Hitler's Foreign Executioners by Hale, Christopher;

Short description:

The hitherto unknown story of more than half a million volunteers who joined in Hitler's 'war of annihilation'. In 1996, the American historian Daniel Goldhagen published his international bestseller, 'Hitler's Willing Executioners', in which he claimed that the Nazi genocide was the result of a force innate in all Germans which he called 'eliminationist anti-Semitism': ie: only Germans were programmed to kill Jews. In this revelatory new book, Chris Hale proves Goldhagen wrong -- and demolishes one of the most influential myths about the Nazi genocide. Hitler's followers were required by Nazi ideology to be of pure Aryan blood, but by 1943, the armed forces of the Third Reich were the most ethnically diverse in history. More than half a million foreign volunteers -- called 'Freiwilligen' -- signed up for the Nazis, most of them wearing the uniform of Himmler's elite Waffen SS and many of them serving in the 'Totenkopf' ('Death's Head') units that managed the extermination camps.The foreign soldiers of the Third Reich -- who came from France, Belgium, Holland, the Ukraine, Scandinavia, and included even Muslims from Bosnia -- were an essential part of Himmler's master plan for a racially pure Europe, ruled by the SS. Who were these people? What motivated them? What happened to them? 'Hitler's Foreign Executioners' tells their shocking story for the first time.