Books like Worse than war by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Browning’s book reveals how ordinary middle‑aged Germans of Reserve Police Battalion 101 became silent mass murderers during the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt’s seminal study charts the rise of totalitarianism from 19th‑century anti‑Semitism and European colonialism to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, examining propaganda, terror, and mass mobilization.

Exploring the science of prejudice and unconscious biases in everyday life.

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays 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. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. - Publisher.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic Church's involvement in the Holocaust, transforming a narrow discussion fixated on Pope Pius XII into the long overdue investigation of the Church throughout Europe. He shows that the Church's and the Pope's complicity in the persecution of the Jews was much deeper than has been understood. The Church's leaders were fully aware of the persecutions. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of the persecution. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a new, precise way for assessing the Church and its clergy's culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores it, analyzes the Church's tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to repair the harm it inflicted on Jews, and to heal itself. Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a path-breaking book of profound, and potentially explosive, importance. - Publisher.