Career
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, 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.
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