With his first book, the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, then a professor of political science at Harvard University – forced the world to re-think some of its most deeply-held beliefs about the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners inspired an unprecedented worldwide discussion and debate about the role ordinary Germans played in the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.
A decade later – and more than half a century after the end of World War II – Goldhagen was convinced that the overall phenomenon of genocide was as poorly understood as the Holocaust had once been. How and why do genocides start? Why do the perpetrators kill? Why has intervention rarely occurred in a timely manner? These and other thought-provoking questions are explored in his book and the film Worse Than War.
A co-production of wnet.org and JTN Productions and funded by The Pershing Square Foundation, The Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, and The Goren Family Foundation, was hailed as “magisterial” by the New York Times, “convincing” and “wholly original” by Kirkus, “pathbreaking” by Die Presse, and “masterful” by the Daily Telegraph. It offers viewers profound insights into its dimensions, patterns and causes, and its tragic role in politics and human affairs.
[text excerpted from pbs.org with edits]
