No recent work of history has generated as much interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Purporting to solve the mystery of the Holocaust, Goldhagen maintains that ordinary Germans were driven by fanatical anti-Semitism to murder the Jews. An immediate national best-seller, the book went on to create an international sensation.

Now, in A Nation on Trial, two leading critics challenge Goldhagen's findings. With devastating cumulative effect, Norman G. Finkelstein meticulously documents Goldhagen's misrepresentations of secondary literature and the internal contradictions of his argument. In a complementary essay, Ruth Bettina Birn juxtaposes Goldhagen's text against the German archives he consulted. The foremost international authority on these archives, Birn argues that Goldhagen systematically misrepresented their contents.

The authoritative statement on the Goldhagen phenomenon, A Nation on Trial is also a cautionary tale on the corruption of scholarship by ideological zealotry.