Saul Friedländer

Saul Friedländer (born the October 11th 1932 with Prague) is free a Historien - Israeli, specialist in the Shoah and Nazism, author of many works.

Born under the first name from Pavel, it grew in France. During the Second world war, his/her parents hid it in a catholic orphanage, not far from the Swiss border , hoping for themselves to find refuge in this neutral country; but the Swiss customs officers drove back them, because at this time (in 1942) Switzerland accepted the Jewish refugees only if it acted families with infants or expectant mothers; having left Pavel behind them, the Friedländer parents did not correspond to the criteria of admission and they were returned to France, then off-set. Without news of his/her parents during several years, Saul Friedländer finally learned in 1946 that his/her parents missing during the war had died in deportation. After having obtained a doctorate in History with the University of Geneva, it engaged actively in the engagements of the movement Zionist in Israel by joining the rows of the Irgoun.

As of the Years 1980, it became militant pacifist cause and since then supports the movement peace now. He is professor of history to the the University of California to Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the university of Tel-Aviv. He is also known like one of the first historians (with Guenter Lewy) to have criticized the pope Pie XII for attitude vis-a-vis the Nazism and with the fate of the Jews; its work aroused the interest of the the Vatican which consequently sought to refute work of the two historians, in particular by placing at the disposal of the historical research certain documents preserved in its secret files so that a more complete vision of the figure of the pope is presented.

Although intentionnalist at the base, Friedländer concluded from his research that Hitler did not have a plan predetermined to exterminate the Jews before 1941. Its only biographical work follows the efforts of a German, Kurt Gerstein, which had decided to join the rows S with an aim of preventing or at least of informing the world of what was woven under the name of code “Final solution” ( Endlösung der Judenfrage ); the calls of Gerstein were not heard and its actions were sometimes ambiguous. At the end of the war, Gerstein was imprisoned by the French and committed suicide. Friedländer dissected the position of Gerstein which was condemned to have tried to act in opposition to the majority of the “good Germans” who remained passive while waiting for the end of the war and Shoah. More recently, Friedländer was interested in perception of Shoah and the Nazism which the following generations build in Occident, through work of the historians and the collective memory.

October 14th, 2007, Saul Friedländer received in Frankfurt the Price of the peace of the booksellers German 2007, in the presence of the German president Horst Köhler. “It is clear for me that this price is granted to me mainly because of the set of themes of my work. This is why I accept with a great humility this honor, whose significance goes well beyond any individual service”, it declared. The jury of this price wanted to greet " the storyteller epic of the history of Shoah, the persecution and the destruction of the Jews at the time of terror Nazi in Europe".

Works

Hitler and the United States, Geneva, ED. Droz, 1963
Pie XII and Third Reich , ED. threshold, 1964 (postface of Alfred Grosser)
Kurt Gerstein or the ambiguity of the good , Castermann, Paris, 1967
Reflections on the future of Israel , ED. threshold, 1969
the Anti-semitism Nazi: history of a collective psychosis , Threshold, Paris, 1971
History and psychoanalysis , ED. threshold, 1975
Reflections of the Nazism , ED. threshold, 1982
Visions off apocalypse: end gold rebirth? , London - New York, Holmes and Meier, 1985
Probing the limits off representation: nazism and the final solution , Cambridge - London, Harvard University Near, 1992 (direction)
When the memory comes, Threshold-Point, Paris, 1998.
the Nazi Germany and the Jews , t.1, ED.: Threshold, 1997; volume 2 left in English ( Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years off Extermination ) in 2007.
Jews and XX E century: dictionary criticizes , Calmann-Levy, Paris, 2000, (with Elie Barnavi)

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