ABSTRACT
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wanted to explore how the policy of exterminating European Jews had come to be carried out. More specifically, he wanted to answer the question as to how and why—from both a moral and a psychological perspective —many thousands of ordinary Germans had participated in what was known by the Nazis as the Final Solution—the final solution to what they saw as the "Jewish problem". Goldhagen wanted to show that ordinary Germans were willing and eager participants in the Holocaust, and coined the phrase "eliminationist anti-Semitism" to describe a deep-seated and uniquely German form of hatred toward Jews. Goldhagen criticized Christopher Browning's argument that ordinary Germans were not personally motivated by anti-Semitism. With his data set identified, Goldhagen then tried to work out the extent to which each institution was influenced by anti-Semitism.
