Hitler's Willing Executioners Quotes

“Interpreters of this period make a grave error by refusing to believe that people could slaughter whole populations—especially populations that are by any objective evaluation not threatening—out of conviction. Why persist in the belief that "ordinary" people could not possibly sanction, let alone partake in wholesale human slaughter? The historical record, from ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with which people can extinguish the lives of others, and even take joy in their deaths.”
― Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

“The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of "ordinary" Germans— and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.”
― Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust