Two prominent critics of "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?" were Daniel Goldhagen and Lucy Dawidowicz. Both questioned Mayer's account of the murder of Jews during the early phases of World War II and arguing the organized and systemic role played by the Nazis was much greater than Mayer stated. Both accused Mayer of attempting to rationalize the Holocaust and compared him to the right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. The American historian Peter Baldwin considered that Goldhagen had missed Mayer's overall point about the association between the war against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, while Guttenplan described their "distortion" of Mayer's opinions as "disgraceful", noting also that