First of all, I have to repeat my thesis: I do not believe myself, nor have I wanted to give the impression, that Luther and Lutheranism are the sole source of our present-day troubles. Economic, political, geographical, and many other causes have to be taken into account if we want to explain the destructive present-day mentality of the Germans, which is above all other causes to blame for the misery in which the modern world finds itself twice within a third of a century.
I did not mean for one minute either to deny that there are things that are good and laudable in Luther—that he pronounced and taught some very fine things which, if they had become the ethical standard of modern Europe, might have brought us peace and prosperity instead of war and misery. All I maintain is that Luther and his doctrines are one of the causes why Europe could follow such a fatal road—that Luther, the man and his teaching, had many disastrous sides, as well as good ones. This negative aspect of Lutheranism is not only generally ignored, but is just the very aspect which as influenced German ethics and standards.
Luther, who is generally shown as a demigod, was nothing of the kind, and his influence was anything but godly. An evil and dangerous legend has been spun round the man and his work. “It is most mysterious how complete the victory of the Luther-legend has been.”
Luther himself led a most immoral life, and destroyed the moral standards of his time. The result of Luther's teachings and his life during his own time was “general moral and religious chaos”. With his denial of reason he produced a complete “decay of intellectual life”. Neitzsche, as so often, describes Luther best when he calls him “a barbarian of the intellect”.
-- Raul Hilberg, on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's earlier book, Hitler's Willing Executioners
Raul Hilberg was probably the pre-eminent Holocaust historian in the world, author of the three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews. He was an atheist of Polish-Romanian Jewish extraction, who fled the Nazis at the age of 13. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia, and spent his teaching career at the University of Vermont.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Goldhagen's scholarship, from someone who has forgotten more about the Holocaust than Goldhagen knows.