Fun and Joyful Reading for History Class

Right now I'm reading Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Generally, I try not to criticize history books unless they're so dense that I can't get through them. But I've just finished the introduction, and I'm already feeling...less than charitable.

- Goldhagen says his "revolutionary" thesis is that Germans were motivated to kill Jews by anti-Semitism. I'm wondering, was this really a revolutionary idea at the time? Because right now, it's practically the Holocaust stereotype.

- As soon as Goldhagen said, "I'm not going to bother calling them 'Nazis' or 'SS men,' they're just 'Germans,'" my respect for his book dropped. A lot.

- Goldhagen spends a lot of time criticizing Christopher Browning's psychological explanations of how the Holocaust was carried out by "ordinary Germans." As a person who once considered majoring in psychology, and still has a lot of respect for psychology as a field, I'm surprised by Goldhagen's blatant misunderstanding of how psychological explanations work. Moreover, unless I'm misreading him, he contradicts himself a lot. "Psychological explanations are bogus! But in order to understand the Holocaust, we have to understand the cognitive and values framework of the Germans!" ...Huh? Isn't that psychology?

- I just don't buy his idea that people can kill solely based on ideological motivations and no outside pressure is needed.

- Goldhagen says that we need to be able to understand the mindset of the perpetrators and what they were experiencing, but at the same time he asserts that the anti-Semitism/"German character" of the perpetrators makes them uniquely qualified to be genocidal killers. Also, I have the suspicion that Goldhagen's mention of "blood, brains, and bone flying everywhere" was inserted in order to make the reader feel horror towards the "Germans." Sensationalism at its finest.

- After having researched and written a paper about the Nazi treatment of the Poles, I'm a little offended by the way Goldhagen focuses solely on the murder of the Jews. So the murder of the Gypsies, Slavs, mentally ill etc. doesn't count? How can he use anti-Semitism to explain all of the other deaths that the Nazis were responsible for?