|
I just finished Hitler's Willing Executioners, and I have a few questions: 1) How well regarded is this book among historians today? I briefly googled some criticism of it, and there was some fairly bitter, sweeping criticism. I agree with some of it as it relates to fairly interpreting evidence - Goldhagen sometimes seems to play "heads I win tails you lose," for instance when it comes to people opting out of killing Jews. He uses that as evidence that it was in fact possible to opt out, thus undermining the notion that killing Jews was a mere act of self-preservation, however, he seems to gloss over the fact that some people did in fact opt out, which undermines the notion that eliminationist anti-semitism was universal in German society. 2) Following on 1), he seems to takeaway of his arguments to the extreme when it is simply not necessary. He makes a lot of absolute statements, when such statements seem difficult to sustain on the available record, and a statement of 90% certainty would support his position just fine. 3) In particular, he states that no German was ever punished for opting out of killing Jews. Not just no German in the police battalions or work camps he examined, but no Germans, period. Is that a defensible statement? It seems to me that if you ask "did the nazis ever kill anyone for ______?" the answer is probably yes. None of this is to say I disagree with his conclusions, I basically buy his theses: the starting point ought to be that maybe Germany and Germans were different, given they holocausted millions of Jews while the other countries with traditions of anti-semitism didn't, and it is difficult to account for the behavior of the very mediocre people who populated the police battalions and death marches without there being some vast popular support for eliminationist anti-semitism. I am just skeptical of overreach in argument. Thoughts? I just started wages of destruction, this thread has some great recommendations, thanks. Kazak_Hstan fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jun 29, 2015 |
#
¿
Jun 29, 2015 03:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:19 |
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I'll do the write up tomorrow but goldhagen is a laughing stock in historical circles. There is also strong evidence he willfully misrepresented some of the evidence in Executioners. Welp that was 500 some pages of misplaced  I'd prefer my bogus nazi history to involve wonder weapons, the occult, and ancient pagan rituals. Wages of Destruction is legit, right? Also, I once read a book by Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, titled White Shark. It is about a half man half shark hybrid with razor sharp metal teeth that was engineered by the nazis at the end of the war. It wakes up in a crate at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the late eighties and swims to the New England shore, where it walks onto land (it has legs), and starts killing people. Someone eventually shoots it. Also there is a teenage love subplot that just gets left hanging. Do they gently caress?! I'd like to know. It's basically Jaws, except if the shark could walk on land and was also a nazi. Can any of the scholars in this thread confirm and / or deny that the Nazis had or attempted to have such a weapon, also if they had lots of them could it have affected the outcome of the war?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2015 05:56
|
|
|
Just finished Wages of Destruction. It was very good, even without much formal economics coursework. I think I only took micro and macro in undergrad. I definitely appreciated that he didn't spend much time rehashing the 'coming to power' or 'origins' narrative. However, the time he did send on it was pretty insightful; I was vaguely aware that the various rationales the Nazis used to gain power (reparations, etc.), and mythology of Nazi accomplishments (stabilizing the Mark, economic recovery, etc.) were exaggerated at best, however Tooze's account of just what the later Weimar governments did was instructive. Some of the inter party power struggles between industrialists and various schemes of industrial control were pretty interesting. It definitely cracks the notion of some kind of Nazi monolith. Picked up Ordinary Germans, will probably read it during my next field stint. Any recommendations for a post-war account of German industry? At one point near the end of the book Tooze listed the biggest firms in the reich and noted they comprise the nucleus of Germany's high quality manufacturing industry. It would be interesting to read an account of how they negotiated the post-war devastation, the Marshall Plan, how the various Nazi collaborators in industry fared, etc. I read the Wikipedia on IG Farben and its breakup into several well-known companies today, which was fairly interesting, particularly that you can still buy (in some countries) Zyklon B insecticide from one of them. One comment in the later chapters spurred a question: Tooze noted the tension between ideologues murdering skilled Jews and industrialists who wanted to use the skills of those Jews, and included a shout out to Oskar Schindler. How much of the Schindler story as popularly understood is true? I assume much of it is, given Schindler's involvement in Yad Vashem, but I also assume pretty much any popular hero narrative is overblown.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2015 03:12
|
|