Top Historian of Nazi Germany and Holocaust Speaks at TCD

Posted on: 21 January 2008

Professor Christopher Browning Speaks at Holocaust Memorial Lecture

The internationally renowned historian and  author of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Professor Christopher Browning, gave the Holocaust Memorial Lecture at Trinity College  on  January 21 last.  The lecture was entitled Remembering Survival: Postwar Testimonies from the Starachowice Slave Labour Camps.

Christopher R. Browning is  the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and internationally recognised as one of the top historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. His book on how ordinary men took part in mass killing in Nazi-occupied Poland is widely recognized as one of the most insightful studies of the perpetrators of genocide (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland). More recently he has turned from the politics of the genocide to the perspective of survivor victims and the issue of memory. It is this that he will address in the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, which is an annual public event sponsored by the Department of History and the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religion in College, and by the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland.

Further biographical detail on Professor Browning:
Professor Christopher Browning  has written seven books, including The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (with contributions from Jürgen Matthäus), University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, CUP, 2000, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Collins, 1992, and The Path to Genocide, CUP, 1992. Both Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution received the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. Professor Browning has been an expert witness at various trials of accused Nazi criminals, and in 2006 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.