In April 1996, before the book had appeared in German translation, "Der Spiegel" ran a cover story on "Hitler's Willing Executioners" under the title "Ein Volk von Dämonen?". The phrase "ein Volk von Dämonen" (translated "a people/nation of demons") was often used by the Nazis to describe Jews, and the title of the cover story was meant by Rudolf Augstein and the editors of "Der Spiegel" to suggest a moral equivalence between the Nazi view of Jews and Goldhagen's view of Germans. The most widely read German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" published an eight-part series of opinions of the book before its German publication in August 1996. Goldhagen arrived in Germany in September 1996 for a book tour, and appeared on several television talk shows, as well as a number of sold-out panel discussions. The book had a "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were vocal in condemning it as ahistorical. "[W]hy does this book, so lacking in factual content and logical rigour, demand so much attention?" Raul Hilberg wondered. The pre-eminent Jewish-American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia. Hilberg summarised the debates: "by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map." Steve Crawshaw writes that although the German readership was keenly aware of certain "professional failings" in Goldhagen's book,  Crawshaw further asserts that the book's critics were partly historians "weary" of Goldhagen's "methodological flaws", but also those who were reluctant to concede that ordinary Germans bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany. In Germany, the leftist general public's insistence on further penitence prevailed, according to most observers. American historian Gordon A. Craig and "Der Spiegel" have argued that whatever the book's flaws, it should be welcomed because it will reinvigorate the debate on the Holocaust and stimulate new scholarship. In May 1996, Goldhagen was interviewed about "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum. When Rosebaum asked Goldhagen about scholarly literature that contends that Austrian anti-Semitism was far more virulent and violent than German anti-Semitism, and if the fact that Hitler was an Austrian had any effect on his thesis, Goldhagen replied: Rosenbaum inquired about Goldhagen's "pregnant with murder" metaphor, which suggested that the "Shoah" was something inevitable that would have happened without Hitler and Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation "No Hitler, no Holocaust".