Gerald Fleming

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gerald Fleming (originally Gerhard Flehinger ; born May 11, 1921 in Mannheim ; † February 25, 2006 ) was a German-English language teacher and recognized historian of Holocaust research . He is counted among the "intentionalists" of Nazi research .

family

Fleming came from a Jewish family. His father was Artur Flehinger (* 1884 in Bruchsal). The grandfather Max Flehinger (* 1851 in Flehingen ) was the main teacher. In 1927 the family moved to Baden-Baden , where the father worked as a high school professor. Because of the anti-Semitic persecution of the Jews in Baden / Baden and thus also of the Flehingers, Gerald was brought to safety in England with his brother with the help of British friends. They were sent to King's College , a boarding school in Taunton / Somerset, and did their training there. Her father was deported to the Dachau concentration camp after the November pogroms in 1938 , but was also able to emigrate to England under pressure from friends and family.

Language teacher

Gerald Fleming was interned in Canada at the beginning of World War II, but soon returned and worked in a Yorkshire munitions factory . He began training as a language teacher for German, English and French. After a year at the Sorbonne , he graduated in 1949. He became a modern language teacher at the William Penn School in Dulwich , south London. He created grammar books with cartoonists Kenneth Bird (Fougasse) and David Langdon .

In 1965 he received a research fellowship from Battersea College of Technology. When it was converted to the University of Surrey the following year , he became a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Regional Studies. In 1982 he retired.

historian

In the 1980s, Fleming confronted the history revisionist and later Holocaust denier David Irving . In 1977 he claimed that Adolf Hitler did not initiate or order the Holocaust and only found out about it in late 1943. He justified this with a missing written order from Hitler on the Holocaust and demanded a counter-evidence from historians.

Fleming then conducted research in the Latvian capital Riga . In 1987/88 he was a member of an international commission of historians that examined Kurt Waldheim's knowledge and possible involvement in Nazi crimes in the context of the Waldheim affair .

At the end of February 1990, Fleming learned from an article in the Russian daily Izvestia from February 1989 that the files of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz were stored in a Moscow state archive. In October 1990 he flew to Russia for the first time and was the first historian to examine these files. In May 1993 he discovered a folder in the Moscow Central State Archives with interrogation protocols of the Auschwitz engineers Kurt Prüfer , Fritz Sander and Karl Schultze dated March 7, 1946. Later he also got access to the separate KGB archives. Fleming, Robert Jan van Pelt and director Mike Rossiter made the documentary Blueprints of Genocide about these Moscow files .

Publications

English edition: Hitler and the Final Solution. University of California Press, Berkeley 1984, ISBN 0-520-05103-3 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anthony de Reuck (The Guardian, March 30, 2006): Gerald Fleming: Historian whose investigations laid bare the full horror of the Holocaust ; Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wolfgang Benz, Wolfgang Neugebauer: The Auschwitz deniers. Elefanten Press, 1996, ISBN 3-88520-600-5 , p. 179
  2. ↑ Alexia K. House: Bruchsal and National Socialism. Verlag Regionalkultur, 2001, ISBN 3-89735-190-0 , p. 216
  3. ↑ Baden-Baden history: "If it had been up to me, you would all have died in the fire" ( report by Arthur Flehinger); Achim Reimer: City between two democracies: Baden-Baden from 1930 to 1950. Meidenbauer, 2005, ISBN 3-89975-045-4 , p. 88
  4. ↑ David Irving: Hitler at War. (1977) Explanation and refutation of David Irving's argument in detail in Richard Evans: Telling Lies About Hitler. Verso, 2002, ISBN 1-85984-417-0 , p. 78
  5. ^ Institute for Contemporary History (Ed.): Inventory of archival sources of the Nazi state. The tradition of authorities and institutions of the Reich, the states and the NSDAP. Volume 2 , Fund 502: Waffen-SS and Police. Central construction management in Auschwitz ( Memento of the original from January 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sonderarchiv.de
  6. ↑ Gerald Fleming: Hitler and the Final Solution , p. 193 ; Protocol of the interrogation of Kurt Prüfer, Erfurt, March 5, 1946 (Nizkor.org, 1994, English)
  7. ^ Robert Jan Van Pelt: The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Indiana University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-253-34016-0 , p. 331
personal data
SURNAME Fleming, Gerald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Flehinger, Gerhard (birth name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-English language teacher and Holocaust researcher
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 2006