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Historian of the Holocaust who wrote an acclaimed memoir of his experiences as a child in Auschwitz
The historian Otto Dov Kulka, who has died aged 88, published a string of important academic works, beginning with The “Jewish Question”in the Third Reich (1975), that portrayed Nazi antisemitism as the product of secularisation. He argued that traditional Christian antisemitism, where the possibility of redemption by religious conversion was inherently present, evolved in the late 19th-century into a secular “redemptive antisemitism”, in which all the ills of modern Germany would be cured by the total annihilation of the Jewish race. He went on to publish research on Jewish self-organisation in the Third Reich that stressed the extent to which the German Jewish community had already prepared itself before the Nazi seizure of power, realising the danger posed to it by the rise of Hitler.
His most important work, however, was on the attitude of ordinary non-Jewish Germans to the Nazi persecution and annihilation of the Jews. In a comprehensive documentary collection, The Jews in the Secret Nazi Reports on Popular Opinion in Germany, 1933-1945 (2010), edited with the German historian Eberhard Jäckel, he presented nearly a thousand pages of compelling evidence that undermined the view, held by most historians up to then, that the German people had been largely indifferent to the fate of the Jews. Instead, it suggested, they not only knew from early on about the extermination camps and shooting pits in the east, but also regarded them in a largely positive way. Continue reading...