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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American political scientist. He is most famous for his controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (ISBN 0-349-10786-6), which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about but were in favour of the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which developed in the centuries preceding the event. Goldhagen claims that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularised. Image File history File links Circle-question-red. ... Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... Year 1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Political science is the field of the social sciences concerning the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. ... This article is becoming very long. ... The Eternal Jew (German: Der ewige Jude): 1937 German poster advertising an antisemitic Nazi movie. ... The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. ...

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. Christopher R. Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian of the Holocaust. ... The American Political Science Association, founded in 1903, serves more than 15,000 members in more than 80 countries, bringing a variety of services to political scientists both inside and outside academic institutions. ...

Goldhagen has also written another book about the Catholic Church’s role in the holocaust, A Moral Reckoning, and articles about "political Islam" and its conflict with the West and Israel. A Moral Reckoning was criticised 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."^[1] In the same review, Dalin accuses Goldhagen of engaging in a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance (his)...Anti-Catholic agenda."

Goldhagen has won acclaim in some circles for his ability to make harsh historical analysis interesting to a large public. Goldhagen 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 anti-Semitism which was the result of long-standing historical tendency and as such 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. Sonderweg, (literally: sonder= special, weg= path) is a theory in historiography that considers the German-speaking lands, or the country Germany, to have followed its own, unique course through its evolution and history, separate from other European countries: therefore, a route of development which is special or an alternative. In... Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf) is a German philosopher, political scientist and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory, best known for his concept of the public sphere. ...

The book published in 1996, met with a great deal of media interest and often scathing scholarly responses. It was commercially and popularly successful by most standards 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. He remains an affiliate of the Harvard Center for European Studies. 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Norman G. Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is a professor of political science and controversial American author. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...

Goldhagen's argument

Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of anti-semitism which he called "eliminationist anti-semitism". This eliminationist anti-semitism 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 anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semitism 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 most 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. Functionalism versus intentionalism is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ...

• 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 Hilberg and 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.

• During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Goldhagen went one step further than the U.S. president, Bill Clinton. In contrast to the propaganda claiming the NATO campaign is directed against the "regime" of Slobodan Milošević, i.e., in no way against the people of Yugoslavia, Goldhagen was sure the air strikes were an accurate punishment for the Serbian nation, which, in his view, was infected by the "exterminatory" psychosis of the kind he claimed was present in the German antisemitism in the Nazi era. To support the military aggression against Yugoslavia, Goldhagen didn´t hesitate to spread the myth, according to which the Serbs exterminated some 100,000 Kosovo Albanians prior to the NATO campaign.

The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Hebrew redirects here. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Kosovo war. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... William Jefferson Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946) was the 42nd President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001. ... NATO 2002 Summit in Prague The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation[1] (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, the Atlantic Alliance or the Western Alliance, is an international organisation for collective security established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington, DC, on 4 April 1949. ... Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević   (IPA Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Милошевић) (Požarevac, 20 August 1941 – The Hague, 11 March 2006) was President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia. ... Albanians in Kosovo in 1991. ...

Work

• 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).

References

• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).

Professor Sir Ian Kershaw (born April 29, 1943 in Oldham, Lancashire, England) is a British historian, noted for his biographies of Adolf Hitler. ... Yehuda Bauer Yehuda Bauer (born 1926) is an historian and scholar of the Holocaust. ... Ron Rosenbaum is American writer best known for 1998 book Explaining Hitler, which was a examination of how different scholars of varying views and time frames have attempted to explain Adolf Hitler and the reasons for his evil. ... Fritz Richard Stern (1926- ) is an American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. ...

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