Hitler's Willing Executioners Analysis

During the Holocaust, thousands of ordinary German men were drafted to be a part of the police battalions. In Daniel Goldenhagen’s, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Goldenhagen explains that these men willingly took part in the killing of Jews and Polish, and anti-semitism was always a part of an ordinary German. In response to these claims, Christopher Browning wrote Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, saying that these men did have morals and they were not rampant anti-Semites but rather just ordinary men. He believed that the men coping with alcohol and the flexibility for guard duty because they cannot take it anymore with everything that is going is examples that these men still had moral in them.

In Goldenhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, he explains that these ordinary Germans were fine with killing the Jews because of the historic culture of anti-Semitism and that they never had any moral in them in the first place. He starts off saying that when the Germans were drafted into this police battalion that there were three features that should be understood. The first, he says that Germans “were not selected because of military or ideological fitness. In fact, the men were often chose for service in a haphazard manner and were frequently the least desirable of the manpower pool, even considered unfit for military service.” He was saying that these men did not have a background check and they were just randomly picked. The second feature is that these men received below-par training in weapons, logistics, and procedures. The third feature is that, “Police battalions were not “Nazi” institutions” and they not “nazified in an significant sense”. Saying that these men were never trained into becoming Nazified, let alone genocidal killers and would easily become genocidal executioners. He backs up his claims with one of the first slaughters of the genocidal campaign unleashed against Soviet Jewry was started by a police battalion and after