Edited sentence: Employing a crude version of Kantian epistemology, Goldhagen argues repeatedly that anti-Semitism was an integral, virtually a priori, component of the cognitive apparatus of the Germans: "the antisemitic creed," he writes, "was essentially unchallenged in Germany" (page 33).Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity" (page 9).Rather than ponder the implications of such awkward contradictions, let us move quickly to Goldhagen's conclusion: "that antisemitism moved many thousands of 'ordinary' Germans--and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned--to slaughter Jews.So as not to distract attention from the flow of Goldhagen's astonishing insights, I will not dwell on the fact that Hitler himself was an Austrian, or that his racial theories were plagiarized from the writings of a nineteenth century French count, Gobineau, or that his political hero, Mussolini, was an Italian, or that his chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, hailed from a Baltic province of czarist Russia, or that Hitler's closest comrade-in-arms, Rudolf Hess, was born in Egypt