic that explains the Holocaust as unique to a given country and a given people, then Goldhagen's book is the one you want. If you are looking for a history book that actually attempts to explore and understand how humanity can undertake horrific acts, then Browning's book is the one you want.