Early Life
Goldhagen was born June 30, 1959 in Boston, Massachusetts to Erich and Norma Goldhagen. He grew up in nearby Newton. His wife Sarah (née Williams) is an architectural historian, and critic forThe New Republic magazine.
Goldhagen's father, retired Harvard professor Erich Goldhagen, is a Holocaust survivor who lived in a Romanian–Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz (present-day Ukraine). He credits his father as a "model of intellectual sobriety and probity". Goldhagen has written that his "understanding of Nazism and of the Holocaust is firmly indebted" to his father's influence. In 1977, Goldhagen entered Harvard and remained there for some twenty years, first as an undergraduate and graduate student, then as an assistant professor in the Government and Social Studies Department.
During early graduate studies, he attended a lecture by Saul Friedländer, in which he had what he describes as a "lightbulb moment": the functionalism versus intentionalism debate did not address the question, “When Hitler ordered the annihilation of the Jews, why did people execute the order?” Goldhagen wanted to investigate who were the German men and women who killed the Jews, and their reasons for killing.
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