Demands a
fundamental revision in our thinking of, and
recording of,
the years between 1933 and 1945.
In
1997, Daniel Goldhagen published his groundbreaking
international bestseller entitled Hitler's
Willing Executioners which he
believed would lay 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.
Drawing
on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally
the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen
took his readers into the killing fields where
Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals,
tortured them, and then posed cheerfully for
snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing
units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen
showed how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society
where Jews were seen as evil and dangerous, willingly
followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion.
An
explosive work, exhaustively documented, and richly
researched, it offered irrefutable proof that should
have forced a fundamental revision in our thinking
and recording of events, but instead of seeing this
work as a chance to seriously re-evaluate what
happened in Germany, the influential German
historians angrily rejected it with accusations of a
lack of scholarship, to a reaction against its
popularity. This investigative work deals with that
historical bias and the resulting complicity.
Fred
Kautz could not understand why leading, professional,
German historians refused to take up the gauntlet
thrown by Goldhagen. The German Historians is the
result of his attempt to get to the bottom of this
mystery. First he presents an overview of Goldhagen's
work, then he subjects the public, and private,
utterances, and the written reviews of three
prominent German historians--Hans Mommsen,
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Eberhard Jackel--to a very
close examination, and finally he draws some
conclusions, and warnings, about how we record
history.
Table of Contents
Fred
Kautz came to Canada as a youth and returned to
Germany after his university studies were completed.
He is currently a freelance historical researcher in
Darmstadt.
German
Edition published by Verlag Edition AV.
204
pages
Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-212-3 $24.99
Hardcover ISBN: 1-55164-213-1 $53.99
History
November
2002
