Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: In His Own Words

"Against much of the literature on the Holocaust, my book shifts the focus of the investigation of the Holocaust from where it has been--namely, on abstract structures like the S.S., the Nazi Party, and the terror apparatus--to the human beings who actually perpetrated the crimes. A very large number of ordinary Germans were involved--a minimum figure of 100,000--and until this point, you have probably read close to nothing about the actual people who carried out the killings, manned the camps, and guarded the ghettos. I have shifted the investigation to them, the perpetrators, in an effort to explain their actions, uncover their motivations, and explicate how such a thing could have happened in an otherwise civilized country such as Germany.

I am very pleased that the publication of my book has produced widespread, international discussion and that so many people seem to feel compelled to come to grips with its contents. Whatever exact conclusions people arrive at after reading my book--and some continuing disagreements are inevitable--that the issues it raises are being discussed so vigorously can be seen as being only a good thing."

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University and an Associate of Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

Hitler's Willing Executioners is based upon his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics.

Books by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Hitler's Willing Executioners

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen