ABSTRACT
The publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) turned out to be a highly symbolic event in the reassessment of the motives that led to, or at least facilitated, the execution of the NS ‘final solution’. In spite of its well-documented flaws (Becker 1997; Wippermann 1997; Finkelstein & Bern 1998; Wesley 1999) Goldhagen’s analysis echoed a fascinating proposition. His “ordinary Germans” participated with varying degrees of enthusiasm and emotional involvement in the NS genocidal project neither because they had been instructed by NS propaganda to hate the Jews nor because they were coerced into patterns of actions they otherwise abhorred or because they became fervent Nazis themselves. For Goldhagen the main explanation lay elsewhere: German society had already been conditioned in cultural terms to accept such a message and therefore were more likely to respond to it with eagerness and devotion. In diminishing the significance of NS ideological agency in the Endlösung Goldhagen shifted the focus of interpretation away from the situational context to long-term cultural determinants, albeit in the restrictive context of a single (German) society and a single (Jewish) target group.
