Dawidowicz’s major interests were the Holocaust and Jewish history. A passionate
Zionist, Dawidowicz believed that had the
Mandate for Palestine been implemented as intended, establishing the Jewish State of Israel before the Holocaust, "the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome". Dawidowicz took an
Intentionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust, contending that, beginning with the
end of World War I on November 11, 1918, Hitler conceived his master plans, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal, and that he had "openly espoused his program of annihilation" when he wrote
Mein Kampf in 1924. Dawidowicz criticized what she considered to be revisionist historians as incorrect and/or sympathetic to the Nazis, as well as German historians who sought to minimize German complicity in the
Nazi era attempt to annihilate Europe's Jews. For Dawidowicz, Nazism was the essence of
total evil, and she wrote that the Nazi movement was the "... daemon let loose in society, Cain in corporate embodiment." Regarding foreign policy questions, she sharply disagreed with
A.J.P. Taylor over his book
The Origins of the Second World War. In even stronger terms, she condemned the American
neo-Nazi historian
David Hoggan for his book
War Forced on Germany as well as
David Irving's revisionist ''
Hitler's War'', which suggested Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. In her view, historians who took a functionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust question were guilty of ignoring their responsibility to historical truth.
Disputes with Arno Mayer Dawidowicz was a leading critic of the American historian
Arno J. Mayer's account of the Holocaust in his 1988 book
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? arguing that Mayer played up anti-communism at the expense of antisemitism as an explanation for the Holocaust. Dawidowicz titled her review of
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? in the October 1989 edition of
Commentary as "Perversions of the Holocaust". Dawidowicz argued against Mayer that the historical evidence undoubtedly shows that Hitler never believed that the war was lost as early as December 1941 and that Mayer's theory is anachronistic. Dawidowicz commented that the
Einsatzgruppen had been massacring Jews since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and that Mayer's claim that the Jews were only surrogate victims due to Germany's inability to defeat the Soviet Union was, in her opinion, rubbish. Dawidowicz attacked Mayer for saying that more Jews died at Auschwitz from disease than from mass gassing and for supporting
Holocaust denial by writing that Holocaust survivor testimony was highly unreliable as a historical source. Dawidowicz questioned Mayer's motives in listing the works of
Arthur Butz and
Paul Rassinier in his bibliography. Dawidowicz ended her review of
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? by accusing Mayer of excusing German racism, rationalizing the Nazi dictatorship, of portraying Soviet Jews as better off than they were under the Soviet dictatorship, and by presenting the Holocaust as due to reasonable political goals instead of, as she believed, being an ideological decision fueled by fanatical antisemitism.
Other She criticized the British historian
Norman Davies, the author of ''
God's Playground: A History of Poland'', for "his virtuosity in erasing Polish antisemitism from the history books he writes" and for peppering some of his writing "with anti-Semitic tidbits."
Ronald Hilton, professor emeritus at Stanford University replied: "Davies is not anti-Semitic, his reputation for fairness is recognized internationally." He also added: "People are frightened to speak up about this." Davies "absolutely" denied being antisemitic. During the same period, Dawidowicz denounced the work of the philosopher
Ernst Nolte, whom she accused of seeking to justify the Holocaust. In her
The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (1975), she writes that antisemitism has had a long history within
Christianity. In her opinion, the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from
Martin Luther to
Adolf Hitler was "easy to draw". She wrote that both Hitler and Luther were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews and that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern antisemitism are no coincidence because they derived from a common history of
Judenhass. Raul Hilberg's 1961
The Destruction of the European Jews has a detailed breakdown that reveals a total estimated death toll of 5.1 million Jews.In her book
The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (1975), Dawidowicz researched birth and death records in many cities of prewar Europe to come up with a death toll of 5,933,900 Jews
Criticism of Dawidowicz Raul Hilberg criticized Dawidowicz for her work
The War Against the Jews, stating that it builds "largely on secondary sources and conveying nothing whatever that could be called new," and then going on to say in regards to Dawidowicz's portrayal of Jewish resistance and resisters that she included "soup ladlers and all others in the ghettos who staved off starvation and despair." Hilberg suggests that "nostalgic Jewish readers [would find here] vaguely consoling words, [which] could be easily clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper." He then lists over 20 key authors on the subjects that Dawidowicz covers, that she did not use as references in her own work. Hilberg ends on the subject of Dawidowicz stating "To be sure, Dawidowicz has not been taken all that seriously by historians". ==Books by Dawidowicz==