Daniel Goldhagen author page

Daniel Goldhagen biography

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former academic in political science.

He earned a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University and later served on the faculty in Harvard’s Government and Social Studies departments.

In 1996 he published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and won Germany’s Democracy Prize in 1997.

His 2002 book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair examines the actions and responsibilities of Church institutions during the Holocaust.

Goldhagen’s subsequent works include Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009), and The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (2013).

He has questioned conventional Holocaust scholarship by emphasising “ordinary” perpetrators and advancing the concept of an eliminationist antisemitism particular to German culture.

Goldhagen resigned his academic position at Harvard to focus on writing full time.