Gerhard Weinberg

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Gerhard Weinberg
Weinberg in January 2003
Born (1928-01-01) 1 January 1928 (age 96)
Hanover, German Reich
(now Germany)
Academic work
Notable studentsDoris Bergen

Norman J.W. Goda

Third Reich, diplomatic history and military history
Notable worksA World at Arms: A Global History of World War II and other books

Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg (born 1 January 1928) is a German-born American

military historian noted for his studies in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. Weinberg is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974. Previously he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan (1959–1974) and the University of Kentucky
(1957–1959).

Youth and education

Weinberg was born in

New York State College for Teachers at Albany. He received his MA (1949) and PhD (1951) in history from the University of Chicago.[1] Weinberg recounted some of his childhood memories and experiences in a two-hour long oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[2]

Early career

Weinberg has studied the foreign policy of

Zweites Buch (Second Book), an unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf
, among captured German files. His find led to his publication in 1961 of Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 , later published in English as Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (2003).

In 1953–1954, Weinberg was involved in a scholarly debate with

German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.[4] In his 1980 monograph The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II 1937–1939, Weinberg noted that about the question of the war's origins that "my view is somewhat different" from Hillgruber's.[5] In his 1981 book World in the Balance, Weinberg stated that "Hillgruber's interpretation is not, however, followed here".[6] In his 1994 book A World At Arms, Weinberg called Hillgruber's thesis presented in his book Zweierlei Untergang – Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Ruin – The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry) "... a preposterous reversal of the realities".[7] Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Red Army in 1945 as Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany.[7]

Another scholarly debate involving Weinberg occurred in 1962–1963 when Weinberg wrote a review of

American Historical Review. The book claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to an Anglo–Polish conspiracy against Germany. In his review, Weinberg suggested that Hoggan had probably engaged in forging documents (the charge was later confirmed). Weinberg noted that Hoggan's method comprised taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and simply ignoring evidence of German intentions for aggression such as the Hossbach Memorandum.[8] Moreover, Weinberg noted that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology designed to support his thesis such as placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) to the Reich in October 1938 instead of in August 1939, thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure.[8]

Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives.[9] As an example, Weinberg noted during a meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Adam von Trott zu Solz in June 1939, Hoggan had Chamberlain saying that the British guarantee of Polish independence given on March 31, 1939 "did not please him personally at all. He thereby gave the impression that Halifax was solely responsible for British policy".[10] As Weinberg noted, what Chamberlain actually said was:

Do you [(vonTrott zu Solz)] believe that I undertook these commitments gladly? Hitler forced me into them![10]

Subsequently, both Hoggan and his mentor

American Historical Review
protesting Weinberg's review and attempting to rebut his arguments. Weinberg in turn published letters rebutting Barnes's and Hoggan's claims.

Major works

Weinberg's early work was the two-volume history of Hitler's diplomatic preparations for war: The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (1970 and 1980; republished 1994). In this work, Weinberg portrayed a Hitler committed to his ideology, no matter how inane or stupid it might seem to others, and therefore as a leader determined to use foreign policy to effect a specific set of goals. Weinberg thus countered others, such as British historian

A.J.P. Taylor, who had argued in The Origins of the Second World War (1962) that Hitler had acted like a traditional statesman in taking advantage of the weaknesses of foreign rivals. The first volume of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 1971.[11]

Weinberg's attention then turned to the Second World War. He published dozens of articles on the war and volumes of collected essays such as World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (1981). All of that work was preparation for the release in 1994 of his 1000-page one-volume history of the war, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, for which he won a second

Hideki Tōjō, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, General Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin D. Roosevelt
.

Weinberg has continued to be a critic of those who claim that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler. In a review of Stalin's War by Ernst Topitsch [de], Weinberg called those who promote the preventive war thesis as believers in "fairy tales".[12] In 1996, Weinberg was somewhat less harsh in his review of Topitsch's book but was still very critical in his assessment of the Czech historian R.C. Raack's Stalin's Drive to the West. (The latter book did not accept the preventive war thesis, but Raack still argued that Soviet foreign policy was far more aggressive than many other historians would accept and that Western leaders were too pliant in their dealings with Stalin.)[13]

In the

Action T4 program, which began in January 1939.[15] Finally, Weinberg praised the thesis put forward by the American historian Richard Breitman that planning for the Shoah began during the winter of 1940–1941 but argued that Breitman missed a crucial point: because the T4 program had generated public protests, the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews in the Soviet Union were intended as a sort of "trial run" to gauge reaction of the German people to genocide.[16]

A major theme of Weinberg's work about the origins of the Second World War has been a revised picture of

Lord Halifax, than Kershaw gave him credit for in his book.[20] Weinberg's picture of Chamberlain has led to criticism; the American historian Williamson Murray condemned Weinberg for his "... attempts to present the British Prime Minister in as favorable a light as possible".[21]

Hitler diaries controversy

In 1983, when the German illustrated weekly magazine

Der Stern reported its purchase of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. weekly magazine Newsweek asked Weinberg to examine them hurriedly in a bank vault in Zürich, Switzerland. Together with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jäckel, Weinberg was one of the three experts on Hitler asked to examine the alleged diaries. Having examined the documents for two hours, Weinberg reported in Newsweek that "on balance I am inclined to consider the material authentic."[22][23] However, he expressed reservations by adding that more work would be needed to "make the verdict [of authenticity] airtight",[22] and said he "would feel more comfortable if a German expert on the Third Reich who has already made his reputation had been brought in to look at the material".[22] Weinberg also noted that the purported journals would likely add less to our understanding of the Second World War than many might have thought. When further work was undertaken by the German Federal Archives
, the "diaries" were deemed forgeries.

Professional accomplishments

Weinberg was elected president of the

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum among many other such honors.[1]

In June 2009, Weinberg was selected to receive the $100,000

Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, a lifetime achievement award given by the Society for Military History.[26]

Works

Books

Articles

See also

  • List of books by or about Adolf Hitler

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b "Gerhard L. Weinberg: 2009 Pritzker Literature Award Winner". www.pritzkermilitary.org. Pritzker Military Museum & Library.
  2. ^ Oral History Interview with Gerhard L. Weinberg, conducted by Astrid M. Eckert (Emory University) on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 2012. Available at http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn74729
  3. ISBN 978-0-521-88018-3
    , pp. 343–357.
  4. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu: die deutsch-rumänischen Beziehungen, 1938–1944 by Andreas Hillgruber, pages 80–82 in The Journal of Modern History, Volume 28, Issue # 1, March 1956 page 81
  5. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. 'The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II 1937–1939, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (UCP), 1980 page 657.
  6. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. World in the Balance. Hanover: Brandeis University Press 1981, page 82.
  7. ^ a b Weinberg, Gerhard. A World At Arms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994, 2005, page 1124.
  8. ^ a b Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Der Erzwungene Krieg, from The American Historical Review, Volume 68, No. 1, October 1962, page 104
  9. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Der Erzwungene Krieg, from The American Historical Review, Volume 68, Number 1, October 1962, pages 104–105
  10. ^ a b Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Der Erzwungene Krieg, from The American Historical Review, Volume 68, No. 1, October 1962, page 105
  11. ^ a b "George Louis Beer Prize Recipients". American Historical Association. Retrieved December 24, 2017.
  12. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War by Ernst Topitsch, pages 800–801 from The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue # 3, June 1989 page 800.
  13. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. Review of Stalin's Drive to the West: The Origins of the Cold War by R.C. Raack, pages 278–279 from Central European History, Volume 29, Issue #2, 1996.
  14. ^ a b Weinberg, Gerhard. "Comments on the Papers by Friedlander, Breitman, and Browning", pages 509–512 from German Studies Review, Volume 17, Issue # 3, October 1994, page 511.
  15. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. "Comments on the Papers by Friedlander, Breitman, and Browning", pages 509–512 from German Studies Review, Volume 17, Issue # 3, October 1994, page 509.
  16. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. "Comments on the Papers by Friedlander, Breitman, and Browning", pages 509–512 from German Studies Review, Volume 17, Issue # 3, October 1994, page 510.
  17. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard. "Reflections on Munich After Sixty Years", pages 1–12 from The Munich Crisis, 1938, edited by Igor Lukes and Erik Goldstein, Frank Cass: London 1999, pages 3–5
  18. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard (November 2002). "No Road From Munich To Iraq". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2011-05-16. Retrieved 2009-05-05.
  19. ^ a b Weinberg, Gerhard. The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, 1980. page 396
  20. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard (November 2007). "Review of Fateful Choices" (PDF). H-Diplo. Retrieved 2009-05-05.
  21. ^ Murray, Williamson. The Change in the European Balance In Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, page 471
  22. ^ a b c Weinberg, Gerhard (2 May 1983). "A Scholar's Appraisal". Newsweek. p. 57.
  23. ^ Newsweek, May 2, 1983; Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century -- The Faking of the Hitler "Diaries" (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 272.
  24. ^ 2009 award Archived 2013-07-02 at the Wayback Machine, official website.
  25. Pritzker Military Library
    on March 11, 2010
  26. ^ "Samuel Eliot Morison Prize previous winners". Society for Military History. Retrieved December 25, 2017.

External links

On Weinberg

By Weinberg

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