When it was published nearly two years ago by Associate Professor of Government Daniel J. Goldhagen '81, Hitler's Willing Executioners inspired a heated exchange of fire in academia and beyond.

The final salvo of that battle has yet to be launched.

Goldhagen's book made international headlines in 1996 with its thesis that the "Germans' anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust."

The book also said that the Holocaust was not the work of isolated or sadistic elements of German society.

Due to be published in April by Henry Holt & Co., A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and National truth is the culmination of the latest round of heated intellectual debate over Goldhagen's book. It critiques his thesis as being oversimplified and of unfairly characterizing the German people.

A Nation on Trial evolved from two articles published in British journals earlier this year. The first was written by Ruth Bettina Birn, the chief historian of the Canadian Justice Department's War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section. The second was the work of Norman G. Finkelstein, a professor of general studies at New York University and adjunct associate professor of political science at Hunter College.

Birn and Finkelstein could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Birn's article "Revising the Holocaust," published last March in the Cambridge Historical Journal, alleges that Goldhagen's book "only caters to those who want simplistic answers to difficult questions, [and] to those who seek the security of prejudices."

After the article appeared, a Londonbased law firm acting on Goldhagen's behalf sent a letter to the journal's publisher demanding a retraction and a halt to any further publication of Birn's allegations.

According to The New York Times, Holt president Michael Naumann believes this could possibly lead to a lawsuit against Birn.

Martin A. Soames, a litigator for the law firm, said that Goldhagen "was defamed in that piece, which claimed to be a review of his book but was a personal attack on him."

Soames said a suit has not been filed.

Raul Hilberg, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, and author of The Destruction of the European Jews, noted that in debates such as these, "one does not as a rule hire lawyers."

Goldhagen emphatically denied that he is planning any lawsuit, and has instead written several pieces attacking the quality of both Birn's and Finkelstein's scholarship.

Though he has declined to speak on the record about the upcoming book, Goldhagen's public response to Birn's article was in a written form.

In the fall 1997 edition of the journal German Politics and Society, Goldhagen accused Birn of resorting to "wholesale invention" in a 47-page rebuttal of her article, bringing into question her scholarly methods.