Henchmen did it. That's the common understanding of who perpetrated the 12-year Holocaust, during which six million European Jews were killed. "Hitler's henchmen"-- small bands of chiseled thugs in brown shirts, or elite wearers of the SS insignia. We emerge from a Leni Reifenstal film half convinced that it was a case of mass hypnotism, the mesmerization of a nation by endless rows of soldiers, columns of light, and the artful use of the millennium's most potent logo. It was madness, and surely that degree of craziness has to be vigorously imposed on a people, right? In his new book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues powerfully against this conclusion -- and indicts the entire German nation in the process.

How could it have happened, is, of course, the crucial question. We tend to think, Goldhagen says, that Germany was a sane, modern nation, and that great coercion and a manufactured climate of fear must have been necessary to perpetrate evil on this mass scale. But Goldhagen argues convincingly that Germans could and did protest what they considered to be violent excesses on the part of their rulers: for example, the Nazi's euthanasia project, which was suspended after organized protests. The mentally ill and physically deformed targeted by that program were the Germans' own people; the Jews decidedly were not. The increasing degradation of the Jews, Goldhagen argues, provoked no sizable dissent because, as Hitler cunningly realized, anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in the vast majority of Germans to a degree not found in other modern nations. This enculturated anti-Semitism was, he says, "the mainspring of the Holocaust." The Nazis applied no significant force in order to bring about the Holocaust because "knowing that ordinary Germans shared their convictions, (they) had no need to do so.... The annihilation of the Jews made sense to them."

Goldhagen focuses on the rarely studied lives of thousands of ordinary people who rounded up, tortured, starved and finally killed their former neighbors. And he notes that the standard focus on the few factory-like extermination camps like Auschwitz, while understandable, draws us away from the fact that most of the killing of the Holocaust was a matter of one person clubbing or shooting another.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners" is a densely written work that reads like the doctoral dissertation it originally was (Goldhagen is an assistant professor at Harvard). But, more importantly, it is a deeply resonant book that will forever change the way we view one of the century's central events. This book will be talked -- and argued -- about for years to come, much like Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." And this new twist on the "banality of evil" concept is what's most chilling. It's not just that Germany's vicious leaders were average men under the surface that proves so disturbing; it's that so many average human beings became such uncomplaining murderers.

--Edward Neuert