Goldhagen's career always brings to mind the advice of the young Elie Weisel–
"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German." (Elie Weisel, at the start of his long career against hatred, writing in the journal of the American Jewish Committee, December 1962)

The most spectacular case I remember was a black engineer married to a German who has been murdered late at night by a horde some years ago.

There was a wave of violence from the right targeting Muslim, immigrants, asylum seekers in the late eighties. Close to here in Duesseldorf Jewish immigrants from Russia have been the target a couple of years ago.

A scholar from Israel told me he was warned by colleagues in Duisburg to not wear his kippah.

I won't comment concerning Daniel Goldhagen's security needs and never thought about how the state's handles VIPs, but who should know about you or anybody like you that you are Jewish, and not simply Americans?

Which reminds me that I very, very rarely notice Jewish people on the street here in Cologne, with the exception of the orthodox hurrying to the Synagogue close to me, black coat and hat and all, or the rare couples with children who are recognizably Jewish only since their men wear kippahs.

Non of my Jewish & half-Jewish friends would be recognizable as Jews. Most have been living here for several decades, most are American Jews. With some I had talked much about the Nazis, but not once anybody told me anything about experienced antisemitism or violence. But they are mainly artists and don't move in circles that are antisemitic.

The killers included ethnic Germans, who were drawn from a population that had lived outside Germany. An ethnic German Kommando, recruited in villages of the Berezovka-Mostovoye region of the western Ukraine, shot more than 30,000 Jews in that area. Moreover, men of ethnic German background were not only shooters but by 1944 they constituted more than a third of the guard force in Auschwitz. Goldhagen does not even mention them. The "executioners" were also Romanians, Croats, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in significant [724] numbers. The Romanian and Croat formations implemented policies of their own governments. The great Odessa massacre of October 1941 was Romanian, and it was Romanian Marshal Ion Antonescu who asked on 16 December 1941, "Are we waiting for a decision to be taken in Berlin?" just before 70,000 Jews were killed by, his men in the Golta prefecture. Thousands of those Jews were burned alive. As to the Croats, there are photographs of what went on in that satellite state. Baltic auxiliaries were absolutely essential to the Germans, as in the case of Latvian street and harbor police who participated heavily in the massive shooting of Jews in Riga. Of the Lithuanian police battalions that were pressed into service, the second is of special interest. In October of that year, it was ordered to go from Kaunas to Byelorussia as a component of the German 11th Reserve Police Battalion. The mission was to kill Jews. Facing the victims, a young Lithuanian declared that he could not shoot men, women, and children, whereupon the company commander, Juozas Kristaponis, invited any of his men with similar objections to move to the side. Some did, most did not. Later, this unit was involved in more killing, and in Slutsk, there were occurrences that prompted a German police officer to call the Lithuanians "pigs."

It would be difficult to ascribe to all of these men, who had not been a part of German society, the kind of German anti-Semitism that in Goldhagen's view harbored an "exterminationist potential." It would be manifestly impossible to connect any anti-Semitism with the origination of killing operations directed at non-Jewish people. Such operations, however, did take place. Approximately a fourth of Germany's own mental patients were gassed. These individuals, selected in asylums, were in no sense regarded as a threat to the German nation. Subsequently, personnel and techniques were literally transferred from the euthanasia stations in Germany to camps in Poland, so that the Jews died, albeit on a much larger scale, like those institutionalized Germans. This sequence was reversed in the case of the Gypsies and Jews when, notwithstanding the very different Nazi conceptions of the two groups, Gypsies were going to be treated like Jews. Thus thousands of Gypsies were shipped to the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos. They were shot at the same time or somewhat later than the Jews in Serbia, Latvia, and Crimea, among other places, and they were gassed in the same chambers that snuffed out the lives of Jews in Kulmhof, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

What, then, is left to be taken seriously in Goldhagen's book? The perpetrators have been studied for more than fifty years. Valuable works have been written about them in several languages. Given that visible progress, why does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigor, demand so much attentions"

I don't think his basic thesis is new. Essentially it has been around much longer. The ultimate culprit are the German Romantics, or more precisely their political writings. Remember there was no united Germany than but a loose coalition of sovereign states. Obviously they were influenced by the French revolution's nationalist ideas. Concerning the facts o the ground they lived in very different world than the English and French, with a series of endless borders and authorities.

The most interesting articles I have read on The Willing Executors are from the Canadian historian Bettina Ruth Birn. From her I learned that the publishing of his book was a PR coup that started well before the book was published. I haven't read her and Finkelstein's critique though. I found it hard enough to follow Goldhagen to the end. And to be quite honest Birn's studies would interest me more than her Goldhagen critique. I am assuming she follows Christopher Browning into the nightmare.

Ruth Bettina Birn introduced Goldhagen to the archives in Ludwigburg he used, which she knows very well from her own studies. So she knows how selectivey he uses the sources.

Goldhagen simply reads the documents in search for the evidence he needs. (a little like Joachim who is in search for the "counter truth")

Which leads us back to scholarship: why don't we here a whisper concerning his "scholarship" but so much about Finkelstein's?

Germany by now has two layers of questions in surveys on antisemitism. The first layer is the ordinary antisemitism, the second layer is associated with the "Schlussstrich"-debate. A Schlussstrich is the symbol noting the end in music notation, or the line under a calculation. Literally it would translate as end line. …

Which leads us into another difficult area. I do not think we should ever draw an end line under our past, but I have been puzzled by the debates in the field of arts surrounding end-line-scandals. I don't think we the demanded ritualization, maybe since I still have too many questions.

I just discovered this: Ruth Bettina Birn's Review of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

What line has she crossed? She seems to have German ancestors or is married to a descendant of German nobility? Amazon Germany gives us her full name: Ruth Bettina Birn von Schoeningh. Mind you there is nothing wrong with being German, as long as you follow the facts were they lead you.

Fritz Stern: The Goldhagen Controversy. One nation, one people, one theory?

The astounding reception of so polemical and pretentious a book can hardly be attributed solely to its topic or thesis. Shrill and simplistic explanations of monstrous crimes obviously command attention. But there is more at work here: the author's ceaseless boast of radical originality was endorsed on the book's jacket by two well-known scholars, both distinguished in fields other than German history — and between them praising Goldhagen's work as "phenomenal scholarship and absolute integrity . . . impeccable scholarship, a profound understanding of modern German history . . . obligatory reading." The American and German publishers touted the book with all the great promotional power at their command. Perhaps Goldhagen's manipulated, public-relations-orchestrated success tells us more about the culture of the present than the book's substance tells us about the horrors of the past.

A German journalist, Johannes Heil Sueddeutsche Zeitung.(? or is he the historian and vice president/chancellor of the Jewish University in Heidelberg? – same name) has looked closer into the the pre-publishing activities over here led by my weekly: DIE ZEIT. One of its ediors, Josef Joffe,is part of the neocon network, or German neocon.

Interestingly Konrad Kwiet cited Heil during a symposium of the United States Holocaust Research Institute which resulted in his article not being printed in the resulting publication:

The Willing Executioners/"Ordinary Men" debate. …, United States Holocaust Research Institute … (ed.),1996

Who defines scholarship and what are the exact rules?

I simply am not far from the mainstream on the importance of local non-Jewish populations with regard to the destruction of local Jewish populations in German occupied Europe, and certainly there is a lot of recent work on local populations that took the initiative to kill Jews without incitement by Germans. I don't see how the web pages to which you pointed me belie anything I have written.

Didn't mean to be OT, just thought that it is clear how security precautions are themselves quite selective. A big deal is being made currently about supposed militant death threats against Paul McCartney for wanting to play in Israel. Is there any sort of boycott against Israel the way performers refused to play South Africa back in the day?