A nation of willing executioners?

BACK in September 2006, in my column in the New Straits Times, I wrote on the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

It was a disturbing read. His contention was that those responsible for the extermination of Jews were not just Nazi party members or SS men but “ordinary Germans of all walks of life, men (and women) who brutalised and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously”.