In Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel J. Goldhagen averred:

As scores of historians familiar with late nineteenth-century German politics have argued, Goldhagen mistook political positions on the margin for positions at the center and willfully described as the mainstream a racial anti-Semitism ready to expel, if not kill, the Jews of Germany. Demonstrably, this position was not the mainstream, though the matter is more complicated than a simple recounting of the dismal electoral fortunes of political anti-Semitism would suggest. As Massimo Zumbini has recently argued, the career of racial anti-Semitism in the Second Empire occurred in two stages. In the founding years of organized anti-Semitism, 1879–1881, the new anti-Semites modernized and radicalized anti-Semitism, rendering it political, racial, and increasingly tied to pseudoscientific thinking. Yet as their project proved a failure, the anti-Semites drifted toward the political periphery, where their anti-Semitism became radical, and their paranoia evident. Eliminationist anti-Semitism, to take Goldhagen's term, cannot be said to be representative of public opinion in Imperial Germany, but it can be found at the periphery – in the work of anti-Semites like Theodor Fritsch, whose Handbook of the Jewish Question became a bible of the extreme right and openly advocated deportation of East European Jews and revoking emancipation legislation.