Goldhagen wrongly implied that scholars such as Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer, and Christopher Browning "denied or obscured" the importance of German antisemitism. What they and other leading Holocaust scholars have done, however, is to avoid the oversimplifications that make and break Goldhagen's book. Antisemitism, for example, was a major current in pre-Nazi times. Nevertheless, while Goldhagen's work filled in empirical details about that ugly picture, pre-Nazi antisemitism in Germany was not primarily the essentially lethal variety that Goldhagen required to make his claims hold. Conveniently dismissing any evidence to the contrary as insufficient or inadequate, failing to do the comparative work that should have modified his extreme views about German antisemitism by placing it in a larger European context, Goldhagen relied too much on an assumed German uniformity to buttress his case.

At times Goldhagen emphasized that his "ordinary Germans" must not be caricatured as a slavish, order-obeying people and that their freedom of choice should be recognized as crucial if they are to be held responsible for their Holocaust-related actions. But then, to cite one of Christopher Browning's succinct rebuttals, Goldhagen ignored his own principles by describing ordinary Germans as basically "undifferentiated, unchanging, possessed by a single, monolithic cognitive outlook," especially as far as Jews were concerned before and during the Holocaust.