Léon Poliakov

Léon Poliakov ( Russian Леон Поляков ; born November 25, 1910 in St. Petersburg , † December 8, 1997 in Orsay ) was a French historian. His research focused on racism , anti-Semitism , Jewish history and the Holocaust . Until his retirement he was a doctor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and research director at the Center national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.

Life

Léon Poliakov 1952

Léon Poliakov was born in St. Petersburg in 1910 as the son of the upper-class Jewish publisher Vladimir Poliakov. In 1920 his family fled to France from the Bolsheviks . In 1921 the family moved to Germany for economic reasons, where Léon quickly learned German. Some time was also spent in Italy. In Germany, Poliakov saw the beginnings of National Socialism as a teenager . In 1924 the family went to Paris. Poliakov's father was very active against National Socialism and after 1933 founded a newspaper for German-speaking exiles in Paris, the Pariser Tageblatt under the editor-in-chief Georg Bernhard . In 1936 the editors under Bernhard put a coup against Léon's father and forced him to shut down the newspaper.

Léon Poliakov studied law and literature in Paris. He then worked as a journalist and turned to historical research. At the beginning of the Second World War he joined the French army. On June 13, 1940, he and his battalion were taken prisoner by Germany near Saint-Valéry-en-Caux . Three months later he escaped from the prisoner of war camp in Doullens and made his way to southern France under the name Robert Paul . He joined the Resistance , where he played a key role in organizing the Jewish resistance.

In 1943, Poliakov, along with Zalman Schneerson, the founder Joseph Bass and other Jews in hiding, took part in a group André in southern France to save many Jewish children by hiding in non-Jewish families. With Schneerson and various Jewish communities, he also founded the Center de documentation juive contemporaine , CDJC, which collected documents and evidence to document the persecution of Jews in France. After the war, Poliakov was accredited as a trial observer at the Nuremberg Trials , where he assisted Edgar Faure , head of the French delegation, as a consultant and interpreter.

After researching German archives and evaluating numerous eyewitness reports, Poliakov and François Mauriac published the first comprehensive study on hatred of Jews and the Nazis' extermination policy, as well as their historical and intellectual roots, under the title Bréviaire de la haine (Saat des Hasses) in 1951 . Poliakov criticized Pope Pius XII's silence . to the crimes of the Nazis and made Christianity jointly responsible for the extermination of the Jews. His eight-volume study on the history of anti-Semitism from antiquity to the 20th century is now considered a standard work in anti-Semitism research . In Le mythe aryen (The Aryan Myth), Poliakov examined, taking into account knowledge from anthropology , philosophy , psychoanalysis , religion and linguistics , how the myth of the Aryan and his superiority gradually developed from antiquity to finally in the 19th and 20th centuries. Century to become an integral part of Western thought.

Schneerson and Poliakov saw their most important task in documenting the persecution of Jews in France from 1939 to 1944. In the 1960s, it was the perpetrators' perspective that was the key to an “objective” portrayal of this historical event. In their publications at the CDJC, they therefore focused on official documents on the extermination of Jews by the Germans themselves or through the active collaboration of the Vichy regime . The publications were aimed primarily at the non-Jewish French public.

According to the sociologist and cultural scientist Peter Ullrich, Poliakov's work From Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism deserves the credit of having drawn attention to the relevance of the problematic amalgamation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism at an early stage . The text gives a legible overview of the development of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, especially in the Soviet Union .

Poliakov also did research on other persecuted groups, including the Old Orthodox (Old Believers) in Russia.

In 1989 Poliakov was named Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) . He died on December 8, 1997 at the age of 87 in Orsay, France .

Quotes

• I wanted to know why they wanted to kill me with millions of other human beings.

Works (selection)

As sole author:

• Léon Poliakov: History of Anti-Semitism. In 8 volumes, Heintz Verlag, Worms. German translation by Rudolf Pfisterer. The German edition differs in the division of the volumes from the French original Histoire de l'antisémitisme .

 1. Von der Antike bis zu den Kreuzzügen. 1977, ISBN 3-921333-99-7.
 2. Das Zeitalter der Verteufelung und des Ghettos. (Mit Anhang: Zur Anthropologie der Juden). 1978, ISBN 3-921333-96-2.
 3. Religiöse und soziale Toleranz unter dem Islam. 1979, ISBN 3-921333-93-8.
 4. Die Marranen im Schatten der Inquisition. 1981, ISBN 3-921333-98-9.
 5. Die Aufklärung und ihre judenfeindliche Tendenz. 1983, ISBN 3-921333-88-1.
 6. Emanzipation und Rassenwahn. 1987, ISBN 3-921333-86-5.
 7. Zwischen Assimilation und "jüdischer Weltverschwörung". 1988, ISBN 3-610-00417-7.
 8. Am Vorabend des Holocaust. 1988, ISBN 3-610-00418-5.

• Léon Poliakov: The Aryan Myth. On the sources of racism and nationalism. Published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research . From the Franz. By Margarete Venjakob; Holger Fliessbach, Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1993 ISBN 3-88506-220-8
• Bréviaire de la Haine - Le IIIeme Reich et les Juifs. Paris 1951, (with a foreword by Francois Mauriac)

With other authors:

• Léon Poliakov, Christian Delacampagne , Patrick Girard : Racism. About xenophobia and racial madness , Luchterhand-Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-630-71061-1 .
• Léon Poliakov: From Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism. With a foreword by Detlev Claussen and an article by Thomas Haury . From the Franz. By Franziska Sick .. Ça-Ira-Verlag, Freiburg 1992, ISBN 3-924627-31-2 .
• The Third Reich and its thinkers. Documents. Arani, Berlin 1959 (with Joseph Wulf).
• The Third Reich and its servants. Berlin 1956, (with Joseph Wulf)
• The Third Reich and the Jews. Berlin 1955 (together with Joseph Wulf, various new editions, most recently Fourier, Wiesbaden 1987, as paperback by Ullstein, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-548-33036-3 )

memoirs

• Léon Poliakov: L'Auberge des Musiciens. 1981, ISBN 2-86374-072-5 .
• Léon Poliakov: “St. Petersburg - Berlin - Paris ”. Memoirs of someone who got away. Translated from the French by Jonas Empen, Jasper Stabenow and Alex Carstiuc. Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89320-243-0 .
• Humanity, nationality, bestiality . (Léon Poliakov in conversation with Elisabeth Weber), in: Elisabeth Weber (Ed.): Jüdisches Denkin in Frankreich , Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-633-54090-3 , pp. 133–155.

literature

• Review of the book The Third Reich and its Thinkers , which Poliakov published in 1959 with Joseph Wulf - Nordic Entkümmerer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1960, p. 55 ( online - 4 May 1960 ).
• Review of Poliakov's book History of Antisemitism. Volume V : Infernal Trinity . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1983, pp. 238-242 ( Online - Nov. 26, 1983 ).
• Laura Jockusch: "Collect and record!" Jewish Holocaust Documentation in early postwar Europe. Oxford University Press , Oxford 2012

Web links

Commons : Léon Poliakov  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Léon Poliakov in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography of Léon Poliakov on the website of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Kempter: Joseph Wulf - Ein Historikerschicksal in Deutschland , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014, ISBN 9783525369654 , p. 131
2. ↑ La Résistance Juive (French)
3. ↑ Laura Jockusch, s. Lit.
4. ↑ Peter Ullrich: Review of Léon Poliakov - From anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism, Ça ira-Verlag 1992 ( Memento of the original from April 20, 2018 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. 
5. ↑ Der Spiegel 51/1997
6. ↑ Léon Poliakov, . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1997, p. 234 ( Online - Dec. 15, 1997 ).