Saul Friedländer

In 1998, Friedländer chaired the Independent Historical Commission (IHC) that was appointed to investigate the activities of the German media company Bertelsmann under the Third Reich. The 800-page report, Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, written with Norbert Frei, Trutz Rendtorff and Reinhard Wittmann, was published in October 2002. It confirmed the findings, first reported by Hersch Fischler in The Nation, that Bertelsmann collaborated with the Nazi regime before and during World War II. Bertelsmann subsequently expressed regret "for its conduct under the Nazis, and for later efforts to cover it up".

Friedländer's book, Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997) was written as a reply to Broszat's work. The second volume, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 appeared in 2007. Friedländer's book is Alltagsgeschichte, not of "Aryan" Germans nor of the Jewish community, but rather an Alltagsgeschichte of the persecution of the Jewish community.

The first problem for Friedländer was that the Nazi era was too recent and fresh in the popular memory for historians to deal with it as a "normal" period as, for example, 16th-century France. The second problem was the "differential relevance" of "historicization". Friedländer argued that the study of the Nazi period was "global", that is it belongs to everyone, and that focusing on everyday life was a particular interest for German historians. Friedländer asserted that for non-Germans, the history of Nazi ideology in practice, especially in regards to war and genocide was vastly more important than Alltagsgeschichte ("history of everyday life"). The third problem for Friedländer was that the Nazi period was so unique that it could not easily be fitted into the long-range view of German history as advocated by Broszat. Friedländer maintained that the essence of National Socialism was that it "tried to determine who should and should not inhabit the world", and the genocidal politics of the Nazi regime resisted any attempt to integrate it as part of the "normal" development of the modern world. The debates between Broszat and Friedländer were conducted through a series of letters between 1987 until Broszat's death in 1989. In 1990, the Broszat-Friedländer correspondences were translated into English, and published in the book Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate edited by Peter Baldwin.

In the 1980s, Friedländer engaged in a spirited debate with the West German historian Martin Broszat over his call for the "historicization" of Nazi Germany. In Friedländer's view, Nazi Germany was not and cannot be seen as a normal period of history. Friedländer argued that there were three dilemmas, and three problems involved in the "historicization" of the Third Reich.

In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988. Friedländer taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. In 1969 he wrote a biography of repentant SS officer Kurt Gerstein. In 1988, he became Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Friedländer served as secretary to Nachum Goldman, then President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress. In 1959, he became an assistant to Shimon Peres, then vice-minister of defense. Late in the 1980s, Friedländer moved to the political left and was active in the Peace Now group.

After 1946, Friedländer grew more conscious of his Jewish identity and became a Zionist. In 1948, Friedländer immigrated to Israel on the Irgun ship Altalena. After finishing high school, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. From 1953 to 1955, he studied political science in Paris.

Friedländer is an Intentionalist on the question of the origins of the Holocaust. However, Friedländer rejects the extreme Intentionalist view that Adolf Hitler had a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people originating when he wrote Mein Kampf. Friedländer, through his research on the Third Reich, has reached the conclusion that there was no intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe before 1941. Friedländer's position might best be deemed moderate Intentionalist.

Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He was raised in France and lived through the German Occupation of 1940–1944. From 1942 until 1946, Friedländer was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in Montluçon, near Vichy. While in hiding, he converted to Roman Catholicism and later began preparing for the Catholic priesthood. His parents attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French gendarmes, turned over to the Germans and were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Not until 1946 did Friedländer learn the fate of his parents.

Saul Friedländer (Hebrew: שאול פרידלנדר; born October 11, 1932) is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.