Debunking Goldhagen

For many years, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has been celebrated, especially in the Jewish world, for his bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioner", which argued for the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Now, in a review of Goldhagen's new book, David Rieff takes him to task as a self-promoter who posed as a trailblazer, but who actually contributed little new research to the field.

This pattern began with Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where, when he wasn’t busy laying down the moral law, Goldhagen was largely arguing against the historiographical consensus about the Holocaust (the great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, drew his particular scorn). If he had an essentialist view of German history from the early nineteenth century to the fall of Berlin in 1945 (that essence, broadly speaking, being what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism), Goldhagen felt equally confident in his ability to discern and lavishly praise the moral regeneration of the post-Nazi German state and society.
The problem, whether when he was doling out praise or blame, as the historian of Nazism Christopher Browning (Goldhagen’s bête noire in Hitler’s Willing Executioners) pointed out more than a decade ago, is that Goldhagen has shown a tendency in his work to claim to be blazing new trails in understanding when, in reality, his own views are not so far as he imagines from the conventional wisdom he so excoriates and about which he claims to be writing to correct and reform.
Despite what Goldhagen claimed, few historians before him had denied that “ordinary Germans” participated willingly in the murder of European Jewry. Nor did the scholars who came before him believe that those ordinary Germans killed out of fear of reprisal. In other words, the concept of Hitler’s willing executioners was the consensus view of historians long before Goldhagen turned his Harvard dissertation into a global best seller.