Daniel Goldhagen

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As a graduate student, Goldhagen undertook research in the German archives. The thesis of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust proposes that, during the Holocaust, many killers were ordinary Germans, who killed for having been raised in a profoundly antisemitic culture, and thus were acculturated — "ready and willing" — to execute the Nazi government's genocidal plans.

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. 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 Prof. Mayer's 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 for more historical background), with little Wehrmacht participation. 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.

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 A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (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?" "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.

Source

• The Jewish Daily Forward, named to Forward 50, 2002 and 1996
• Journal for German and International Politics Triennial Democracy Prize, 1997, with laudatio given by Jürgen Habermas.
• National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Hitler's Willing Executioners, 1996
• Time, named Hitler's Willing Executioners one of two best non-fiction books of the year, 1996
• American Political Science Association, Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics, 1994
• Harvard University, Sumner Dissertation Prize, 1993
• Whiting Fellowship, 1990–1991
• Fulbright IIE Grant for Dissertation Research, 1988–1989
• Krupp Foundation Fellowship for Dissertation Research, 1988–1989
• Center for European Studies Summer Research Grant, 1987
• Jacob Javits Fellowship 1996–1988, 1989–1990
• Harvard College, Philo Sherman Bennett Thesis Prize, 1982
• German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) Fellowship, 1979–1980