Anti Semitism, Fascism And The Holocaust: A Critical Review Of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

In his critique of Daniel Goldhagen's claim that the roots of genocide of European Jews were to be found in the German national psyche, David North challenges the depiction of Germany in the 1930s as an internally undifferentiated society, and the deeply pessimistic view that the triumph of fascism was inevitable. North points instead to the social roots of anti-Semitism, traces the long and honorable record of the German workers' movement led by socialists in defending the democratic rights of the Jewish people, and analyzes the reasons for the failure of the Social Democratic and Communist parties to block Hitler's rise to power.