The book describes these police units as made up of average people, with normal lives, participating in their off duty hours in social events, sports, and cultural activities, having their families with them at their assigned stations in foreign lands.  It talks about ordinary people, as everyone else, who fall in love, get married, are considerate to animals, but for a tiny portion of their time took on the role of brutal killers.  The book presents a picture of this second characteristic that is unbelievably savage towards the Jewish people who have been made the axiomatic target.

The book opens with an apparent paradox, a description of Captain Wolfgang Hoffman, commander of three companies of Police Battalion 101 who were at the center of many of the most gruesome slaughters of Jewish men, women, and children - by the tens of thousands - in the villages and cities of Poland.  The same man is described as having refused to obey a superior order on moral grounds.  He justified his refusal in writing "because it appeared to me a piece of impertinence to demand of a decent German soldier to sign a declaration in which he obligates himself not to steal, not to plunder, and not to buy without paying..."  Goldhagen reports that the captain pointed out in his letter how "unnecessary such a demand was, since his men, of proper ideological conviction, were fully aware that such activities were punishable offenses."*(Hitler's Willing Executioners, Introduction, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, published 1996 Alfred A. Knopf, New York)

This paradox is a part of history, a gruesome part of it, that cannot be left unexplored as the processes it involved are still in operation today in many parts of the world, detail for detail, and threaten the future of humanity.  By exploring its history, even the darkest 'night' in terms of its humanity, mankind finds a mirror to itself in which it sees not necessarily its actual nature, but the face of what it has allowed itself to become by not being responsive to the true dimension of its nature and its potential for good.

In some cases Goldhagen's book aims to correlate the inhumanity of the executioners, their deeds, and the manner in which they were conducted, with these people's evident role as fathers of families of their own.  This correlation cannot be accomplished by shallow investigation, and as expected, Daniel Goldhagen has some difficultly with this aspect of exploration though he takes the exploration miles beyond what other scholars have accomplished in this line.  Actually, it cannot be accomplished at all without clearly separating the individual's humanity from the conduct that unfolds in response to ideological axioms.  The contrast that is presented in Goldhagen's book, when seen as an axiomatic phenomenon, is so surprising and strong that this fundamental separation between the naturally real, and the artificially created axiomatic response, actually becomes clearly visible.  In this regard Goldhagen's book is valuable.

The police-men's response to the controlling axioms that have been carefully generated for them, as described by Daniel Goldhagen, of course, doesn't excuse the men's deeds or absolve them of the crimes committed.  The usefulness of recognizing the processes involved lies in that it enables one to raise one's own humanity above the waters of hate onto a platform that causes one to examine the axioms of modern time that still argue for the elimination of people as a "necessary" component for the advance of society, or for budgetary reason, or for environmental imperatives.  Here, we find the modern axiomatic drivers by which today's ordinary people repeat the historic atrocities.

In the following paragraphs, condensed narratives from Daniel Goldhagen's book are presented in order to stir the human thought to a deeper self-examination, especially in regard to the modern axiomatic assumptions that allow the murdering of close to 100 million people each year in the name of progress, or mining rights, or ecology, or myths about a so-called resource depletion.

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche