Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

I downloaded this book from my Kindle thinking that it was Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men:  Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.  I had forgotten the title and just remembered that the word "ordinary" was in the title.  As it turns out,  Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book was a fascinating and informative read; it just lacked the diary and journal entries that I know are a part of Browning's book.

One thing I found extraordinary was Goldhagen's assertions, backed by research, that soldiers and citizens did have the power to say no.  Men who had been drafted to be part of the Einsatzgruppen could ask for reassignment without fear of penalty or backlash.  It's just that, for the most part, men did not as for reassignment.

This book has been the brunt of much criticism, mostly because a few Holocaust scholars feel that Goldhagen merely published his poorly edited doctoral thesis or complied others research and claiming it's new information.  Even if these claims are true, the information was new to me and reading it all in one place was helpful.

While I am not a Holocaust expert, I can see where the editing needs to improved.  Much of the text is quite repetitive.  He attempts to justify the repetition by stating that he wants to show as many examples as possible, but as a reader, this can get very redundant.

 Overall Hitler's Willing Executioners shed some new light for me, that perhaps many more people went along with The Final Solution, not out of fear and reprisals, not of duty, but out of a deeply rooted antisemitism that goes back centuries.