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In the controversial 1996 bestseller "Hitler's Willing Executioners," Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Germans gladly participated in the torture and mass murder of Jews during World War II.

He attributes this phenomenon to a specifically German anti-Semitism, unique from all others — even that of the Poles.

Too simplistic, say his critics. But Goldhagen brushes them off. All except one. Christopher Browning.

A history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and last year's senior visiting scholar at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Browning studied the same time period and the same German battalions as Goldhagen. But he came up with vastly different conclusions.

Browning writes of them in his 1992 publication "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland."

Browning will speak on "Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? Explaining Holocaust Perpetrators and the Goldhagen Controversy" Monday, March 3 at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. The inaugural lecture of the Grete Berger Sternberg Memorial Lecture Fund is sponsored by the Holocaust Center of Northern California and the synagogue.

He will also speak Tuesday, March 4 at Stanford University on "Hitler and the Decisions for the Final Solution." The eighth annual Elsie B. Lipset Jewish Community Endowment Fund lecture is presented by the Stanford University program in Jewish studies. Both lectures are free.

Browning contends that those who killed were mostly ordinary people caught up in a bureaucratic process — and not, as Goldhagen says, people who killed out of a uniquely German anti-Semitism.

The author of "The Path to Genocide" and "Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution" developed his theory while working at the German Central Agency for Nazi War Crimes in 1987. Browning uncovered detailed testimony and indictment records of a police battalion from Hamburg. Goldhagen studied these same records.

Among the testimonials from Reserve Police Battalion 101 was the story of a commander who, before instructing his men to shoot, dismissed any of those who "didn't feel up to it," Browning said. About 12 of the 500 reserve officers dropped their guns.

Browning said the specific offer to opt out of killing "was probably unique." However, that same order was understood by all German officers, and no evidence surfaced that any were punished for refusing to shoot.

"Officers who chose not to kill were considered weak. However, years after the war, not one defense attorney has been able to document a case where officers suffered for not shooting," Browning said. "Only if they tried to persuade others not to kill were they disciplined."

Browning describes Battalion 101 as the "dregs of police power — men in their late 30s and 40s still conscripted and [who] had obligatory service in the police." Nevertheless, the unit massacred 38,000 Jews and put 45,000 on the trains to Treblinka.

Once the standard alibi of "shoot or be shot" was removed, Browning, and later Goldhagen, wanted to know "why these men became professional killers."

Browning contends there were several reasons that Germans willingly murdered Jews:

He cites war, a socialized deference to authority and a need to conform, to avoid breaking from other men or being perceived as weak.

Plus, "people get used to shooting," Browning said. "And over time the battalion broke into three groups — the evaders, the killers and those who did what they were told," who were the majority of officers.

Browning called the officers "ordinary men" in an extraordinary situation, while Goldhagen called them "ordinary Germans."

"Goldhagen turns a universal phenomenon, or one with universal characteristics, into a German phenomenon. He sees the officers as motivated by an anti-Semitism that is a product of German culture," Browning said.

Goldhagen's theory "is easier to swallow. You don't have to look in the mirror and say, `Would I do that?' He assures you that Americans don't.

"Goldhagen distances us from the perpetrators. He gives you one single reason for the Holocaust — German anti-Semitism. It's distancing and easy to grasp. It's quite uncomplex and quite digestible."

Steven Zipperstein, director of the Jewish Studies Program at Stanford, agrees.

"I don't blame Goldhagen for thinking in simple terms. I think the story he tells seems, on the surface, immediately true to many Jews, and ironically, to many Germans," Zipperstein said.

"Simple bald statements move people much more readily and vigorously than nuanced ones."

However, "Christopher Browning's work by no means excuses the Germans," Zipperstein added. "But his portrait of German responses during the Holocaust is the most nuanced and intelligent that we have."

So how do two scholars — Browning and Goldhagen — study the same documents and come up with such vastly differing theories?

"We both looked at 30 volumes of testimony," Browning said. "What you cut and snip, include and ignore, can affect a story significantly."