Saul Friedlander

Saul Friedländer is a scholar of the Third Reich and the Holocaust who has transformed our understanding of this period by weaving into a coherent whole the perspectives of ordinary Germans, party activists, military and political figures, and, most importantly, victims and survivors.

Drawing from documents, films, recollections, and his personal experience, he reconstructs these events with a judicious tone that defies the nature of the subject and demonstrates the interplay of memory and representation in the interpretation of historic events. Friedländer shows that a rational and many-sided reinterpretation of the evidence deepens a reader’s understanding of the nature, meaning, and complexity of the Holocaust. His works include Pius XII and the Third Reich, History and Psychoanalysis, When Memory Comes, Reflections on Nazism, and Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume One: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. He is in the process of completing Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume Two: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945.

Friedländer holds the 1939 Club Chair in the History of the Holocaust at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has held the Maxwell Cummings Chair of European History at Tel Aviv University since 1975.

Friedländer received a degree (1955) from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris and a Ph.D. (1963) from the University of Geneva.