Henry Friedlander (born 1930) is an American historian of
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany,...
noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of victims of the Holocaust.
Born in
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
to a Jewish family, Friedlander came to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1947 and obtained his BA in History at
Temple UniversityTemple University is a state-related public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Temple University was founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell and became known as Temple College in 1888. In 1907, the college became a fully accredited university...
in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1954 and 1968. Starting in 1975 until his retirement in 2001, Friedlander served as a professor in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College of the
City University of New YorkThe City University of New York , is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
.
Friedlander has argued that three groups should be considered victims of the Holocaust, namely Jews, Roma, and the mentally and physically disabled, noting that the latter were Nazism's first victims. Moreover, Friedlander has argued that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to the coming together of two lines of Nazi policies, the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime and its “racial cleansing” policies that led to the
Action T4Action T4 was a program, also called Euthanasia Program, in Nazi Germany spanning October 1939 until August 1941, during which physicians killed 70,273 people specified in Hitler's secret memo of September 1, 1939 as suffering patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination", but...
program.
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Henry Friedlander (born 1930) is an American historian of
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany,...
noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of victims of the Holocaust.
Born in
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
to a Jewish family, Friedlander came to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1947 and obtained his BA in History at
Temple UniversityTemple University is a state-related public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Temple University was founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell and became known as Temple College in 1888. In 1907, the college became a fully accredited university...
in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1954 and 1968. Starting in 1975 until his retirement in 2001, Friedlander served as a professor in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College of the
City University of New YorkThe City University of New York , is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
.
Friedlander has argued that three groups should be considered victims of the Holocaust, namely Jews, Roma, and the mentally and physically disabled, noting that the latter were Nazism's first victims. Moreover, Friedlander has argued that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to the coming together of two lines of Nazi policies, the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime and its “racial cleansing” policies that led to the
Action T4Action T4 was a program, also called Euthanasia Program, in Nazi Germany spanning October 1939 until August 1941, during which physicians killed 70,273 people specified in Hitler's secret memo of September 1, 1939 as suffering patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination", but...
program. In Friedlander’s opinion, the decisive origins of the Holocaust came from the T4 Program. Friedlander has pointed out that the poison gas used to commit mass murder and the crematoria used to dispose of the bodies of those killed by poison gas were originally deployed in the T4 Program in 1939, and that only later in 1941 were the experts from the T4 Program imported by the SS to help design and later run the death camps for the Jews of Europe. Though Friedlander does not deny the importance of Nazi anti-Semitic ideology, in his view the T4 Program was the crucial seed that gave birth to the Holocaust. Friedlander’s arguments concerning the inclusion of both the mentally and physically disabled and Roma as victims of the Holocaust have often been embodied in the form of intense debates with those such as the Israeli historian
Yehuda BauerYehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
who argued that only Jews should be considered victims of the Holocaust.
Work
- Détente In Historical Perspective : The First CUNY Conference on History and Politics, New York : Cyrco Press, 1975 ISBN 0-915326-01-9.
- co-edited with Sybil Milton The Holocaust : Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide : the San Jose Papers, Millwood, N.Y. : Kraus International Publications, 1980 ISBN 0-527-63807-2.
- co-edited with Sybil Milton Archives of the Holocaust : An International Collection Of Selected Documents, New York : Garland, 1989 ISBN 0-8240-5483-0.
- The German Revolution of 1918, New York : Garland Pub., 1992 ISBN 0-8153-0739-X.
- The Origins of Nazi Genocide : From Euthanasia To The Final Solution, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1995 ISBN 0-8078-2208-6.
- Foreword to People in Auschwitz by Hermann Langbein, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8078-2816-5.
External links