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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) U.S. Public Records Index Vol 1 & 2 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010. is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen received attention as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
Goldhagen's father was interned in Chernivtsi (which later became part of Ukraine in 1991). Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence. In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard College, and remained there for some twenty years - first as an undergraduate and graduate student, then as an assistant professor in the Government and Social Studies Department.
During graduate studies, he attended a lecture by Saul Friedländer, in which he had what he describes as a "lightbulb moment": The functionalism versus intentionalism debate did not address the question, "When Adolf Hitler ordered the annihilation of the Jews, why did people execute the order?". Goldhagen wanted to investigate who the German men and women who killed the Jews were, and their reasons for killing.
Goldhagen's first notable work was a book review titled "False Witness" published by The New Republic magazine on April 17, 1989. It was one in a series of hostile reviews of the 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? by an American-Jewish professor of Princeton University born in Luxembourg, Arno J. Mayer.Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York: Norton, 2001 p. 74. . Goldhagen wrote that "Mayer's enormous intellectual error" was in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism, rather than to antisemitism, and criticized Mayer for saying that most massacres of Jews in the USSR, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, were committed by local peoples (see the Lviv pogroms and Babyn Yar for more historical background), with little Wehrmacht participation.Goldhagen, Daniel. "False Witness," The New Republic, April 17, 1989 pp. 39-43. Goldhagen accused him also of misrepresenting the facts about the Wannsee Conference (1942), which was meant for plotting the genocide of European Jews, not (as Mayer said) merely the resettlement of the Jews. Goldhagen further accused Mayer of obscurantism, of suppressing historical fact, and of being an apologist for Nazi Germany, like Ernst Nolte, for attempting to "de-demonize" National Socialism. Also in 1989, historian Lucy Dawidowicz reviewed Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? in Commentary magazine, and praised Goldhagen's "False Witness" review, identifying him as a rising Holocaust historian who formally rebutted "Mayer's falsification" of history.Dawidowicz, Lucy, "Perversions of the Holocaust", pp. 56–60, from Commentary, vol. 88, no. 4, October 1989, p. 58.
In 2003, Goldhagen resigned from Harvard to focus on writing. His work synthesizes four historical elements, kept distinct for analysis; as presented in the books (2002) and Worse Than War (2009): (i) description (what happens), (ii) explanation (why it happens), (iii) moral evaluation (judgment), and (iv) prescription (what is to be done?). According to Goldhagen, his Holocaust studies address questions about the political, social, and cultural particulars behind other genocides: "Who did the killing?" and "What, despite temporal and cultural differences, do mass killings have in common?", which yielded Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, about the global nature of genocide, and averting such crimes against humanity.
The book, which began as a doctoral dissertation, was written largely as a response to Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). Much of Goldhagen's book was concerned with the same Order Police battalion, but with very different conclusions. On April 8, 1996, Browning and Goldhagen discussed their differences during a symposium hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The 'Willing Executioners'/'Ordinary Men' Debate". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, selections from the symposium of April 8, 1996. Browning's book recognizes the impact of the endless campaign of anti-semitic propaganda, but it takes other factors into account, such as: fear of breaking ranks, desire for career advancement, concern not to be viewed as weak, the effects of state bureaucracy, battlefield conditions, and peer-bonding. Goldhagen does not acknowledge the impact of these influences.
Goldhagen's book went on to win the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics and the Democracy Prize of the Journal for German and International Politics. Time magazine reported that it was one of the two most important books of 1996.
The book sparked controversy in the press and academic circles, in America and internationally. Several historians characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history. The book was a "publishing phenomenon",
Historians' criticisms of the book centered on three shortcomings: It did not provide convincing evidence to support its basic premise, that the vast majority of "ordinary" Germans willingly took part in the Holocaust (and that they had done so because of their uniquely German, "eliminationist anti-Semitic mind-set"); it focused on the genocidal behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and without further explanation or rationale, extrapolated the genocidal behavior of that single police unit to all of German society; Goldhagen cherry-picked his primary and secondary sources, and entirely ignored evidence that did not support his thesis.
Due to its alleged "generalizing hypothesis" about Germans, it has been characterized as anti-German.Bill Niven, William John Niven. Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich. 2004, p. 116Robert R. Shandley. Unwilling Germans?: the Goldhagen debate. 1998, p. 17Paul Gottfried. Multiculturalism and the politics of guilt. 2004, p. 94 The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer claims that "Goldhagen stumbles badly" and "Goldhagen's thesis does not work",Bauer 2000, p. 100. and charges "... that the anti-German bias of his book, almost a racist bias (however much he may deny it), leads nowhere".Bauer 2000, p. 108. The American historian Fritz Stern denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.Stern, Fritz (1999). "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted", in: Einstein's German World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 272–288. 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".
David Dalin and Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard criticized the book, calling it a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance an anti-Catholic agenda", and poor scholarship. "The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen" The Weekly Standard, October 23, 2002 Goldhagen noted in an interview with The Atlantic, as well as in the book's introduction, that the title and the first page of the book reveal its purpose as a moral, rather than historical analysis, asserting that he has invited European Church representatives to present their own historical account in discussing morality and reparation.Gritz, Jennie Rothenberg. (January 31, 2003) The Guilt of the Church. The Atlantic. Retrieved January 4, 2008.
The book was cinematically adapted, and the documentary film of Worse Than War was first presented in the U.S. in Aspen, Colorado, on August 6, 2009 – the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. In Germany, the documentary was first broadcast by the ARD television network on October 18, 2009, and was to be nationally broadcast by PBS in 2010.
Adam Jones, who praised this book for its fluid style and commendable passion, concludes however, that the book is undermined by a casual approach to basic research, and by the author's tendency to overreach and overstate his case.Adam Jones' book reviews, Journal of Genocide Research (2010), 12:3–4, pp. 271–278 The British historian David Elstein accused Goldhagen of manipulating his sources to make a false accusation of genocide against the British during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s in Kenya. Elstein wrote in his view that the chapter on Kenya left Goldhagen open "...to the charge that he is the kind of scholar who is either unaware of the facts or prefers to exclude those which do not fit his thesis".
David Rieff questions Goldhagen's conclusion that, in order to prevent "eliminationism", the United Nations should be remade into an interventionist entity focusing on "a devoted international push for democratizing more countries".
Steve Crawshaw (2026). 9780826463203, Continuum International Publishing Group. . ISBN 9780826463203 achieving fame in both the United States and Germany despite being criticized by some historians,Shatz, Adam. (April 8, 1998) Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back Slate. Retrieved January 4, 2008.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation London : Arnold 2000, pp. 254–254-256.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation London: Arnold 2000, p. 255. who called it ahistorical."Ordinary People?" National Review, vol. 48 no. # 12, July 1, 1996, pp. 54–56.
A Moral Reckoning
In 2002, Goldhagen published , his account of the role of the Catholic Church before, during and after World War II. In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual Catholic bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews, but also asserts that others promoted or accepted antisemitism before and during the war, and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.
Worse Than War
In Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009), Goldhagen described Nazism and the Holocaust as "eliminationist assaults". He worked on the book intermittently for a decade, interviewing atrocity perpetrators and victims in Rwandan genocide, Bosnian genocide, Guatemala, Cambodia, Kenya, and the USSR, and politicians, government officers, and private humanitarian organization officers. Goldhagen states that his aim is to help "craft institutions and politics that will save countless lives and also lift the lethal threat under which so many people live". He concludes that eliminationist assaults are preventable because "the world's non-mass-murdering countries are wealthy and powerful, having prodigious military capabilities (and they can band together)", whereas the perpetrator countries "are overwhelmingly poor and weak". Worse than War, p. 658
Personal life
Goldhagen has been a vegetarian since the age of 10. Since 1999, Goldhagen has been married to Sarah Williams Goldhagen.
Selected works
Further reading
External links
Categories: Harvard College Alumni, Harvard University Faculty, Jewish American Historians, Scholars Of Antisemitism, American Historians Of The Holocaust, Historians Of Fascism, Historians Of Nazism, Historians Of The Catholic Church, Critics Of The Catholic Church, American Male Non-fiction Writers, American People Of Romanian-jewish Descent, American Zionists, Writers From Boston, 21st-century American Historians, Historians From Massachusetts, Reserve Police Battalion 101, 1959 Births, Living People
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