Goldhagen's book was meant to be an anthropological "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz.Clendinnean, Inga Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 p. 117. The violent antisemitic "cultural axiom" held by Martin Luther in the 16th century and expressed in his 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, according to Goldhagen, were the same as those held by Adolf Hitler in the 20th century.Goldhagen, Daniel Hitler's Willing Executioners, New York: Alfred Knopf 1996 p. 284. He argued that such was the ferocity of German "eliminationist antisemitism" that the situation in Germany had been "pregnant with murder" regarding the Jews since the mid-19th century and that all Hitler did was merely to unleash the deeply rooted murderous "eliminationist antisemitism" that had been brooding within the German people since at least Luther's time, if not earlier.Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler, New York: HarperCollins, 1998 p. 339.
