German historians hit back at Holocaust theory

A United States academic who claimed that ordinary Germans willingly helped the Nazis kill six million Jews has finally faced his German critics - and admitted that his book was flawed.

Making his first appearance in Germany since the publication of his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Harvard scholar Daniel Goldhagen told a television studio audience here that he agreed "a more differentiated picture should ultimately emerge" of why the Holocaust happened in Germany.

But he defended his sociological model, which draws on documentary evidence of a police battallion's eagerness to participate in the execution of Jews, claiming it shows that others would have done the same. Pre-1945 Germans were gripped by an "eliminationist anti-semitism", he argued.

Goldhagen's book became a bestseller when it was published in German translation last month, although most German historians have been critical of his thesis.

Reinhard Rurup, a historian at the Technical University of Berlin, said Goldhagen had a "very sweeping definition of anti-semitism". He had not put forward a convincing case for the existence of a specifically German form of anti-semitism because he had not made comparisons with other countries.

Historian Gotz Aly, also from Berlin, said Goldhagen had not come up with a satisfactory explantation of the Holocaust. "No one has yet done that," he said.