Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was born in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., in June 1959, to Norma and Erich Goldhagen. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. His wife is Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architectural historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.

Goldhagen is the son of retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, a Holocaust survivor who lived in a Romanian—Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz, Ukraine. Goldhagen credits his father for the intellectual perspective of studying the subject and dispassionately reporting the events, the perpetrators, and their motives. In 1977, he entered Harvard College and remained there for some twenty years, 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 “light bulb 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 were the German men and women who killed the Jews, and their reasons for killing.

As a graduate student, Goldhagen did 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 publication was the New Republic magazine book review “False Witness” (1989) of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988), by Princeton University professor Arno J. Mayer. Goldhagen said that “Mayer’s enormous intellectual error” is in ascribing the cause of the Holocaust to anti-Communism, rather than to anti-Semitism, and criticized Prof. Mayer’s saying that most massacres of Jews in the USSR, during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa (1941) in the summer of 1941, were committed by local peoples, with little Wehrmacht participation, and accused him of traducing 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. In 1989, Lucy Dawidowicz reviewed Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988) 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, Prof. Goldhagen quit his Harvard academic job to focus on writing. His work synthesizes four historical elements, kept distinct for analysis; as presented in the books 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 (judgement), and (iv) prescription (what is to be done?). In the event, his Holocaust studies progress raised 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.

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about but also supported the Holocaust, because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen asserted that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.

Goldhagen's book stoked controversy and debate, in Germany and the United States. Some historians have 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", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its "mostly scathing" reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "totally wrong about everything" and "worthless".

The book, which began as a Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely as an answer to Christopher Browning's publication on German history. It won 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. The Journal asserted that the debate fostered by Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany.

A Moral Reckoning

In 2002 Goldhagen published A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, his account of the role of the Catholic Church before, during and after World War II. A Moral Reckoning was the subject of considerable controversy involving allegations of anti-Catholic bias. In the book, Goldhagen acknowledges that individual bishops and priests hid and saved a large number of Jews, yet he asserts that others promoted or accepted anti-Semitism before and during the war, and some played a direct role in the persecution of Jews in Europe during the time of the Nazis.

The book has been criticized as being a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] anti-Catholic agenda", and as being poor scholarship. Because he believes the book's recommendations would mean the end of the Church as it has been for two millennia, William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has labeled Goldhagen an "anti-Catholic bigot".

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.

Worse Than War

Intellectually, Daniel Goldhagen’s investigations and analyses of Nazism and the Holocaust genocide progressed to investigation and analysis of “eliminationist assaults”, and in 2009 published Worse Than War, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009), detailing genocide as the contemporary cause of more deaths than war. The Kirkus Reviews reported that Worse than War is “A significant achievement . . . intensely researched, and wholly original”.

In the book, he reports having considered writing it for some twenty-six years, intermittently working on it for perhaps a decade, by interviewing genocide perpetrators and victims in Rwanda, Guatemala, Cambodia, Kenya, and the USSR, and politicians, government officers, and private humanitarian organization officers, in order to understand the local and global mentality ... social, political, and cultural ... that foments and facilitates killing en masse, and what mentality can cease such human tragedy. In the introduction, Goldhagen said that “we can focus on this scourge; understand its causes, its nature and complexity, and its scope and systematic quality; and, building upon that understanding, craft institutions and politics that will save countless lives and also lift the lethal threat under which so many people live”.

In the event, the book was cinematically adapted, and the documentary film of Worse than War was first presented in the U.S. in Aspen, Colorado, on 6 August 2009 ... the sixty-fourth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, to conclude the Second World War (1939—45). In Germany, the documentary was first broadcast by the ARD television network 18 October 2009, and was to be nationally broadcast by the PBS network in the U.S. in 2010.

Daniel Goldhagen’s history books have been criticized by Raul Hilberg, Ian Kershaw, Fritz Stern, Eberhard Jäckel, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and David Schoenbaum. Goldhagen has publicly debated some of his critics; during the 1996 book promotion and public-speaking tour of Germany, he and German historian Hans Mommsen angrily debated on national German television. Moreover, Prof. Norman Finkelstein and historian Ruth Bettina Birn claimed his books are inaccurate, because they contain many factual errors. The American William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called Daniel Goldhagen an “anti-Catholic bigot”.

In 1996, The New York Times Magazine reported that Daniel Goldhagen’s book promotion and public-speaking tour of Germany was “more reminiscent of a Michael Jackson concert than of the publication of a 700-page book of non-fiction . . . So many people came to Goldhagen’s personal appearances ... and so many cheered him, and booed his detractors . . . Those who could not get into the Frankfurt Opera house for Goldhagen’s debate with his critics nearly demolished the foyer”.

At Die Zeit newspaper, editor Volker Ullrich said that German public interest in Goldhagen was that: “Here, finally, is someone who expresses what has long been a taboo: that the distinction, between ‘criminal Nazis’ and ‘normal Germans’ is false; that the readiness to murder millions came from the middle of German society . . . When someone utters this simple truth, it acts on no few Germans as a kind of liberation”. The defenders of Goldhagen and the book include the Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor Israel Gutman, a leading defender of Goldhagen; and the American historian of Germany Gordon A. Craig who defended Goldhagen when Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published in spring of 1996.

The U.S. edition of Time magazine reported that Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust was one of the two most important books of 1996. Benjamin B. Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor of the Ensatzgruppen Case of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, said that “Goldhagen has probed the depths of man’s depravity to explain how a civilized country like Germany and its ordinary citizens became accomplices and perpetrators . . . It is a bitter revelation of the origins of incredible cruelty that, hopefully, may illuminate the path to a more humane future.” In The New York Review of Books (18 April 1996), historian Gordon A. Craig said that A Moral Reckoning is “an original, indeed brilliant, contribution to the . . . literature on the Holocaust.”; and The New York Times reported “His book is one of those rare, new works that merit the appellation ‘landmark’ ”.

As a public intellectual Daniel Goldhagen is an historical-authority public speaker about past and contemporary events, including Political Islam. His works have been translated into fifteen languages, and his writings are published internationally in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Forward, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Süddeutscher Zeitung, Die Welt, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, El Mundo, Ha’aretz, Gazeta Wyborcza, The Australian. He has appeared on eadio and television world-wide, on The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, and Charlie Rose, and Newsnight (UK). Profiles of him have appeared on Dateline, and on Focus TV (Germany), and in The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Der Spiegel, Stern, Profil.