Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners PDF Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners PDF Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Get Book Here

Book Description
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Hitler's Executioner

Hitler's Executioner PDF Author: Helmut Ortner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781473889392
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Though little known, the name of the judge Roland Freisler is inextricably linked to the judiciary in Nazi Germany. As well as serving as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, he was the notorious president of the 'People's Court', a man directly responsible for more than 2,200 death sentences; with almost no exceptions, cases in the 'People's Court' had predetermined guilty verdicts. It was Freisler, for example, who tried three activists of the White Rose resistance movement in February 1943\. Along with Christoph Probst, Sophie and Hans Scholl were arrested for their part in an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign which called for active opposition against the Nazi regime. Found guilty of treason, Freisler sentenced the trio to death by beheading; a sentence carried out the same day by guillotine. In August 1944, Freisler played a central role in the show trials that followed the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July that year - a plot known more commonly as Operation Valkyrie. Many of the ringleaders were tried by Freisler in the 'People's Court'. The proceedings were filmed, the intention being to use the images as propaganda in newsreels. Freisler could be seen alternating between clinical interrogations of the defendants through to his yelling of personalized and theatrically enraged abuse at them from the bench. Nearly all of those found guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within two hours of the verdicts being passed. Roland Freisler's mastery of legal texts and dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity made him the most feared judge in the Third Reich. In this in-depth examination, Helmut Ortner not only investigates the development and judgments of the Nazi tribunal, but the career of Freisler, a man who was killed in February 1945 during an Allied air raid.

Hitler's Executioner

Hitler's Executioner PDF Author: Helmut Ortner
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473889413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The biography of the infamous judge who oversaw Nazi justice for the Third Reich as president of the “People’s Court.” Though little known, the name of the judge Roland Freisler is inextricably linked to the judiciary in Nazi Germany. As well as serving as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, he was the notorious president of the “People’s Court,” a man directly responsible for more than 2,200 death sentences; with almost no exceptions, cases in the “People’s Court” had predetermined guilty verdicts. It was Freisler, for example, who tried three activists of the White Rose resistance movement in February 1943. He found them guilty of treason and sentenced the trio to death by beheading; a sentence carried out the same day by guillotine. In August 1944, Freisler played a central role in the show trials that followed the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July that year—a plot known more commonly as Operation Valkyrie. Many of the ringleaders were tried by Freisler in the “People’s Court.” Nearly all of those found guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within two hours of the verdicts being passed. Roland Freisler’s mastery of legal texts and dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity made him the most feared judge in the Third Reich. In this in-depth examination, Helmut Ortner not only investigates the development and judgments of the Nazi tribunal, but the career of Freisler, a man who was killed in February 1945 during an Allied air raid.

Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann PDF Author: Volker Koop
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1473886945
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
A biography of the man who served as head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Hitler’s personal secretary, and the monster who decided the fate of millions. Born on June 17, 1900, Martin Ludwig Bormann became one of the most powerful and most feared men in the Third Reich. An obsessive bureaucrat, it was Bormann who helped steer Hitler’s apparatus of terror so effectively that he became the clandestine ruler of Nazi Germany. After joining the Nazi Party in 1927 Bormann rose through its ranks. Indeed, by July 1933 Bormann had maneuvered himself into the position where he became the Chief of Cabinet in the Office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. In this role Bormann gradually consolidated his power base, so that when Hess carried out his infamous flight to the United Kingdom in 1941, Bormann stepped into his shoes. As the head of the Party Chancellery, Bormann took control of the Nazi Party. By the end of 1942, he was Hitler’s deputy and his closest collaborator. With the Führer increasingly preoccupied with military matters, Hitler came to rely more and more on Bormann to handle Germany’s domestic affairs. On 12 April 1943, Bormann was appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer. Feared by ministers, Gauleiters, civil servants, judges and generals alike, Bormann identified strongly with Hitler’s ideas on racial politics, destruction of the Jews, and forced labor, and made himself indispensable as the Führer’s executioner. Cold as ice, he decided the fate of millions of people. In January 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing, Bormann returned to the Führerbunker with Hitler. Following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Bormann was named as Party Minister, thus officially confirming his rise to the top of the Party. Late the following day he fled from the bunker to escape the encircling Red Army; his fate remaining a mystery for many years. In October 1946 he was found guilty in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to death. Drawing heavily on recently declassified documents and files, the historian and journalist Volker Koop reveals the full story of the most faithful member of Hitler’s inner circle, an individual who, whilst little known to the German people, became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Praise for Martin Bormann: Hitler’s Executioner “An unbelievable monster, but people still need to know about him and what he did, here fulfilled by Volker Koop, who simply doesn't hold back.” —Books Monthly (UK)

An Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

An Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners PDF Author: Simon Taylor
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351352326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively – and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents – forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.

Hitler's Foreign Executioners

Hitler's Foreign Executioners PDF Author: Christopher Hale
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752463934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In Hitler’s Foreign Executioners, Heinrich Himmler’s secret master plan for Europe is revealed: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of ‘Germanic’ peoples from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an ‘SS Europa’. This revised and fully updated book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe’s dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish Bolshevism. Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers ‘like any other’ and fought a decent war against Stalin’s Red Army. Historian Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler’s murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy of joining his future ‘SS Europa’. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler’s monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler – and to the downfall of the man once known as ‘loyal Heinrich’.

Ordinary Men

Ordinary Men PDF Author: Christopher R. Browning
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062037757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

Beheaded by Hitler

Beheaded by Hitler PDF Author: Colin Pateman
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
From 1933 during the Nazi era when Hitler refashioned the German judicial system in line with his oppressive regime, many crimes became capital offences which led to a drastic increase in the number of executions. In 1936, the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, acting upon Hitler’s direction, ordered that the fallbeil, a variation on the guillotine, replace the hand axe as the official method for all civil executions throughout Germany. To meet this new demand for ‘justice’, many prisons were designated as execution sites and equipped with a ‘Tegel Fallbeil’, named after the inmates of the Tegal prison in Berlin who first built these atrocious contraptions. Beheaded by Hitler: Cruelty of the Nazis, Judicial Terror and Civilian Executions 1933-1945 provides the reader with a chilling insight into the judicial terror that took place and the harrowing stories of execution by fallbeil of civilians who were convicted of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime, treason and other offences after so called ‘trials’ by the Volksgerichtshof or People’s Court. This exceptionally well researched book also explains the Nazi judicial system, the prisons selected for central execution sites and the Nazi officials and executioners that carried out Hitler’s cleansing. Illustrations: 55 black-and-white photographs

Hitler's Bureaucrats

Hitler's Bureaucrats PDF Author: Yaacov Lozowick
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826479181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
For many, the name Adolf Eichmann is synonymous with the Nazi murder of six million Jews. Alongside Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, he is probably the most infamous of the Nazi murderers; unlike them, the aura linked to his name is that of the ultimate evil that may lurk in each and every one of us. This understanding can be attributed above all to Hannah Arendt, and her seminal book, Eichmann in Jersualem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she suggested that Eighcmann and many bureaucrats like him never actually realized what they were doing:they were thoughtless rather than consciously evil. By taking this position, Arendt rejected the biblical story of Genesis, which sets the ability to distinguish between right and wrong at the very core of beign human. Instead, she implied that Eichmann represented a potential face of the future. This book claims that she was wrong. It describes the facts as they appear in the documentation created by Eichmann and his colleagues, and suggest that they fully understood what they were doing. The primary motivating force for their actions was a well-developed acceptance of th tenents of Nazi ideology, of which antisemitism was a central component. As far as one is able to determine, after the war not a single one of them ever expressed regret for their actions against the Jews, unless it was regret for having to pay the consequences. These were no run-of-the-mill bureaucrats who merely 'followed orders'.

A Simple Soldier

A Simple Soldier PDF Author: John Gess
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 146533291X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This is the story of Sepp Scheibenzuber, a simple man. For most of his early life, Sepp didnt make choices. Choices were made for him. At 13, he wanted to continue his schooling, but his parents had other ideas and soon he was toiling on the farms of Bavaria. Thereafter, he knew nothing else and so continued working on the land until he was drafted into the German Army. There was no question that he would go. He had never heard of anyone even contemplating avoiding the draft. And so within months he was fighting a war against Frenchman, a people whom he knew little about other than the Nazis said they were evil. And in the following years, he fought the Russians and suffered almost unendurable depravation. But somehow Sepp endured. He obeyed. He did what he was told along with millions of other Germans. It never even entered his mind that he had an alternative. All the choices were made for him, except one. He wanted to survive.