Helmuth Hubener: Boy Sentenced To Death

Not many historical works have achieved more success and have generated more heated debate than Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen’s thesis relies on the idea that since medieval times, a specific kind of eliminationist anti-Semitism had developed in Germany. According to Goldhagen, the German population was already open to the idea of eliminating the Jews. He also claims that when Hitler came to Power in 1933, rather than slowly convincing the Germans to commit mass murder, he merely gave them the opportunity to do what they have wanted to do for years. Goldhagen also inflated the number of people involved, suggesting that hundreds of thousands were participating in the killing and that millions more would have willingly joined in, given the opportunity. Despite the rejection of the book by many German and non-German historians, the German version of the book, published in August 1996, sold very well. Eighty thousand copies of the German edition sold in the first month of the book’s release. By the time of Goldhagen's tour in September, three thousand copies were being sold every single day. Facts like these show how important communication is with the public. Hitler’s Willing Executioners was successful in Germany because of the accessibility of the book to the German population, the social context in which the book was produced, and the powerful marketing campaign that preceded the book itself.

In the article, “The Boys Who Fought the Nazis” by Kristen Lewis, three teenage boys named Karl, Helmuth, and Rudi risked everything to fight the Nazis with the power of writing because they knew that Hitler was cruel and wrong. In July of 1941, Helmuth found an illegal short-wave radio that picked up foreign channels that would speak about Hitler and his terrible actions. Listening to the stations were “forbidden, and the penalties were severe” for anyone who did so in Germany (8). Karl, Helmuth, and Rudi would get together to listen to the Britain station that told what no one else in the country had the courage to say. Hitler was lying and putting his soldiers into battles that couldn’t be won. Although the boys now knew the truth about

This book takes place sometime during the 1960s after the Second World War. Some Germans would rather forget it ever happened than acknowledge the disgraceful events that took place during World War II “Adolf Eichmann's trial began on April 11, 1961 in Jerusalem, Israel. Eichmann was

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of

Helmuth Hübener went into a biased courtroom, and his friend even recalls, “I had a feeling the minute I entered the courtroom that we were already sentenced. It was just a show they were putting on-just a big show. ”(Hübener vs. Hitler, pg. 189.)

When Adolf Hitler first came to power in pre-WWII Germany, all of Germany was ready for a new Fuhrer to lead them into success and overcome the recent depression. Among his supporters was Adolf Eichmann, who began as just another German citizen, but transformed into something even he could not have imagined. “On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism” (Arendt 5). Eichmann was tried for crimes against humanity, but before deciding for oneself whether he was guilty of this charge, we must question whether he was acting out of service to his country or out of his own self-interest. After reading deeper into the results and proceedings of the trial, it is only logical for one to conclude that although he may have joined forces with the Nazi party as a patriot, his motives for continuing to assist in carrying out genocide on an unimaginable scale was largely self-interest.

However, moving into the concluding paragraph, the speaker convinces himself, he is again in the right when he says, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” This confirms the allusion in the beginning and shows the speaker does indeed feel he is in the right. While this shows that he is confident in his decision, the diction still leaves a question of his morality. Words like “die unseen,” “gassed,” and “quiet” all together create a very negative connotation to the innocent plea the speaker

A common misconception about the Holocaust is that the world was naïve of the atrocities happening under the Nazi’s rule. The horrors of the Holocaust were not left undocumented. Unfortunately, many saw these malicious acts as insignificant to the global population; people only start sympathizing when the hindrance affects them. Hitler, with the help of his many allies, achieved to murder millions of innocent men, women, and children. After spending this semester studying the Holocaust, I have realized that the Nazis’ greatest ally was neither an individual nor a country; Hitler’s greatest ally was indifference.

I asked Karl Boem-Tettelbach how it was possible in the 1930s that someone could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were forced to lose their jobs and leave the country. In his reply spoke, I believe, for millions of other Germans: "That never came up. Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn't separate from the group. You were infected. That explains it a bit." (2) And as for actual officers, during the Nuremberg Trials, a Commandant named Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess had this to say of his indifference, "Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. And besides it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything….It was not just newspapers like Sturmer but it was everything we heard. Even our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews….We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would never have occurred to anybody." (3) So there is a delicate balance between conscious and unconscious actions of every individual of Nazi Germany. The majority was bewitched by the charismatic Hitler who not only gave them a reason as to why they were suffering with ubiquitous propaganda, but also promised to strengthen Germany until she was beyond restored. (4) For some it was an underlying hatred that had finally found a vent. For

During this time Jews were being arrested simply because they were Jewish. This lead me to think of just how time hasn't changed and how we have not learned from the past, because right after September 11 happened Arab, Muslim or any Middle Eastern people were being arrested being they were thought of as terrorists. During our survival panel lecture I remember hearing Betty talk about how the teachers and students used to harass her and her younger brother. I really could not believe that even the teachers, who were educated, I thought they would be a lot smarter that to follow the ideology of Hitler. I understand they could not really stand up against him but they could have not encouraged it in school.

Many people may question, if Germany was a Democratic country, how did Adolf Hitler, a tyrant who orchestrated the largest genocide in human history, rise to power? After World War I in 1918, Germany had lost the war and its imperial government began to downfall. Germany had to undertake full responsibility for the war and pay reparations debilitating its already weakened economy. By many Nationalist and veterans, the forfeiture of the war was seen as a humiliation and degradation as they believed the war could have been won if it wasn’t for protestors and politicians. Hitler, being a German soldier, became obsessed with these views. His narrow-mindedness and misapprehensions, along with many other anti- Semites, led him to pin the fault on Jews. These conspiracy theories were born out of distress, resentment, and racism, not realities (2).

When looking into the history of Germany and determining what led to the startling rise in Nazism in Germany and its detrimental effects on the social outcasts in Europe, it can be easy to deduce that the Nazi regime was one where Hitler walked in with his officials and took office by force. The truth is that, while the Nazi party is responsible for the atrocities that occurred before and during WWII, they would have not gotten far if it hadn’t been for the cooperation of the German people themselves. Life in the Third Reich provides proof through voting, youth programs and village life that the Nazi party rose into power with German support.

Germans believed the false information from the propaganda, which lead to many people being put into

Hart, a legal positivist, believes that “law is law,” and argued against Radbrunch’s theory in servings as a solution to fix Germany’s judicial system. He argued against his theory and wanted a separation of law and morality because he thought that it would only “cloak the true nature of the problems,” and encourage a “romantic optimism,” rather than addressing the dilemma that the courts had in deciding on convicting Nazi criminals. Though Hart acknowledges that this case poses a difficult situation for the law, he does propose his own solution to the problem. With his positivist approach to the law, saying that the laws are the rules expected of us, and enforced at a particular time, he proposes that the “grudge informer” should be punished through a different and ‘new’ set of laws. These laws he deems “retrospective laws,” would entail punishing acts such as revenge and duplicity. However, this dilemma between choosing if the “grudge informer” was innocent

The New York times recently did an in depth report of Oskar Groning an ex-SS soldier who served 3 years taking valuables from arriving prisoners in auschwitz, reportedly he wasn’t involved in any killings but witnessed murder and was involved in the mistreatment of jews. Groning was 94 years old when he was convicted to accessory to murder on 300,000 cases and sentenced to 6 years imprisonment. The judge that convicted groning described him as physically frail and yet mentally alert as he was able to describe details of the camp including how long the shifts of guards were. CNN article ‘US nazi hunter has one active case’ talks about John Demjanjuk who took part in the mass killings at treblinka. In his old age he faked an illness to prevent extradition, when carers found out that he was faking an illness he was immediately deported to Germany in 2011 went on trial and was convicted to 28,000 counts of murder and sentenced to death, the court acknowledged that his actions were motivated by racial hatred. The charges issued to him he denied arguing “I was a prisoner of war who was forced to do what the nazis wanted.”. Before his sentence took place he died of natural causes in a home for the elderly. A large amount of nazis are still being punished and sentenced for their crimes. The public have not forgotten what they have done and still want them to be punished for their