In 1997, Daniel Goldhagen published his groundbreaking international
best-seller, Hitler's Willing Executioners, in an attempt to lay to rest many
Holocaust myths: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of the
Jews; that the killers were all SS men; and that those who slaughtered Jews did
so reluctantly. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, including the
testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen showed how ordinary Germans,
nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as evil and dangerous, willingly
followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. An explosive work,
exhaustively documented and researched, Hitler's Willing Executioners offered
irrefutable proof that should have forced a fundamental revision of Holocaust
thinking. Instead, it was rejected angrily by German historians with
accusations of a lack of scholarship. Shocked that such insightful research
could be so easily dismissed, Kautz offers his investigative study into the
reception of Goldhagen's work.

Starting with an overview of the book
itself, THE GERMAN HISTORIANS subjects the public and private utterances
alongside the written reviews of three prominent German historians - Hans
Mommsen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Eberhard Jackel - to a close examination,
drawing a shocking conclusion about how we record history.