How Ordinary Israelis Became Mass Murderers
In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book that proposed to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Its central point was that the Nazi genocide was chiefly made possible by the existence of a deep form of “demonological antisemitism” that had seeped into German society; Hitler and the Nazi regime weren’t so much agitating against Jews as they were simply giving ordinary Germans the green light to act on their already virulent genocidal attitudes. Without this form of “eliminationist antisemitism,” which according to Goldhagen was essentially a part of the fabric of German society long before the Nazis came to power, the Holocaust would not have been possible.