Peter Hayes (historian)

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Peter Hayes, 2017

Peter Francis Hayes (born September 7, 1946 in Boston ) is an American historian . His research focus is German history in the 20th century, especially the time of National Socialism . His specialty is Holocaust research .

Life

After studying history, politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford and Yale , Hayes received his PhD from Yale University in 1982. He taught at Northwestern University from 1980 until his retirement in 2016 . Since 1993 he has been Professor of Modern European History and since 2000 has held the Theodore Zev Weiss Chair for Holocaust Studies. He heads the Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .

In 2005, Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appointed Hayes to the Independent Historical Commission - Foreign Office , which examined the history of the office under National Socialism and how it dealt with this past after 1945. The results of the commission appeared in October 2010 as a book publication under the title The Office and the Past .

Hayes' ongoing research projects deal with large German companies and the Holocaust, as well as with National Socialism as a phenomenon of a certain generation of German elites.

His work Why? Explaining the Holocaust or Why? A history of the Holocaust is praised by the historian and anti-Semitism expert Wolfgang Benz as a "knowledgeable and carefully weighing the arguments" study. It is true that it is not free from “short circuits, errors and ambiguous formulations”, especially when it comes to the depiction of the Nazi camp system. But overall, the book breathes "the spirit of serious learning, is well written and pleasant to read".

Fonts (selection)

  • Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era . 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-78638-X (first 1987).
  • The People and the Mob. The Ideology of Civil Conflict in Modern Europe . Praeger, Westport, Connecticut 1992, ISBN 0-275-94336-4 .
  • Edited with Irmtrud Wojak: "Aryanization" in National Socialism. Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis (= Yearbook of the Fritz Bauer Institute for the History and Effects of the Holocaust. 2000). Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-593-36494-8 .
  • Degussa in the Third Reich. From cooperation to complicity . Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52204-1 .
  • together with Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei and Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Blessing, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
  • Why? Explaining the Holocaust . WW Norton & Company, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-0-393-25436-5 .
    • Why? A story of the Holocaust . Translated from the English by Ursel Schäfer. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-593-50745-3 .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Independent Commission of Historians . In: Auswärtiges-Amt.de , October 28, 2010, retrieved on December 20, 2010. See website of the Historians' Commission: Independent Commission of Historians to review the history of the Federal Foreign Office during the Nazi era and in the Federal Republic ( Memento from February 3 2011 in the Internet Archive ). In: Uni-Marburg.de , accessed on December 20, 2010.
  2. ↑ "Amazingly devoted killers". The US historian Peter Hayes has written a book about the Holocaust that answers all of the key questions - except for one . From Wolfgang Benz. In: Süddeutsche.de , August 25, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Hayes, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hayes, Peter Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston