Erich Goldhagen

On October 23, 2024, Erich Goldhagen, 94, died peacefully in his home in Short Hills, New Jersey that he shared with his beloved and loving wife of 67 years, Norma Goldhagen.

Erich, born in 1930, survived the Holocaust in Chernivtsi, Ukraine (then Romania), and, as a scholar, was one of the Holocaust’s most penetrating interpreters. After being liberated by the Soviets in 1944, he and his parents fled west, living for a year in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. As a teenager, he just walked in and attended the Nuremberg Trials. Sponsored by family friends, his family emigrated to Canada in 1948, where he went to college and at McGill University earned a master’s degree. He then migrated to the United States to enroll in a PhD program in political science at Harvard, specializing in Soviet Studies.

Erich, an old-world intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge, was a dazzling thinker and speaker and had extraordinary command of English, even though he began learning it only as a teenager after the war, in good measure by measure reading Shakespeare, whom, in conversation, he would often quote from memory. Although not a professional linguist, he was a near super-polyglot, speaking nine languages, in many of which he was virtuosic. Erich, raised in the Orthodox tradition, was wedded to his Jewishness and steeped in its culture, even though he was secular in belief. As a person, he was marked his entire life by the suffering and the loss of most of his extended family that he endured during the Holocaust. As an intellectual, he set out, clear-eyed and dispassionately, to understand and explain the Holocaust’s commission.

Erich taught one of the first courses on the Holocaust at an American university, and started in the early 1970s a quarter century run at Harvard University, at its Russian Research Center and Divinity School, teaching his legendary undergraduate General Education course Explaining the Holocaust and the Phenomenon of Genocide. His son, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, also a former professor at Harvard, is the author of the landmark book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust that changed the way much of the world understands the Holocaust. Daniel always emphasized his intellectual debt to Erich, to whom he dedicated the book. Erich’s story can be seen in Daniel’s PBS documentary Worse Than War.

In addition to his wife Norma, and his son Daniel, he is survived by his children, Benjamin Goldhagen, Ethel Bogursky, and Mayer Goldhagen, and by eight grandchildren, to whom he was a devoted Grandpa.