A NATION ON TRIAL: THE GOLDHAGEN THESIS AND HISTORICAL TRUTH

		No recent work of history has generated as much interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Purporting to solve the mystery of the Holocaust, Goldhagen maintains that ordinary Germans were driven by fanatical anti-semitism to murder Jews. An immediate national best-seller, the book went on to create an international sensation. Now, in A Nation on Trial , two leading critics challenge Goldhagen's findings. With devastating cumulative effect, Norman G. Finkelstein meticulously documents Goldhagen's misrepresentations of secondary literature and the internal contradictions of his argument. In a complimentary essay, Ruth Bettina Birn juxtaposes Goldhagen's text against the German archives he consulted. The foremost international authority on these archives, Birn argues that Goldhagen systematically misrepresented their contents. First published in the New Left Review and the Cambridge Historical Journal , these two landmark essays have already provoked intense debate both here and abroad. The authoritative statement on the Goldhagen phenomenon, A Nation on Trial is also a cautionary tale on the corruption of scholarship by ideological zealotry.

ENDORSEMENTS

"Among the dozens of reviewers of Hitler's Willing Executioners, Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein stand out for the seriousness and thoroughness with which they have undertaken their task. Even if I do not embrace every aspect of Finkelstein's conclusions concerning the politicization of the Holocaust historiography, I am grateful for these writers' courageous, conscientious and labour-intensive efforts."


"No serious student of history can afford to ignore these well-reasoned and withering reflections on the perils of pseudo-scholarship."


"All readers of Goldhagen's controversial book should take note of these much-needed studies, which, in line with serious historians, convincingly and authoritatively dismantle its arguments."


"Finkelstein and Birn provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my view, indispensable."


"Highly recommended to the many readers of Goldhagen's controversial book, especially those who were mesmerized by its hypotheses. Fortunately, in an open society all scholarship is subject to public scrutiny, and the advance of historical knowledge cannot do without rigorous criticism of the kind of provided in this important and courageous collection."

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