governments no other choice but to engage in authoritarianism. Stürmer's views have been very controversial and would become one of the central issues in the notorious ("Historians' Quarrel") of the mid-1980s. One of Stürmer's leading critics, Jürgen Kocka, himself a proponent of the view of history, argued that "Geography is not destiny", suggesting that the reasons for the were political and cultural instead. Kocka wrote against Stürmer that both Switzerland and Poland were also "lands in the middle" but that neither country went in the same authoritarian direction as Germany. Subdebate over Holocaust In his 1992 book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning opposed the theory that Germans in the Nazi era were motivated by the especially virulent anti-Semitism that had characterized German culture for centuries. Analyzing the troops of the special police battalion units, who were the ones who directly killed Jews in the mass raids phase of the Holocaust (prior to the death camps), Browning concluded that the typical middle-class workers were not ingrained with anti-Semitism but became killers through peer pressure and indoctrination. The debate on the was renewed by the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen with his 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen countered that German society, politics and life until 1945 were characterized by a unique version of extreme anti-Semitism that held the murder of Jews as the highest possible national value. His critics such as Yehuda Bauer replied that Goldhagen ignored most recent research and ignored other developments both in Germany and abroad. Ruth Bettina Birn asserts that Goldhagen "allow[ed] his thesis to dictate his presentation of the evidence". Nonetheless, Goldhagen is often held to have succeeded in reviving the debate on the question of a German "collective guilt", and, in Germany, of bringing many Germans to a modern confrontation with and a lively and fruitful debate about the legacy of the Holocaust. Pan-European Criticism In recent decades, German historiography has shifted from nationalism to a pan-European viewpoint. Most recent scholars reject the old notion of separate national paths typified by models of the German "Sonderweg" or the French "singularité française". The leading critics of the thesis have been two British Marxist historians, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, who in their 1984 book The Peculiarities of German History (first published in German in 1980 as ) argued that there is no normal course of social and political change; that the experience of France and Britain in the