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The holocaust is a word that in ancient times indicated a sacrifice that was made in order to worship and thank God. Nowadays, this word has another meaning which actually has become the most frequently used. The Oxford English dictionary defines the Holocaust as “the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis in the war of 1939-1945”.

The holocaust actually began in the years that preceded the Second World War; the persecution and the massacre of Jewish race was planned by a mad German painter called Adolph Hitler with anti-Semitic ideas, who came to power in 1933. His main goal was to impose the superiority of the “pure German race” making the Jewish people completely disappear. During the first years of Hitler’s tyranny Jews were humiliated and deprived of their rights and dignity; but that was just the beginning of the persecution and massacre of the helpless Jewish population. An endless number of Jewish families were deported to the concentration camps. The means that brought them to their burying place were trains in which they died before getting to destination because people could not afford to be literally squeezed for hours in small wagons that transported hundreds of people. Probably, those who died were actually the luckiest ones because they would not face the absurd reality of the concentration camps, in which the prisoners were treated like animals and were subjected to dreadful experiments before being killed.

The historical relevance of the Holocaust or “Shoa”, the Jewish term which refers to one of the saddest moments of mankind’s history, is then enormous and has left an indelible mark in recent history.
Soon after the Second World War, the Holocaust has become a real object of study and debate. In this essay I will talk about some of the causes of this event and some of its consequences on the recent history. Among the numerous scholars who studied this historical, political and social phenomenon, I believe it is worth starting off with a historian that has recently brought a revolutionary approach to this question.

Daniel Goldhagen, a young professor from Harvard University, has opened an intense debate and has entered the list of American best-sellers with his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. Goldhagen’s book is about the conception of the Holocaust as a collective guilt; the young professor wonders how the German people, one of the most civilized country in Europe, could be the “executioners” of the biggest genocide ever. Goldhagen maintains that no explanation of this phenomenon provided for us by the historians is satisfactory. The guilt was usually attributed to Hitler’s criminal madness, to the secrecy in which the exterminations were led and to the education to discipline which ‘brought” soldiers and other military members to “obey” the orders. Supporting his thesis with material ignored by other scholars and with direct witnesses of some “executioners”, Goldhagen demonstrates that the responsible for the victims of the Holocaust were not the SS or the members of the Nazis party, but every single German. Goldhagen himself says: “The conclusion drawn about the overall character of the members’ action can, indeed must, be generalized to the German people in general. What these ordinary Germans did also could have been expected of other ordinary Germans”. Then, what Goldhagen is trying to tell us is that Germans, both men and women belonging to any social classes, tortured and killed the Jews because anti-Semitism was so deeply rooted in Germany that Jewish race was considered as a sort of disease that had to be eliminated from the country and, maybe, from the whole word. What makes Goldhagen’s theory so convincing and at the same time astonishing is the evidence provided by the words of the executioners, the organization of their daily life, their brutal methods of torture and their reactions to death scenes.