Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an Jewish-American political scientist. He is best known for his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), which 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 writes that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularized.

Goldhagen's book, which began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely to rebut the claims of Christopher Browning as to perpetrator motives. The dissertation won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics.

Goldhagen has won acclaim for his ability to make harsh historical analysis interesting to a large public. He was awarded the prestigious Democracy Prize by the German Journal for German and International Politics, in that his work forced Germans to reckon with the phenomenon of pervasive and violent antisemitism, and as such it provided a corrective to any notion that an end to the Sonderweg of modern German history was at hand. The laudatio was given by Jürgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma.

Hitler's Willing Executioners met with a great deal of media interest and often scathing scholarly responses. It was commercially and popularly successful and has been widely translated, prompting two of its most truculent academic critics, Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, to publish an extensive joint critique of the book purporting to debunk its scholarship. Partly as a result of the controversy surrounding his book, Goldhagen was turned down for tenure at Harvard. ^{[citation needed]} He remains an affiliate of the Harvard Center for European Studies.

Goldhagen's argument

Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism which he called "eliminationist antisemitism". This eliminationist antisemitism developed over centuries prior to the 20th century.

Goldhagen has described his central contentions this way: "The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent antisemitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews somehow from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between antisemitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and supported." [1]

Critical reception of work

Debate about his theory has been intense, with many historians of the subject rejecting Goldhagen's scholarship. The most common general complaints are that his primary hypothesis is simplistic and either unprovable or ill-formed; that he must rely on substantial factual errors and misrepresentations of primary and secondary sources to demonstrate it; and that his methodology requires unjustifiably selective analysis.

In subsequent debates, Goldhagen characterised functionalist claims associated with the period of 1938-1942 as "ahistorical". Even among scholars who wholly reject functionalist arguments, Goldhagen finds virtually no support in excluding examination of this period to understand why antisemitism, "eliminationist" or otherwise, became actively genocidal as and when it did.

• Bauer has further observed that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis. Lack of comparative analysis is a methodological fault more generally identified by critics who draw particular attention to neglect of France, Hungary, and Romania, which were also violently antisemitic, albeit in different ways, from the period emphasised by Goldhagen's book as determinative to the Holocaust.

• There are also critics who claim that Goldhagen is not internally consistent in advancing his "eliminationist" hypothesis. Goldhagen repeatedly claims that the average German was full of murderous antisemitism endemic to German culture. If this were true, it would imply that there were no further fundamental distinctions to be made among Germans as far as their susceptibility to participate in the worst crimes of the Holocaust, which begs questions of individual morality and therefore answerability. The men who became the killers profiled in Goldhagen's book only killed because it was part of their German identity. Had they grown up in some other culture, they presumably would not have become killers. Such a notion of motive would therefore be available as an excuse. As some critics would have it, Goldhagen recognised this and therefore repeatedly moralises about evil choices ―if choices were available, any hypothesis of cultural determination would be sharply mitigated to the point of losing the explanatory power with which Goldhagen invests it. Critics taking this approach contend that Goldhagen is therefore ambivalent about his own conclusions.

• Both Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer have questioned whether, given that the Department of Political Science at Harvard lacked faculty familiar with research materials for the dissertation topic, it was appropriate for it to accept Goldhagen's dissertation proposal. They further remarked that Goldhagen's level of research ought not have been accepted by any dissertation advisor possessed of such competence.

• Hilberg has written that Goldhagen is "totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong."^[1]

• During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Goldhagen suggested NATO air strikes were an appropriate punishment for the Serbian nation, which, in his view, was infected by exterminatory psychosis of the kind he claimed was present in the German antisemitism in the Nazi era.

Recent research on Goldhagen thesis

Research in the last decade by some German historians supports Goldhagen's thesis. German scholar Wolfram Wette in The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Harvard University Press, 2006) pointed out the continuity of German antisemitism in German society from imperial era to Nazi Germany and made clear that distinction cannot be made between "good" and "bad" Germans. According to Publishers Weekly, "More restrained than Daniel Goldhagen's 'Hitler's Willing Executioners,' Wette's hard-hitting indictment also emphasizes the broad culpability of German society for the crimes of the Third Reich."

A book by German historian Götz Aly Hitlers Volksstaat (translated to English as Hitler's Beneficiaries) (2005), while it agrees with Goldhagen's attribution of support for the Nazis to broad segments of German society, offers a competing thesis in explanation of much of this support: that the Nazis in effect bought support among Germans with loot taken from Jews and the populations of countries occupied by the Wehrmacht in the course of the war. It does not explicitly refute Goldhagen's thesis, but Aly's book contains no references to Goldhagen's work, and does not list it in its bibliography.

A Moral Reckoning

Goldhagen has written a book about the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust, A Moral Reckoning. A Moral Reckoning was criticized as being riddled with errors and falsehoods and for failing to use any primary sources. In the Weekly Standard, Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D. described it as slanderous bigotry which "fails to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship. That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal."^[2] In the same review, Dalin accuses Goldhagen of engaging in a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his]...anti-Catholic agenda."

Works

• Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. ISBN 0-679-44695-8.
• A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2002). ISBN 0-375-41434-7.
• The “Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men” Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8, 1996, introduced by Michael Berenbaum (Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 2001).

Notes

References

• Bauer, Yehuda Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-300-08256-8.
• Eley, Geoff (editor) The Goldhagen Effect : History, Memory, Nazism--Facing The German past, Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2000 ISBN 0-472-06752-4.
• Feldkamp, Michael F. Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft, München : Olzog-Verlag, 2003 ISBN 3789281271
• Finkelstein, Norman & Birn, Ruth Bettina A Nation On Trial : The Goldhagen Thesis And Historical Truth, New York : Henry Holt, 1998 ISBN 0-8050-5871-0.
• Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York : Norton, 2001 ISBN 0-393-02044-4.
• Kershaw, Sir Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives Of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-340-76028-1
• Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil New York : Random House, 1998 ISBN 0-679-43151-9.
• Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (editors) Unwilling Germans? : The Goldhagen Debate, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8166-3101-8.
• Stern, Fritz "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted" pages 272-288 from Einstein's German World, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-691-05939-X.
• Wesley, Frank The Holocaust And Anti-semitism : the Goldhagen Argument And Its Effects, San Francisco ; London : International Scholars Publications, 1999, 1998 ISBN 1-57309-235-5.
• Kwiet, Konrad: “‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and ‘Ordinary Germans’. Some Comments on Goldhagen’s Ideas,” Jewish Studies Yearbook 1 (2000) (online at http://www.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_kwiet.pdf)
• LaCapra, Dominick: “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (= ch. 4) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 114-140.
• Pohl, Dieter: "Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997).

External links

• Goldhagen's defunct personal website. archived at web.archive.org
• Goldhagen's new website.

Critical analyses

• Goldhagen in Germany: Historians' Nightmare & Popular Hero. An Essay on the Reception of Hitler's Willing Executioners in Germany
• Slate article on the dispute between Goldhagen and Finkelstein
• Discussion of Goldhagen by Various Scholars
• Goldhagen advocating an occupation of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis

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