Much public attention has been focused on Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and his claim that the roots of the genocide of European Jews were to be found in the German national psyche. In his critique of Goldhagen's book, David North challenges its depiction of Germany in the 1930's as an internally undifferentiated society, as well as its deeply pessimistic view that the triumph of fscism was inevitable. North points instead to the social roots of anti-Semitism, traces the long and honorable record of the German workers' movement led by socialists in defending democratic the rights of the Jewish people and analyzes the reasons for the failure of the Social Democratic and Communist parties to block Hitler's rise to power.