Confident of the superiority of his own judgment, Goldhagen contended that few puzzles remain about the Holocaust's causes. Although explaining how the Holocaust happened remains a long story, he believed that there was no need to dwell on most of the complexities that decades of causal analysis of the Holocaust has produced. As Goldhagen saw it, the Holocaust had one cause that outweighed the others. Direct and straightforward, it involved the motivation without which the Holocaust was unthinkable: namely, the Germans' antisemitic beliefs about Jews. Remove that factor and the Holocaust that actually happened would not have taken place. On the other hand, to realize the Final Solution, the antisemitism of Goldhagen's ordinary Germans did need the catalyst that Hitler and the Nazi Party provided. Nevertheless, by themselves Hitler and the Nazi Party alone could not have made the Holocaust happen as it did. The actual Holocaust required willing, ordinary Germans to bring it about.

Fanatically antisemitic as they were, Goldhagen suggests, Hitler and the Nazi Party had a reciprocal relationship with ordinary Germans when it came to the "Jewish question." In Hitler and the Nazi Party, ordinary Germans got the organization, determination, and legitimation to act on their latent, if not active, will to destroy European Jewry. In ordinary Germans, Hitler and the Nazi Party found a people who were well prepared to carry out the plan for a Third Reich that would be judenrein ("cleansed of Jews"). Thus, when Goldhagen reckoned with the actuality of the Holocaust, his book became much more than an explanation of how he thought the Holocaust took place. With his view that the Germans' antisemitic motivation was the most crucial condition--necessary though not alone sufficient--for the Holocaust, Goldhagen indicted "ordinary Germans," a category as broad as it was undiscriminating, and rendered a sweeping verdict of collective German guilt.