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A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth
No recent work of history has generated as much interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Purporting to solve the mystery of the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen maintains that ordinary Germans were driven by fanatical anti-Semitism to murder the Jews. An immediate national best-seller, the book went on to create an international sensation.
Now, in A Nation on Trial, two leading critics challenge Goldhagen's findings and show that his work is not scholarship at all. With compelling cumulative effect, Norman G. Finkelstein meticulously documents Goldhagen's distortions of secondary literature and the internal contradictions of his argument. In a complementary essay, Ruth Bettina Birn juxtaposes Goldhagen's text against the German archives he consulted. The foremost international authority on these archives, Birn conclusively demonstrates that Goldhagen systematically misrepresented their contents.
The definitive statement on the Goldhagen phenomenon, this volume is also a cautionary tale on the corruption of scholarship by ideological zealotry.
Now, in A Nation on Trial, two leading critics challenge Goldhagen's findings and show that his work is not scholarship at all. With compelling cumulative effect, Norman G. Finkelstein meticulously documents Goldhagen's distortions of secondary literature and the internal contradictions of his argument. In a complementary essay, Ruth Bettina Birn juxtaposes Goldhagen's text against the German archives he consulted. The foremost international authority on these archives, Birn conclusively demonstrates that Goldhagen systematically misrepresented their contents.
The definitive statement on the Goldhagen phenomenon, this volume is also a cautionary tale on the corruption of scholarship by ideological zealotry.
148 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 1998
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About the author
Norman G. Finkelstein
26 books1,746 followersNorman Gary Finkelstein, is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Son of a holocaust survivor, Finkelstein is a fierce critic of Israeli policy, especially toward Palestinians. He has had a tense rivalry with his pro-Israel counterpart, Alan Dershowitz. In 2007 DePaul University denied his tenure, a decision for which Dershowitz lobbied. For his views and suspected connections to anti-Zionist groups, Israel has denied Finkelstein entry and banned him from the country for a decade.
Son of a holocaust survivor, Finkelstein is a fierce critic of Israeli policy, especially toward Palestinians. He has had a tense rivalry with his pro-Israel counterpart, Alan Dershowitz. In 2007 DePaul University denied his tenure, a decision for which Dershowitz lobbied. For his views and suspected connections to anti-Zionist groups, Israel has denied Finkelstein entry and banned him from the country for a decade.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 23, 2015
First published in 1998 in response to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's much-hyped, so-called history book 'Hitler's Willing Executioners', this savaging of Goldhagen's work remains just as compelling and relevant today.
Finkelstein gets the bulk of the pages (about half, his co-author gets a quarter or so, as do the meticulous endnotes) and is his usual caustic self. In her essay, Ruth Bettina Birn seems to take less gleeful pleasure in insulting Goldhagen and giving his lurid nonsense the utter kicking it deserves, but she does so expertly, and raises the same deeply troubling issues.
Not only is Goldhagen's entire idea insultingly racist (all Germans have always been desperate to eliminate the Jews) it's illogical and ridiculous. By pointing out his slapdash research, his cherry-picking of quotes, his misrepresentation of source material, his outright making things up, his seeming ignorance of basic scholarship and the obvious contradictions he writes about but fails to notice, Finkelstein and Birn have done a valuable job. And done it brilliantly.
Finkelstein gets the bulk of the pages (about half, his co-author gets a quarter or so, as do the meticulous endnotes) and is his usual caustic self. In her essay, Ruth Bettina Birn seems to take less gleeful pleasure in insulting Goldhagen and giving his lurid nonsense the utter kicking it deserves, but she does so expertly, and raises the same deeply troubling issues.
Not only is Goldhagen's entire idea insultingly racist (all Germans have always been desperate to eliminate the Jews) it's illogical and ridiculous. By pointing out his slapdash research, his cherry-picking of quotes, his misrepresentation of source material, his outright making things up, his seeming ignorance of basic scholarship and the obvious contradictions he writes about but fails to notice, Finkelstein and Birn have done a valuable job. And done it brilliantly.
July 16, 2012
He demolishes Goldhagen's Zionist thesis that the German people in 1940 were all anti Semitic and proceeds to look more closely at the facts and circumstances of the Holocaust.
December 28, 2014
A thorough and damning response to Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. I don't think I quite agree with Finkelstein's argument that Goldhagen's work was intended to justify Zionist ideology or to suggest that Israelis have a right to act with impunity, but I found the earlier sections detailing the internal contradictions and flaws in Goldhagen's thesis convincing. And Ruth Bettina Birn's contextualization of the documents Goldhagen used were careful and equally appreciated.
Recommended if you have an interest in Goldhagen's thesis or in Finkelstein's or Birn's work. I can't imagine why else anyone would read it, although I personally quite enjoyed it.
Recommended if you have an interest in Goldhagen's thesis or in Finkelstein's or Birn's work. I can't imagine why else anyone would read it, although I personally quite enjoyed it.
March 13, 2024
TWO AUTHORS STRONGLY CRITIQUE ‘HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS’
Norman Finkelstein wrote in the introductory section of this 1998 book, “Rarely has a book with scholarly pretensions evoked as much popular interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners.’ … Although initial reviews were not uniformly positive, once the Goldhagen juggernaut proved unstoppable, even the dissenting media voices joined in the chorus of praise…. What makes the Goldhagen phenomenon so remarkable is that [the book] is not at all a learned inquiry. Replete with gross misrepresentations of the secondary literature and internal contradictions, Goldhagen’s book is worthless as scholarship. The bulk of what follows documents this claim.” (Pg. 4)
He states, “For argument’s sake, let us assume that Goldhagen is correct. Consumed by a ferocious loathing of the Jews, the German people jumped at Hitler’s invitation to exterminate them. Yet the question still remains, Whence the hatred of Jews? A nation of genocidal racists is, after all, not exactly a commonplace. On this crucial issue, Goldhagen sheds no light. Antisemitism, he suggests, was symptomatic of a much deeper German malaise… Yet he explains neither why these normally quiescent passions burst forth in Germany nor why they were directed against the Jews.” (Pg. 10)
He notes, “to demonstrate Hitler’s greater popularity right after the seizure of power, Goldhagen recalls that the throttling of all dissent ‘did not deter voters, but increased the Nazi vote to over seventeen millions people’ in March 1933… One may have supposed that this increment in Nazi votes was perhaps BECAUSE all dissent was l throttled…” (Pg..34)
He asserts, “The remarkable thing about Goldhagen’s argument is that the exact opposite is true. What distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism WAS the reluctant and mechanical as against the gratuitously cruel implementation of the Final Solution. ‘The killing of the Jews,’ reports Raul Hilberg, was regarded as historical necessity.’” (Pg. 60)
He reports, “‘German children,’ recalls a survivor of the Helmbrechts death march, ‘began to throw stones at us.’ Clutching his thesis, Goldhagen concludes: ‘The German children, knowing nothing of Jews but what they learned from their society, understood how they were to act.’ Thus, to dispel any lingering doubt that pre-Nazi homicidal German anti-Semitism explains the Final Solution, Goldhagen points to German children stoning Jews in 1945.” (Pg. 79)
Ruth Bettina Birn observes, “The evidence itself has not been examined by reviewers, because most of them are not familiar with Goldhagen’s sources. In fact, the author uses historical documents only to a minimal extent; apart from some Nuremberg documents and a few files from the German Federal Archives, he relies mainly on secondary literature.” (Pg. 105)
She points out, “The incident described by Goldhagen seems to have been in the nature of a pogrom, caused by a group of officers who… were ideologically zealots… the perpetrators in this case can be specifically identified. Of the fourteen main perpetrators who stood trial, thirteen were career police officers and one came via the Waffen-SS, eight were party members. One of the two company leaders had been involved, after World War I, with right-wing groups such as the ‘Freikorps’ while the other was an SS member in 1933. They can hardly be considered ‘ordinary Germans.’” (Pg.117-118)
She asserts, “Goldhagen’s book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves, he uses source material only as an underpinning for his preconceived theory. Rather the book is driven by the author’s choice of language , and it can only be understood by analyzing those choices and his generally argumentative style. Verbosity and repetitiveness are the book's most striking features.” (Pg. 136)
She concludes, “Whether this is really the role of a scholar is doubtful. After all, there is an extensive collection of survivors’ testimonies, in which we can hear the voices of the victims themselves. In the approach Goldhagen advocates, the historian takes on the position of an intermediary who is not interpreting sources but retelling the events in the light of his own imagination. It’s his voice we hear!” (Pg. 147)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking critiques of Goldhagen’s book.
Norman Finkelstein wrote in the introductory section of this 1998 book, “Rarely has a book with scholarly pretensions evoked as much popular interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners.’ … Although initial reviews were not uniformly positive, once the Goldhagen juggernaut proved unstoppable, even the dissenting media voices joined in the chorus of praise…. What makes the Goldhagen phenomenon so remarkable is that [the book] is not at all a learned inquiry. Replete with gross misrepresentations of the secondary literature and internal contradictions, Goldhagen’s book is worthless as scholarship. The bulk of what follows documents this claim.” (Pg. 4)
He states, “For argument’s sake, let us assume that Goldhagen is correct. Consumed by a ferocious loathing of the Jews, the German people jumped at Hitler’s invitation to exterminate them. Yet the question still remains, Whence the hatred of Jews? A nation of genocidal racists is, after all, not exactly a commonplace. On this crucial issue, Goldhagen sheds no light. Antisemitism, he suggests, was symptomatic of a much deeper German malaise… Yet he explains neither why these normally quiescent passions burst forth in Germany nor why they were directed against the Jews.” (Pg. 10)
He notes, “to demonstrate Hitler’s greater popularity right after the seizure of power, Goldhagen recalls that the throttling of all dissent ‘did not deter voters, but increased the Nazi vote to over seventeen millions people’ in March 1933… One may have supposed that this increment in Nazi votes was perhaps BECAUSE all dissent was l throttled…” (Pg..34)
He asserts, “The remarkable thing about Goldhagen’s argument is that the exact opposite is true. What distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism WAS the reluctant and mechanical as against the gratuitously cruel implementation of the Final Solution. ‘The killing of the Jews,’ reports Raul Hilberg, was regarded as historical necessity.’” (Pg. 60)
He reports, “‘German children,’ recalls a survivor of the Helmbrechts death march, ‘began to throw stones at us.’ Clutching his thesis, Goldhagen concludes: ‘The German children, knowing nothing of Jews but what they learned from their society, understood how they were to act.’ Thus, to dispel any lingering doubt that pre-Nazi homicidal German anti-Semitism explains the Final Solution, Goldhagen points to German children stoning Jews in 1945.” (Pg. 79)
Ruth Bettina Birn observes, “The evidence itself has not been examined by reviewers, because most of them are not familiar with Goldhagen’s sources. In fact, the author uses historical documents only to a minimal extent; apart from some Nuremberg documents and a few files from the German Federal Archives, he relies mainly on secondary literature.” (Pg. 105)
She points out, “The incident described by Goldhagen seems to have been in the nature of a pogrom, caused by a group of officers who… were ideologically zealots… the perpetrators in this case can be specifically identified. Of the fourteen main perpetrators who stood trial, thirteen were career police officers and one came via the Waffen-SS, eight were party members. One of the two company leaders had been involved, after World War I, with right-wing groups such as the ‘Freikorps’ while the other was an SS member in 1933. They can hardly be considered ‘ordinary Germans.’” (Pg.117-118)
She asserts, “Goldhagen’s book is not driven by sources, be they primary or secondary. He does not allow the witness statements he uses to speak for themselves, he uses source material only as an underpinning for his preconceived theory. Rather the book is driven by the author’s choice of language , and it can only be understood by analyzing those choices and his generally argumentative style. Verbosity and repetitiveness are the book's most striking features.” (Pg. 136)
She concludes, “Whether this is really the role of a scholar is doubtful. After all, there is an extensive collection of survivors’ testimonies, in which we can hear the voices of the victims themselves. In the approach Goldhagen advocates, the historian takes on the position of an intermediary who is not interpreting sources but retelling the events in the light of his own imagination. It’s his voice we hear!” (Pg. 147)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking critiques of Goldhagen’s book.
November 30, 2024
The book is good and well-written. It serves its purpose. The purpose is relatively limited. Two authors refute the argument of a popular, promoted as scholarly, book on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen.
The arguments by Finkelstein and Birn are very convincing. Goldhagen started with a conclusion and looked for evidence and misinterpreted evidence to fit his conclusion.
The book is relevant for our time, as the incoming US administration is talking of deporting millions of immigrants and dealing with internal enemies. Goldhagen's thesis is that the Holocaust was unique and could only happen in Germany. Finkelstein and Birn show that historical circumstances and leadership can get people to do things that they ordinarily would not do. What will Americans do if faced with similar questions?
The arguments by Finkelstein and Birn are very convincing. Goldhagen started with a conclusion and looked for evidence and misinterpreted evidence to fit his conclusion.
The book is relevant for our time, as the incoming US administration is talking of deporting millions of immigrants and dealing with internal enemies. Goldhagen's thesis is that the Holocaust was unique and could only happen in Germany. Finkelstein and Birn show that historical circumstances and leadership can get people to do things that they ordinarily would not do. What will Americans do if faced with similar questions?
January 13, 2024
I'll be honest, I can't say it's a triumphant feeling to close a book that pretty centrally features Elie Wiesel as the responsible party for a whole world of deeply disingenuous and intellectually-dishonest writing and punditry and be thoroughly convinced.
November 29, 2025
A pretty damning riposte to Goldhagen.
February 19, 2026
I finally read this early excursion by Finkelstein into the sanctimonies of holocaust literature, a little prequel to the Holocaust Industry and Beyond Hutzpah. It can be read in an hour or two and has a few pearls.
Perhaps the star of the production is co author Ruth Bettina Birn, whose name on the cover withers any hasbara attempt to dismiss the book as "fringe" or anti semitic.
Birn is a person worth learning more about, a German jewish scholar of the highest echelon, born post war, who became a foremost expert on the Ludwigsburg Archive from which Goldhagen's book is largely compiled. She is also the "chief historian of the war crimes section of the Canadian Department of Justice". A Nation on Trial originates in her demolition of Goldhagen for the Cambridge Review.
There is a wonderful comparison of Hitler and Theodore Roosevelt on p. 85 in which NF concludes that Hitler's supremacist arguments are "but an anemic version of Roosevelt's".
The first section is a bit boring but conclusive, a textual refutation of Goldhagen's thesis which leaves DG in rags. Goldhagen will unfortunately be remembered as a a silly writer who wrote a pop bestseller about the Holocaust and attacked, to his further discredit, far better writers. He denigrated Arno Mayer (Why Did The Heavens Not Darken) a writer of a depth and breadth such as to make Goldhagen a very tiny trinket. Mayer worked from an intellectual vantage that makes Goldhagen's POV feel like a cupboard.
In the thirty odd page "reflections " chapter NF gently suggests without i think using the word that HWE was so popular because it played to the narcissism and exceptionalism of post war jewry , which became receptive to this kind of history after the 1967 Arab Isrseli War, which NF sees as a hinge of zionist narcissism. The audience that lapped up Goldhagen's nonsense was the same audience that rejected Hilberg's book because it told the truth about Jewish non resistance, rejected Hanna Arendt for implying that Jews were cooperative, and rejected Mayer because he correctly moved Bolshevism to center stage as a Nazi obsession, hatred of communism being the true explanatory key , the lost key of the Nazi phenomenon, the lost key drowned in a sea of schlock which would succeed in making jewish identity a ruling historical and cultural paradigm.
"Goldhagen is to Holocaust literature what Elie Weisel is to Holocaust memory"....a sham in other words.
Weisel was a mere dribble of vomit. Imagine if we could travel back in time and swap him into the death lists for Walter Benjamin or Victor Ullman, but fate is not a board game.
In 1999 NF already has a footnote which prefigures some future tillage: "Revealingly , Holocaust literature has been exempted " from the conservative backlash against gay, African American and Woman's Identitarian academic studies. The reason for this exemption, "is plainly not comparative scholarly worth."
And as the ziovomit are contriving to drag us into a possible nuclear war, this final quote, written almost thirty years ago:
"Thus interpreted , the Nazi extermination both justifies the necessity of Israel and accounts for all hostility directed at it. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next outbreak of homicidal anti semitism, and conversely, homicidal anti semitism" is behind every criticismj of the Jewish state.
Perhaps the star of the production is co author Ruth Bettina Birn, whose name on the cover withers any hasbara attempt to dismiss the book as "fringe" or anti semitic.
Birn is a person worth learning more about, a German jewish scholar of the highest echelon, born post war, who became a foremost expert on the Ludwigsburg Archive from which Goldhagen's book is largely compiled. She is also the "chief historian of the war crimes section of the Canadian Department of Justice". A Nation on Trial originates in her demolition of Goldhagen for the Cambridge Review.
There is a wonderful comparison of Hitler and Theodore Roosevelt on p. 85 in which NF concludes that Hitler's supremacist arguments are "but an anemic version of Roosevelt's".
The first section is a bit boring but conclusive, a textual refutation of Goldhagen's thesis which leaves DG in rags. Goldhagen will unfortunately be remembered as a a silly writer who wrote a pop bestseller about the Holocaust and attacked, to his further discredit, far better writers. He denigrated Arno Mayer (Why Did The Heavens Not Darken) a writer of a depth and breadth such as to make Goldhagen a very tiny trinket. Mayer worked from an intellectual vantage that makes Goldhagen's POV feel like a cupboard.
In the thirty odd page "reflections " chapter NF gently suggests without i think using the word that HWE was so popular because it played to the narcissism and exceptionalism of post war jewry , which became receptive to this kind of history after the 1967 Arab Isrseli War, which NF sees as a hinge of zionist narcissism. The audience that lapped up Goldhagen's nonsense was the same audience that rejected Hilberg's book because it told the truth about Jewish non resistance, rejected Hanna Arendt for implying that Jews were cooperative, and rejected Mayer because he correctly moved Bolshevism to center stage as a Nazi obsession, hatred of communism being the true explanatory key , the lost key of the Nazi phenomenon, the lost key drowned in a sea of schlock which would succeed in making jewish identity a ruling historical and cultural paradigm.
"Goldhagen is to Holocaust literature what Elie Weisel is to Holocaust memory"....a sham in other words.
Weisel was a mere dribble of vomit. Imagine if we could travel back in time and swap him into the death lists for Walter Benjamin or Victor Ullman, but fate is not a board game.
In 1999 NF already has a footnote which prefigures some future tillage: "Revealingly , Holocaust literature has been exempted " from the conservative backlash against gay, African American and Woman's Identitarian academic studies. The reason for this exemption, "is plainly not comparative scholarly worth."
And as the ziovomit are contriving to drag us into a possible nuclear war, this final quote, written almost thirty years ago:
"Thus interpreted , the Nazi extermination both justifies the necessity of Israel and accounts for all hostility directed at it. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next outbreak of homicidal anti semitism, and conversely, homicidal anti semitism" is behind every criticismj of the Jewish state.
June 21, 2025
Two-pronged
surgical strike dissects hack
history. Dissent!
surgical strike dissects hack
history. Dissent!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews