for the Holocaust) was the horrific climax of the "Thirty Years' Crisis" that had been raging in Europe since 1914. The book considers the Holocaust as primarily an expression of anti-communism: Anti-Semitism did not play a decisive or even significant role in the growth of the Nazi movement and electorate. The appeals of Nazism were many and complex. People rallied to a syncretic creed of ultra-nationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-Marxism, anti-bolshevism, and anti-Semitism, as well as to a party program calling for the revision of Versailles, the repeal of reparations, the curb of industrial capitalism, and the establishment of a völkisch welfare state. Mayer stated that one purpose of his in writing Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? was to put an end to a "cult of remembrance" that, in his opinion, had "become overly sectarian". In his opinion, Hitler's war was first and foremost against the Soviets, not the Jews. According to Mayer, the original German plan was to defeat the Soviet Union, and then to deport all the Soviet Jews to a reservation behind the Urals. In regard to the functionalist-intentionalist divide that once pervaded Holocaust historiography, Mayer's work can be considered as intermediate between the two schools. Mayer argues that there was no masterplan for genocide and that the Holocaust cannot be explained solely in regard to Hitler's world view. At the same time, Mayer agrees with intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber (with whom Mayer otherwise has little in common) in considering Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi crusade to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism" as major developments in the genesis of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Critical responses to Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? had hostile reviews. The British historian Richard J. Evans, in summing up their reviews of the book, noted that some of their more "printable" responses included: "a mockery of memory and history" and "bizarre and perverse." Two prominent critics of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? were Daniel Goldhagen and Lucy Dawidowicz. Both questioned Mayer's account of the murder of Jews during the early phases of World War II. They argued that the organized and systemic role of Nazis was much greater than Mayer stated. Both accused Mayer of attempting to rationalize the Holocaust and compared him to the right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. The American historian Peter Baldwin considered that Goldhagen had missed Mayer's overall point about