ABSTRACT
Hitler's Willing Executioners was one of the most talked-about, even infamous, history books of the 1990s. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's powerful, simple narrative connected with a wide public. Goldhagen insisted that collective prejudice played a role in the Holocaust. This has been largely accepted: most historians today would say that these collective passions were a necessary cause of the Holocaust, although they were not the only one. Goldhagen focused on anti-Semitism as an aspect of German culture. Other historians have also explored how prevailing cultural beliefs played a role in the Holocaust. Goldhagen had presented the Holocaust as being driven by German thinking. The American historian Timothy Snyder has looked at the links between geography and genocide. In his prize-winning book of 2010, Bloodlands, Snyder demonstrated that the vast majority of the killing in early twentieth-century Europe was located at the troubled eastern boundaries of the continent.
