Crudely speaking, Goldhagen's thesis in part is this. The Germans murdered Jews because they wanted to, many enjoyed doing it, they suffered no guilt or remorse because they believed that what they did was right. That is somewhat supported by the almost total absence of psychiatric or confessional reports in the literature that talk of guilt or remorse by the perpetrators. And one ought to remember that it is estimated that some half a million Germans were directly involved with one aspect of the final solution or another. And in so doing, we are faced with the absurd, but very real situation, where Jew hate is being written out of the history of antisemitism.
Simplistic explanations go down badly in academia and elsewhere.
And so they should. Propositions ought to be fleshed out, explored and tested. But if in the course of that procedure, core interpretations are relativised out of existence, the ethical and moral basis which is one of the implied consequences of the pursuit of historical knowledge, is lost. I can't remember the source of this comment, but I recall that in an interview with Daniel Goldhagen, Goldhagen, in what seemed to me to be an exasperated tone, commented, that when Hutu kills Tutsi or Serb kills Moslem, why is it we have no difficulty understanding the role of hatred and contempt. But when German kills Jew, we look for explanations like, peer group pressure, effects of war, theories of functionalism i.e. bureaucracies out of control, or a universalism bordering on pathological relativism, and so forth.