The defining confrontation of 1990s Holocaust historiography pitted Christopher Browning's situational-functionalist reading against Daniel Goldhagen's claim of a uniquely German 'eliminationist antisemitism.' Browning showed the perpetrators were mostly middle-aged, working-class Hamburg policemen, not committed Nazis, and that group dynamics — not ideology — drove participation. Goldhagen countered that no amount of situational pressure could explain the brutality without a culturally specific German hatred of Jews.
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