Talk:Hitler's Willing Executioners

message: The criticism section, taking up a page, had one reference. I copy and pasted the two paragaphs in the author's article and copied it here. There appears to be some possible original research, which I tagged, and weasel words (not identifing the author). I tagged all the paragraphs and sentences with no sources. 
I am willing to accept either side, but I need some evidence. Ikip (talk) 08:58, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: #The book:  mentions how many historians were critical of this book. I don't have the energy to add this material to the article.  I mentioned the noble prize winner's praise, but I didn't mention all the criticism  from historians. the book mentioned that some authors liked chapter 6-9 and that one prominent historian said that as flawed as the book is, it ask important questions. You can read most of the book pages in the google link, above. Ikip (talk) 09:33, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

text: #Also: Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (eds.) Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 . Mentions the positive reviews of German Jewish journalists, but that German historians were negative. Ikip (talk) 09:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

text: #More:   says two well respected authors endorsed the German edition, on the front cover. Ikip (talk) 11:05, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Criticism section

message: I removed the following to talk:
:There are also critics who claim that Goldhagen is not internally consistent in advancing his "eliminationist" hypothesis. Goldhagen repeatedly claims that the average German was full of murderous antisemitism endemic to German culture. If this were true, it would imply that there were no further fundamental distinctions to be made among Germans as far as their susceptibility to participate in the worst crimes of the Holocaust, which begs questions of individual morality and therefore answerability. The men who became the killers profiled in Goldhagen's book only killed because it was part of their German identity. Had they grown up in some other culture, they presumably would not have become killers. Such a notion of motive would therefore be available as an excuse. As some critics would have it, Goldhagen recognized this and therefore repeatedly moralizes about evil choices ―if choices were available, any hypothesis of cultural determination would be sharply mitigated to the point of losing the explanatory power with which Goldhagen invests it. Critics taking this approach contend that Goldhagen is therefore ambivalent about his own conclusions.
:In subsequent debates, Goldhagen characterised functionalist claims (there was no master plan by Hitler, and the holocaust came from lower ranks) associated with the period of 1938-1942 as "ahistorical". Even among scholars who wholly reject functionalist arguments, Goldhagen finds virtually no support in excluding examination of this period to understand why antisemitism, "eliminationist" or otherwise, became actively genocidal as and when it did.
Ikip (talk) 10:21, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed unsourced paragraphs

message: Wow, the Critical reception of work is pretty daming. Despite this, I was wondering if anyone was familar with books similar to Hitler's Willing Executioners on other countries, say the Soviet Union, or even the United States. I am interested in studying the social history of wars in the United States. 
It goes along with what Ward Churchill said: 
:Progressives...while acknowledging many of America's more reprehensible features...have become quite [consistent] in attributing all things negative to handy abstractions like "capitalism," "the state," "structural oppression," and, yes, "the hierarchy." Hence, they have been able to conjure what might be termed the "miracle of immaculate genocide," a form of genocide, that is, in which—apart from a few [indeterminate] "decision-making élites" —there are no actual perpetrators and no one who might "really" be deemed culpable by reason of complicity. 
Ikip (talk) 08:37, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Other research and books

message: Recall that this was a PhD thesis, with characteristic emphasis on originality. It nor his undergraduate thesis appear to have had any accompanying peer reviewed publications. Perhaps these would not have changed the book's form or content to gain it more ready acceptance and less hysteria (critical or admiring). Rare is the soul who analyzes without some bias for guidance. With luck and evidence, biases change.
The subject is one of the least likely to encourage, decades after the crimes, Keats's negative capability. Evil occurred. We can learn by whom and the context better, but we may never understand it. Mutually inconsistant insights may be as educational as a grand theory. Sadly history allows no control experiments to test our hindsight. Original provocative work easily ends up producing more heat than light for interested raders who have no relevant expertise. Appealing to a plurality of scholars - whose agendas are obscure to us - to validate passions does not clarify, move understanding, stir compassion, nor guide actions to prevent recurrence. 
Two articles from Clive James which I inserted may help the balance. He is scarily well-read, well-spoken and and well-tempered; aware both of the weaknesses of the book and its value.
Eztach (talk) 23:33, 22 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Critical Analyses

message: I apologize for undoing all that work, but I feel I have to.  It feel like it has an ideological bent which completely ignores the citations it was based on; approximately the same criticism Goldhagen faced himself for writing it.  Just a couple of examples to open the conversation:
*The book is a "publishing phenomenon" because of the Historikerstreit, according to the citations; you altered it to say it it was criticized because of the Historikerstreit, when in reality it was criticized for what historians' believed to be its "worthlessness", or its ahistorical nature, or its getting everything "completely wrong", or its being racist.  I don't want to suggest a favorite interpretation here, I'm just saying that's what's in the citations, which don't back this change.
*You write that Goldhagen's "critics seek to “erase the distinction between ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’", but the citation and original text (and numerous other citations included in this text) write that Goldhagen is taking a racist view of Germans; that is, Goldhagen is erasing the distinction, not his critics (I'm not sure what that could even mean).
All of this good writing you put into it, I appreciate it and I'm not doing this lightly.  It's just that it seems to be quite radically wrong, and irreconcilable with the sources.  We'll talk it out.  Cheers, DBaba (talk) 03:14, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Mhazard9's edits

message: I've raised a question about the use of Fred Kautz as a source (issues of UNDUE?) at the European history project talkboard. I thought I'd centralise discussion there.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 04:27, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fred Kautz 

message: i'll return later to highlight examples, but i want to say now that this "article" is not worthy of the name. it is instead a largely negative book review (and critique of Goldhagen's thesis and methods) interspersed with edits intended to "move the needle" away from the negative. whole sections are beyond salvaging and should be rewritten from scratch. others serve no informative purpose in re the book and should be elided entirely. when all opinion is removed, the piece will be 60 per cent shorter.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Adambrower (talk • contribs) 05:01, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article or review? 

message: I have removed this sentence: "Goldhagen argued that for ordinary German men and women murderous anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained that when Germans had sex in World War II that they fantasied about the murder of Jews at the moment of orgasm." It was a rather shocking thing to read, so I looked for verification in the book at the page cited (p. 339), but found that the quoted 'paraphrase' was a grotesque misreading. The relevant passage begins: "The Germans made love in barracks next to enormous privation and incessant cruelty..." and goes on to ponder in about these hypothetical (non-civilian) Germans' post-coital conversations, suggesting the violence involved in their daily work might come up as pillow talk. It's a slightly ridiculous rhetorical exercise, but Goldhagen is not speaking about "ordinary German men and women," nor is he suggesting that anti-Semitic violence was fodder for anyone's sexual fantasies "at the moment of orgasm." Tothebarricades (talk) 22:41, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deleted faulty reference to a Goldhagen passage 

message: I have removed the random comment that Ordinary Men was dedicated to Raul Hilberg. Neither of the cited sources mention anything about this, and this is irrelevant. Is there some claim that Hilberg's opinion of the book was coloured by this fact? Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 11:56, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dedication of Ordinary Men to Raul Hilberg 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Hitler's Willing Executioners. Please take a moment to review my edit. You may add  after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
*Attempted to fix sourcing for //www.goldhagen.com/frbb0.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online</sup> 16:29, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I've draftified Draft:A Nation on Trial, an unreferenced stub for eight years. Interested editors may wish to improve the Draft and submit it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:56, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Nation on Trial 

message: Firstly from this edit I don't have an opinion in regards to the use of  I don't know what the advantage is of using that instead of typing in the dash. I also don't understand what's going on with the spacing here. 
WhisperToMe (talk) 21:33, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The only advantage is to the editor who is writing the sentences in the first place -- that is, the person actually working at building the article.  If it makes it easier and faster for them to write, that's fine, it's a personal choice.  Theres' no reason, however, that an editor needs to come by later and change what has been written to another form which means exactly the same thing, but is somewhat more esoteric in its meaning.  If one didn't already know what "" means, it's not intuitively obvious by looking at it  The unnecessary mass replacement of one version with another less understandable one is a waste of time, cluttering up people's watchlist with edits that make non-rendering "cosmetic changes".  Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:14, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:   That is a genuine concern that watchlists could be unnecessarily weighted with such cosmetic edits. Perhaps I can find a relevant village pump or discussion board so other editors can weigh in? WhisperToMe (talk) 22:18, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I created   so hopefully there can be some discussion about it there: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Is_it_acceptable_to_make_multiple_cosmetic_changes_to_existing_articles_without_substantially_changing_content%3F WhisperToMe (talk) 23:58, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of <nowiki>{{snd}}</nowiki> 

message: I found these while searching for articles about the book:
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* - Online version revised December 2007 and January 2008 - Version prior to revisions
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WhisperToMe (talk) 16:21, 27 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible additional resources?