ABSTRACT

Hitler's Willing Executioners was met with hostility from professional historians. Numerous criticisms were made, the most common being that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen had grossly oversimplified history. He said there was a single explanation for the Holocaust—widespread anti-Semitism. Other scholars criticized Goldhagen's understanding of the role of anti-Semitism in the decades and centuries prior to the Third Reich. The British historian Geoff Eley echoed this point, arguing that Goldhagen's "argument failed to explain why so little legislative discrimination, let alone physical violence, occurred against Jews in Germany before 1914". Hitler's Willing Executioners was also attacked for lacking originality. Critics like the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein said that most of its arguments were already known to historians. Goldhagen vehemently rejected the negative scholarly response to Hitler's Willing Executioners. The most heated exchanges were with long-term critics. The Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn reviewed Hitler's Willing Executioners and pointed out its many factual errors.