In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “american political scientist most famous for his controversial book”. Today it says “american author”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-02. In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “american political scientist most famous for his controversial book”. Today it says “american author”.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2005 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since.Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now.Red text: written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot.1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2005
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959 ) is an American political scientist most famous for his controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners , which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about but were actively in favour of the Holocaust because of a supposedly unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which developed in the centuries preceeding the event. Goldhagen claims that this special mentality cannot be fully understood by non-Germans and is unique to Germany, where it grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularised. Goldhagen's book, which began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely to rebut the claims of Christopher Browning as to Germans motives. The dissertation won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics. The book, published in 1996 , met with a great deal of media interest and often scathing scholarly responses. It was commercially and popularly successful by most standards, although it was banned for a period in Germany, and has been widely translated, leading to additional bitter complaints from some scholars (among them the objects of Goldhagen's harshest criticisms) that Goldhagen's work was marketable at the expense of academic quality if not integrity. Relatively more charitable but still negative critics have charged that Goldhagen is derivative where he is right and wrong where he attempts original analysis. Some of the most prominent contemporary scholars of the Holocaust have questioned Harvard's dissertation supervision. Perhaps the most radical criticism of Goldhagen is that his understanding of German antisemitism is largely informed by an implicit desire to apologise for Zionism . Conversely, Goldhagen has won acclaim in some circles, particularly in Germany and the United States, for his ability to make harsh historical analysis accessible to a large public.1
This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 17924175.
The opening as it stood in 2010 11 passages from the previous snapshot no longer appear
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University .Goldhagen reached international awareness as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust , Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002).He is also the author of 2009's Worse Than War , which examines the phenomenon of genocide .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 369266013.
The opening as it stood in 2015
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University . Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust : Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002).He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide , and The Devil That Never Dies, in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent anti-Semitism .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 667371899.
The opening as it stood in 2020
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University . Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust : Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide , and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 957757110.
The opening as it stood on October 6, 2023
Harvard University Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University . Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust : Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide , and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 1165643259.
The opening as it stood in 2025
American author and academic (born 1959) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University . Goldhagen reached attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust : Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 1293156529. This is our newest snapshot; the live article may have moved again since.
Today
In 2005 Wikipedia's first sentence called it “american political scientist most famous for his controversial book”. Today it says “american author”. Read the current article and compare.
2005
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Oct '23
2025
antisemitism
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genocide
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Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.
What Wikipedia says this is
Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined between 2005 and 2025.
Then
american political scientist most famous for his controversial book
Now
american author
Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.
