Daniel Goldhagen

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.

As such, to prove his thesis Goldhagen focused on the behavior of ordinary Germans who killed Jews, especially the behavior of the men of Order Police (Orpo) Reserve Battalion 101 in occupied Poland in 1942 to argue ordinary Germans possessed by "eliminationist anti-Semitism" chose to willingly murder Jews in cruel and sadistic ways.

Scholars such as Yehuda Bauer, Otto Kulka and Israel Gutman among others had asserted before Goldhagen, the primacy of ideology, radical anti-Semitism, and the corollary of an inimitability exclusive to Germany.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University.

In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard, 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 early 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 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.

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.

Several historians characterized its reception as an extension of the Historikerstreit, the German historiographical debate of the 1980s that sought to explain Nazi history.

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's first notable work was a book review titled "False Witness" published by The New Republic magazine on April 17, 1989.

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.

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.

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.

Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002).

Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) posits that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German identity that had developed in the preceding centuries.

Goldhagen argued that this form of antisemitism was widespread in Germany, that it was unique to Germany, and that because of it, ordinary Germans willingly killed Jews.

Goldhagen asserted that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes with a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.

Goldhagen's book was meant to be a "thick description" in the manner of Clifford Geertz.

On April 8, 1996, Browning and Goldhagen discussed their differences during a symposium hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Browning's book recognizes the impact of the unending campaign of antisemitic propaganda, but it takes other factors into account, such as fear of breaking ranks, desire for career advancement, a concern not to be viewed as weak, the effect of state bureaucracy, battlefield conditions and peer-bonding.

Goldhagen does not acknowledge the influence of these variables.

Time magazine reported that it was one of the two most important books of 1996, and The New York Times called it "one of those rare, new works that merit the appellation 'landmark.

The book sparked controversy in the press and academic circles.

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.

In 2003, Goldhagen resigned from Harvard to focus on writing.

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.

Daniel Goldhagen was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Erich and Norma Goldhagen.

He grew up in nearby Newton.

His wife Sarah (née Williams) is an architectural historian, and critic for The New Republic magazine.

Daniel Goldhagen's father is Erich Goldhagen, a retired Harvard professor.

Erich is a Holocaust survivor who, with his family, was interned in a Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz (present-day Ukraine).

Daniel credits his father for being a "model of intellectual sobriety and probity".

Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence.