ABSTRACT
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing Executioners when he was a young scholar, aged 37. It was based on his Harvard doctorate and looked at how and why ordinary people collaborate in genocidal politics. The factor that links all Goldhagen's writings is his fascination with the connection between racist hatred and mass murder. He argues against the idea that genocidal violence is the result of short-term triggers or structural factors. Goldhagen believes that eliminationist thinking is not simply a prejudice against a particular ethnic group. He argues that it has a warped moral component, which grows out of Christian beliefs about the existence of evil. In eliminationist thinking, the existence of a hated minority group somehow pollutes the moral order. The phenomenal publishing success of Hitler's Willing Executioners makes it undeniably Goldhagen's most important book. Many senior historians were dismayed by the work.
