ABSTRACT
The American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was born in Boston in 1959. In 1996, at the age of just, he published Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a book based on a doctoral dissertation he had written at Harvard University. Consciously aimed at both academics and the wider reading public, it immediately divided opinion, with many historians publishing fierce criticism of Goldhagen's sweeping argument. A year later Goldhagen gave up his academic position at Harvard to become a full-time writer. His most recent work looks at genocides worldwide. In Hitler's Willing Executioners Goldhagen says the irrational hatred had grown over the centuries. Hitler's Willing Executioners enjoyed enormous popular sales in Europe and America, and it was particularly successful in Germany. The extremity of Goldhagen's argument attracted readers. The scale of the row that Goldhagen generated, both in academic circles and among the general public, revealed the ongoing sensitivity surrounding these issues.
