sh in content, they are not completely unjust for there is no obvious reason why a culture cannot be fanatically consumed by hatred. Goldhagen argues that for centuries, nearly every German was possessed of a homicidal animus towards Jews and thus 80 to 90 percent of Germans would have relished in the occasion to eliminate Jews. (Goldhagen dissents from Christopher Browning's estimates that 10-20 percent of the German police battalions refused to kill Jews as 'stretching the evidence ). It is one of Goldhagen's central arguments that the police battalions were prototypical of the murderous German mind-set. Goldhagen’s true distinction from Browning is to argue that German anti- Semitism was not only a significant but rather it was the sufficient condition for perpetrating the extermination of the Jews. Goldhagen observes that if it was not for “Hitler’s moral authority”, the “vast majority of Germans never would have contemplated” the genocide against the Jews. He also argues that by the time Hitler came to power, the model of Jews that was the basis of his anti-Semitism was shared by the vast majority of Germans. To rebuttal his claim I must ask that if anti-Semitism was true to not only the Germans but also the other European countries then why didn’t a massive scale anti-Semitism movement come into play elsewhere? It is true that Goldhagen believes “Had there not been an economic depression in Germany, then the Nazi’s, in all likelihood, would never have to come to power.” However, this statement simply requires a question that if the Germans were fanatically anti-Semitists then why did they have to wait an economic depression to attain power and act out their anti-Semitist beliefs?Anti-Semitism, according to Goldhagen, was symptomatic of a much deeper German dissatisfaction. It served the Germans as a “moral rationale” for releasing “destructive an...
