ABSTRACT
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in 1996, and it quickly became an international phenomenon. Goldhagen was born in 1959, in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was a child, his father, Erich Goldhagen, briefly moved the family to Germany. Erich was a Harvard historian and was carrying out research on the Holocaust. Goldhagen started looking into the possibilities of writing a book based on his dissertation. The Holocaust was a subject of intense debate in the 1990s, both within academia and more widely. Goldhagen dedicated Hitler's Willing Executioners to his father. In 1996, January 27 was decreed a special day of remembrance in Germany. Britain followed in 2001 and the United Nations in 2005. It became a crime in many European countries to deny that the Holocaust had occurred. During the 1990s there were also controversies over the way the memory of the Holocaust might be manipulated.
