Discourses of genocide in Germany and Australia: a linked history.

For decades before the Nazis began the legal persecution of Jews, anti-Semites had been active in Germany. They created a climate in which genocide — or so it seems with hindsight — became possible. In 1996 an American scholar, Daniel J Goldhagen, went further. He argued that in Germany ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ had created a culture that produced ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’. The ‘common sense’ of German society during the Nazi period was grounded in years of discussion about getting rid of the Jews.1