The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. We hope they will enrich your understanding of this revolutionary new analysis of the Holocaust, which has riveted thousands of readers and provoked impassioned discussion in both America and Europe.

It is a question that has haunted the world for the last half-century and produced a host of theories: How could the Holocaust happen? In Hitler's Willing Executioners, the product of years of studying the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen gives a radical new answer: Germans degraded, brutalized, and slaughtered Jews not, as has previously been asserted, because Germans were coerced, because of irresistible social or psychological pressure, or because they were slavishly obedient to their führer and merely following orders, but because a virulent form of antisemitism that had been generations in the making permeated German society, leading Germans to believe that the extermination was justified and necessary.

By the time Hitler came to power, Goldhagen attests, hatred of Jews was a fully accepted, even institutionalized element of the culture; hence he found no shortage of willing executioners among ordinary Germans with whom to implement his terrible "final solution." Chillingly, Goldhagen uses the killers' own words to describe their actions and the mental world that made such actions possible.

Hitler's Willing Executioners is a devastating portrait of a deluded society as well as a provocative work of scholarship that challenges fifty years of conventional wisdom.