Stubble wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2026 8:35 pm
we can talk about how Germans are inherently evil!
I'm interested in this idea, and it's one you seem to be particularly hung up on, with your proclamation about hating all Germans (even modern ones who had nothing to do with Nazism) growing up - which I think I doubt. I think you want to believe that, because you're wedded to this narrative that the hoaxers were trying to instill hatred towards Germans or all white people. But no I don't really believe it, and if you really did believe that at the time, I think it would be phenomenally dumb.
There was a book about this idea - German "evil" - called Hitler's Willing Executioners, which the historical establishment roundly rejected.
Goldhagen's assertion that almost all Germans "wanted to be genocidal executioners" has been viewed with skepticism by most historians, a skepticism ranging from dismissal as "not valid social science" to a condemnation, in the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, as "patent nonsense".[2][65][66] Common complaints suggest that Goldhagen's primary hypothesis is either "oversimplified",[67] or represents "a bizarre inversion of the Nazi view of the Jews" turned back upon the Germans.[3] One German commentator suggested that Goldhagen's book "pushes us again and again headfirst into the nasty anti-Semitic mud. This is his revenge."[68] Eberhard Jäckel wrote a very hostile book review in the Die Zeit newspaper in May 1996 that called Hitler's Willing Executioners "simply a bad book".[69] The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw wrote that he fully agreed with Jäckel on the merits of Hitler's Willing Executioners".[69] Kershaw wrote in 2000 that Goldhagen's book would "occupy only a limited place in the unfolding, vast historiography of such a crucially important topic-probably at best as a challenge to historians to qualify or counter his 'broad-brush' generalisations".[70]
In 1996, the American historian David Schoenbaum wrote a highly critical book review in the National Review of Hitler's Willing Executioners where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism, and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis.[71]: 54–5 Furthermore, Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation, thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread antisemitism.[71]: 55 Finally, Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933, was relatively ineffective or why the Kristallnacht needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular antisemitism.[71]: 56 Using an example from his family history, Schoenbaum wrote that his mother in law, a Polish Jew who lived in Germany between 1928–47, never considered the National Socialists and the Germans synonymous, and expressed regret that Goldhagen could not see the same.[71]: 56
Hitler's Willing Executioners also drew controversy with the publication of two critical articles: "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis", by the American political science professor Norman Finkelstein and initially published in the UK political journal New Left Review,[72] and "Historiographical review: Revising the Holocaust", written by the Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn and initially published in the Historical Journal of Cambridge.[3] These articles were later published as the book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.[3] In response to their book, Goldhagen sought a retraction and apology from Birn, threatening at one point to sue her for libel and according to Salon declaring Finkelstein "a supporter of Hamas".[3] The force of the counterattacks against Birn and Finkelstein from Goldhagen's supporters was described by Israeli journalist Tom Segev as "bordering on cultural terrorism ... The Jewish establishment has embraced Goldhagen as if he were Mr Holocaust himself ... All this is absurd, because the criticism of Goldhagen is backed up so well."[73]
The Austrian-born American historian Raul Hilberg has stated that Goldhagen is "totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong."[4] Hilberg also wrote in an open letter on the eve of the book launch at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that "The book is advertised as something that will change our thinking. It can do nothing of the sort. To me it is worthless, all the hype by the publisher notwithstanding".[5] Yehuda Bauer was similarly condemnatory, questioning how an institute such as Harvard could award a doctorate for a work which so "slipped through the filter of critical scholarly assessment".[74] Bauer also suggested that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis.
Tbh his book doesn't go nearly as far as you did, in your self proclaimed previous hatred of Germans. There's nothing in the history, no rational reason to believe such things about Germans, assuming orthodoxy is correct. It's just a cartoonish way of looking at the world.