Richard Grunberger

Richard Grunberger (7 March 1924 Vienna, Austria – 15 February 2005) was a British historian, who specialised in study of the Third Reich.[1][2]

He was born in Austria to Jewish parents. After the 1938 Anschluss with Hitler's Germany, he was put on the first Kindertransport train to leave Vienna. He was initially housed in a refugee camp at Lowestoft in England. After this he lived with a Jewish family, who were West End tailors in London. Grunberger entered their tailoring business. His desire for education however led to his taking A levels at Birkbeck college. He gained an exhibition scholarship in history at King's College London.[2]

When he went to the Wiener Library in London, he expressed to a friend his frustration at the absence of a book that held together the masses of documentation surrounding Nazism and 20th-century Germany. A friend asked why he did not write one, and so he did. The product was A Social History of the Third Reich, first published in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It has since become a significant text for studying the social history of Nazi Germany in schools and at undergraduate level.[2]

Initially, much of Grunberger's leisure time in Britain was taken up by the communist youth group Young Austria. In spite of this, his political outlook was social democratic.[2]

Books

A Social History of the Third Reich

Germany 1918-1945

Hitler's S.S.

Red Rising in Bavaria

References
  1. Rickels, Laurence A. (2002). Nazi psychoanalysis. University of Minnesota Press. p. 12. ISBN 0-8166-3697-4.
  2. Rothenberg, Ruth (7 May 2005). "Obituary: Richard Grunberger". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 August 2009.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.