ABSTRACT
Hitler's Willing Executioners focuses on what motivated the Holocaust and who or what was responsible for the killing. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen focuses on the people who carried out the Holocaust, the "ordinary" Germans responsible for carrying out mass killings. He believed that nearly all previous scholars of the Holocaust had assumed the German people were either coerced into becoming killers or failed to realize what was happening around them. Goldhagen's key point is that the crimes of the Holocaust were committed freely, so the German nation as a whole was responsible for the atrocities. Goldhagen highlights the forced death marches, where many thousands of Jewish prisoners were moved on foot from concentration camps and prison camps. The central argument of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is that ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust because they were motivated by "eliminationist antiSemitism".
