Holocaust Historiography: The Return of Antisemitism and Ethnic Stereotypes as Major Themes

Ofer addresses the return of antisemitism as a major factor in explanations of the Final Solution, and explores the significance and meaning of the reinstatement of antisemitism at the centre of historical work on the subject. She refers mostly to three books published in the mid-1990s. The one that caused the greatest uproar was Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the title of which makes clear its thesis, as does that of John Weiss's Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. The third book discussed is the first volume of Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Ofer demonstrates the role of antisemitism in explaining the Holocaust at different stages of post-war research, the historiographical trends in histories of the Holocaust and the transition that these three publications suggest. The main part of the article addresses these books which, despite their common message, are very different in their methodologies and the perceptions of their authors, and are also associated with different historiographic schools.