Historian to explore Hitler and the Holocaust
11/3/2009
As the anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, is remembered Nov. 9, many at CMU will experience a new perspective on Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the Holocaust.
Gerhard Weinberg, a noted and award-winning World War II historian who personally experienced the Holocaust, will inaugurate the Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series on Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide.
Weinberg, the 2009 recipient of the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement, will speak at 7 p.m. in Plachta Auditorium, Warriner Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
"It is an enormous honor for the CMU community to host Professor Gerhard Weinberg," said Eric Johnson, CMU professor of history. "The history of World War II and, more specifically, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, are subjects that thousands write books on every single year. There could be no person in the world more qualified to speak on this subject."
Weinberg has published, edited and co-authored many books and articles dealing with the origins and course of World War II, the Holocaust and German records. One of the books he edited and published was a book by Adolf Hitler written in 1928, which he found while microfilming German documents.
The William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history has been a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1974. Born in Hanover, Germany, in 1928, Weinberg and his family were exiled to England in 1938 for being Jewish and moved to the U.S. in 1940. As a research analyst, he captured and analyzed German World War II documents for the Air Force contract known as the War Documentation Project with Columbia University from 1951 through 1954.
Harold Abel's family established the Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series in the Study of Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide this year. Abel served as president of CMU from 1975 to 1985 and passed away in 2002. This series will bring distinguished scholars to discuss the impact of worldwide genocide and historical events like World War II, the Holocaust, and mass murders in Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur.
For more information on the event or the speaker series, visit http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/abel.