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carried out an in-depth study of one German town, Northeim, found that, from 1928 on, Nazi propaganda actually played down the anti-Semitic aspects of the party’s ideology, for the very good reason that it was unpopular with the electorate. Why did Heinrich Himmler need to keep the “Final Solution” secret if ordinary Germans were as murderous as Goldhagen insists? Why did Himmler complain at one point that “every German has a Jew they wish to protect”? 45
    Goldhagen cites as compelling evidence for popular German anti-Semitism the recurrence of “ritual murder” accusations against Jews and quotes this sentence from Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany : “In Germany and the Austrian Empire twelve such trials took place between 1867 and 1914.” But this was not the complete sentence; Goldhagen leaves out the remainder, which reads: “eleven of which collapsed although the trials were by jury.” 46 Goldhagen referred to Thomas Mann who, he said, though a long-standing opponent of the Nazis, “could nevertheless find some common ground with [them]” when he wrote: “…it is no great misfortune…that…the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended.” Fritz Stern pointed out that Mann was married to Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, and in the very next sentence to that quoted above, which Goldhagen omitted, Mann expressed his distaste at his own thoughts, characterizing them as “secret, disquieting, intense.” 47
    No less damaging to Goldhagen’s scholarship was the fact that he had mistranslated some German passages—and in telling fashion. In one instance, he refers to a poem written by a member of an Einsatzkommando and writes that this individual “managed to work into his verse, for the enjoyment of all, a reference to the ‘skull-cracking blows’…that they had undoubtedly delivered with relish to their Jewish victims.” Although the verse was indeed extremely anti-Semitic, the phrase in quotes actually referred to “the cracking of nuts.” 48 Evans concluded—and he was just one among many—that Goldhagen’s book was disfigured by a “startling failure of scholarship,” that it was written in the “pretentious language of dogmatism,” and betrayed a “disturbing arrogance that is of a piece with the exaggerated claims for novelty.” 49
    Hitler’s Willing Executioners conforms exactly to what Novick is saying. Far from interest in the Holocaust declining in our (or Goldhagen’s) historical consciousness, its enormity—its singularity—has now grown in salience to the point where it was caused, not by Hitler alone, or his elite entourage, or the SS, but by all Germans, including the ordinary ones, and this was so because, throughout history, Germany has always been anti-Semitic, far more so than any other country. This comes close to making the Holocaust inevitable in Germany.
    It also alerts us to a phenomenon we shall have occasion to examine and criticize and where the Germans (among others) have been at fault: the writing of meta -history, by which I mean the attempt to understand the past via simple, all-embracing theories, the “dangerous simplifiers” as Jacob Burckhardt called them.
    The “Goldhagen affair” shows how history writing can be distorted. Given the distortions and omissions he employed, one is entitled to wonder whether he could not see past or around the Holocaust to begin with, and this author at least is prompted to suspect instead that he started with his conclusions and then found the “facts” to fit his theory. Goldhagen’s account is not so crude as that of the British tabloids, but it does have the same obsessive quality. As Fritz Stern saw it, “the book also reinforces and reignites earlier prejudices: latent anti-German sentiment among Americans, especially Jews; and a sense among Germans that Jews have a special stake in commemorating the Holocaust, thereby keeping Germany a