"culture of cruelty" in Battalion 101 was linked by Goldhagen to the culture of "eliminationist antisemitism". Goldhagen noted that the officers in charge of Battalion 101 led by Major Wilhem Trapp allowed the men to excuse themselves from killing if they found it too unpleasant, and Goldhagen used the fact that the vast majority of the men of Battalion 101 did not excuse themselves to argue that this proved the murderous antisemitic nature of German culture. Goldhagen argued for the specific antisemitic nature of Battalion 101's violence by noting that in 1942 the battalion was ordered to shoot 200 Gentile Poles, and instead shot 78 Polish Catholics while shooting 180 Polish Jews later that same day. Goldhagen used this incident to argue the men of Battalion 101 were reluctant to kill Polish Catholics, but only too willing to murder Polish Jews. Goldhagen wrote the men of Battalion 101 felt "joy and triumph" after torturing and murdering Jews. Goldhagen used antisemitic statements by Cardinal Adolf Bertram as typical of what he called the Roman Catholic Church's support for genocide. Goldhagen was later to expand on what he sees as the Catholic Church's institutional antisemitism and support for the Nazi regime in Hitler's Willing Executionerss sequel, 2002's A Moral Reckoning. Goldhagen argued that it "strains credibility" to imagine that "ordinary Danes or Italians" could have acted as he claimed ordinary Germans did during the Holocaust to prove that "eliminationist" anti-Semitism was uniquely German. Reception What some commentators termed "The Goldhagen Affair" began in late 1996, when Goldhagen visited Berlin to participate in the debate on television and in lecture halls before capacity crowds, on a book tour.Elon, Amos. (January 26, 1997). The antagonist as liberator The New York Times. Accessed January 4, 2008. Although Hitler's Willing Executioners was sharply criticized in Germany at its debut, the intense public interest in the book secured the author much celebrity among Germans, so much so that Harold Marcuse characterizes him as "the darling of the German public". Many media commentators observed that, while the book launched a passionate national discussion about the Holocaust, this discussion was carried out civilly and respectfully. Goldhagen's book tour became, in the opinion of some in the German media, "a triumphant march", as "the open-mindedness that Goldhagen encountered in the land of the perpetrators" was "gratifying" and something of which Germans ought to be proud, even in the context of