Schoenbaum has written books about other aspects of modern German history . In 1968 , Schoenbaum published a book about the Spiegel Affair scandal of 1962 , in which he sought to set the affair into the context of the history of the Federal Republic and the wider context of German history . His 1982 book '' Zabern 1913 '' concerned the political fall-out from the Saverne Affair in 1913 . Schoenbaum argued that the affair revealed different aspects of the Second '' Reich '' , and argued that the Zabern Affair was the exception that proved that the rule that the Second Reich was no more or less liberal or illiberal then other Western nations . In 1996 , Schoenbaum wrote a highly critical book review in the '' National Review '' of Daniel Goldhagen 's bestseller '' Hitler 's Willing Executioners '' where he charged Goldhagen with grossly simplifying the question of the degree and virulence of German Antisemitism , and of only selecting evidence that supported his thesis . Furthermore , Schoenbaum complained that Goldhagen did not take a comparative approach with Germany placed in isolation , thereby falsely implying that Germans and Germans alone were the only nation that saw widespread anti-semitism . Finally , Schoenbaum argued that Goldhagen failed to explain why the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1 , 1933 was relatively ineffective or why the '' Kristallnacht '' needed to be organized by the Nazis as opposed to being a spontaneous expression of German popular anti-semitism . Using an example from his family history , Schoenbaum wrote that his mother-in-law , a Polish Jew who lived in Germany between 1928 &ndash; 1947 , never considered the National Socialists and the Germans synonymous , and expressed regret that Goldhagen could not see the same
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
David Schoenbaum