> ... I must confess I never figured out what Finkelstein's argument
> was ...
Here are two salient points:
[1] "Finkelstein ... provide[s] a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust..." (Ian Kershaw, author of *Hitler*); and
[2] "'The most refined shedders of blood,' Dostoyevsky long ago recognized, 'have been almost always the most highly civilized gentlemen,' to whom the official criminal misfits 'could not have held a candle.' Indeed, fixating as it does on the pathologically criminal, *Hitler's Willing Executioners* fails to even grasp, let alone resolve, the central mystery of the Nazi holocaust: how, under particular historical circumstances, ordinary men and women, as well as the 'civilized gentlemen' who lead nations, can commit history's greatest crimes." (Finkelstein in *A Nation on Trial*, p. 100.)
C. G. Estabrook