Yehuda Bauer

Yehuda Bauer

Yehuda Bauer ( Hebrew יהודה באואר; * April 6, 1926 in Prague ) is an Israeli historian . He was born under the name Martin Bauer , grew up as Yehuda Bauer after the family migrated to Israel and eventually took on Israeli citizenship.

Life

Bauer's father was an engineer and his mother a fashion designer . As Zionists , the family, who had been preparing the emigration for years and had received their exit visas in 1938, finally emigrated to Palestine on the day the Germans invaded the “rest of Czech Republic” via Poland, Romania and Turkey.

Martin (Yehuda) attended high school in Haifa , became a member of the Palmach and, interrupted by the battle in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, studied history at Cardiff University in Wales . He then worked as a milker at Kibbutz Shoval, among other things , but completed his academic career at the same time and received his doctorate in history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1960 with studies on the British mandate in Palestine . He then taught at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. He became Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the same university.

He was visiting professor at Brandeis University , Yale University , Richard Stockton College, and Clark University . Bauer was also a member of the Mapam party. He was the founding editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and was on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust (Yad Vashem 1990). In 2001 he became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities .

Bauer's focus is on the Holocaust . From 1996 to 2000 he was director of the International Center for Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem and is a scientific advisor there. He is also Honorary Chairman of the Task Force for International Cooperation in Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research .

In 1998, Yehuda Bauer spoke to the German Bundestag on the occasion of the commemoration day for the victims of National Socialism and said, among other things: “The terrible thing about the Shoah is not that the Nazis were inhuman; the horrible thing is that they were human - like you and me. "

In an interview published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2019, he is quoted as saying: “The audience has developed views that are completely wrong. For example, many people believe that Hitler had planned the Holocaust since World War I, but the Holocaust developed: in 1940 the Germans did not yet know that they would murder the Jews. It is terribly difficult to bring all of this to the public. "- In the Berliner Zeitung of October 21, 2018, Bauer speaks in more detail about the Holocaust:" In ›Mein Kampf‹ there is not a word about it [about the extermination of the Jews]. The decision to murder the Jews only dates back to 1941. «

He lives in a retirement home in Jerusalem, very close to the Yad Vashem memorial.

honors and awards

• Winner of the Israel Prize in 1998
• Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria (2008)

Yehuda Bauer received the Israel Prize in 1998 for his tireless commitment to commemorating the Holocaust . In 2008 he was named a worthy citizen (Yakir Yerushalayim) by the city of Jerusalem .

Works

Monographs:

• American Jewry and the Holocaust. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1939-1945. The Institute of Contemporary Jewry / Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1981, ISBN 0-8143-1672-7 .
• Jewish reactions to the Holocaust , MOD, Tel Aviv 1989, ISBN 965-05-0482-6 .
  • Jewish reactions to the Holocaust , Lit Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-10958-3 .
• Jews for sale? Nazi-Jewish negotiations, 1933-1945 , Yale University Press, New Haven 1994, ISBN 0-300-05913-2 .
  • German: ransom from Jews? Negotiations between National Socialist Germany and Jewish representatives from 1933 to 1945 ; Translated from the English by Klaus Binder and Jeremy Gaines. Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-633-54107-1 .
• Rethinking the Holocaust , Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, ISBN 0-300-08256-8 .
  • German: The dark side of history. The Shoah in a historical perspective. Interpretations and re-interpretations. Translated from the English by Christian Wiese . Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2001, ISBN 3-633-54170-5 .
• The death of the Shtetl. Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-15209-8 .
  • German: The death of the shtetl . Translated from the English by Klaus Binder. Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-633-54253-6 .
• We Jews, an unruly people , Lit Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-643-12605-4 .

Items:

• “Uncle Saly” - Saly Mayer's negotiations to save the Jews in 1944/45. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 25 (1977), H. 1, pp. 188-219 ( PDF ).
• Comments on the “Auschwitz Report” by Rudolf Vrba. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 45 (1997), H. 2, pp. 297-308 ( PDF ).
• Rudolf Vrba and the Auschwitz Protocols. One response to John S. Conway. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 54 (2006), H. 4, pp. 701-710 ( PDF ).
• The third totalitarianism. In: The time . July 31, 2003, p. 7 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Yehuda Bauer  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Yehuda Bauer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Speech to the German Bundestag. Memorial hour for the victims of National Socialism on January 27, 1998
• Interview with Yehuda Bauer at Yad Vashem
• Bad nationalism is blooming everywhere , NZZ , June 25, 2019

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Anja Reich: “Of course the Holocaust could have been prevented”. Interview with the historian, October 2018. In: Berliner Zeitung , 20./21. October 2018.
2. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/der-historiker-yehuda-bauer-schlimmer-nationalismus-blueht-ueberall-auf-der-welt-oftmals-ist-er-religioes-gepraegt-ld.1486369 accessed on September 21, 2019
3. ↑ https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik/historiker-yehuda-bauer--es-ist-nicht-wie-1933----aber-es-ist-gefaehrlich-31463672 accessed on September 21, 2019
4. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)