Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (PublicAffairs), and is the author of the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997), which has been published in fifteen languages, and named by Time one of the two best non-fiction books of 1996 and by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “the most spectacular nonfiction success of this year.” For Hitler’s Willing Executioners and his contributions to German democracy, Goldhagen won Germany’s prestigious triennial Democracy Prize in 1997. Hailed as “a monumental achievement” by the Sunday Times of London, and as “masterly…one of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark” by the New York Times, Hitler’s Willing Executioners may have generated as much international discussion as any book in our time. He is also the author of the prizewinning and international bestselling A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Vintage, 2003), published in eight languages, and has published Briefe an Goldhagen (Letters to Goldhagen) (Siedler, 1997).
Goldhagen, born in 1959, received a B.A. (summa cum laude), M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation, on which Hitler’s Willing Executioners was based, was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel A. Almond award for the best dissertation in comparative politics (1994). Until deciding to devote himself full time to writing and speaking, he was a professor in Harvard University’s Government and Social Studies departments.
Goldhagen’s essays and columns can be found in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, 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 and many other national and international publications. He has appeared on many national television and radio programs around the world, including The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled on television, including on Dateline, and in magazines, including the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books. Goldhagen and his work have been, together with the eponymous international debate, the “Goldhagen Debate,” the subject of dozens of scholarly and popular books.
Named to the Forward 50, Goldhagen lectures frequently nationally and internationally on diverse subjects about genocide and its prevention, the Holocaust, the Catholic Church and Jews, Israel, antisemitism today, and Political Islam.
Goldhagen is an affiliate of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.