Gerhard Weinberg
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Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg (born January 1, 1928) is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of World War II. Weinberg currently is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974. Previously he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan (1959-1974) and the University of Kentucky (1957-1959).
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[edit] Youth and Education
Weinberg was born in Hanover, Germany, and resided there the first ten years of his life. As Jews in Nazi Germany, he and his family suffered increasing persecution. They emigrated in 1938, first to the United Kingdom and then in 1941 to New York State. Weinberg became a U.S. citizen, served in the U.S. Army during its occupation of Japan in 1946-1947, and returned to receive a B.A. in social studies from the State University of New York at Albany. He received his MA (1949) and PhD (1951) in history from the University of Chicago.
[edit] Early career
Weinberg has studied the foreign policy of National Socialist Germany and the Second World War for his entire professional life. His doctoral dissertation (1951), directed by Hans Rothfels, was "German Relations with Russia, 1939-1941," subsequently published in 1954 as Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941. From 1951 to 1954 Weinberg was a Research Analyst for the War Documentation Project at Columbia University and was Director of the American Historical Association Project for Microfilming Captured German Documents in 1956-1957. After joining the project to microfilm captured records at Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1950s, Weinberg published the Guide to Captured German Documents (1952). In 1958, Weinberg made the notable discovery of Hitler's so-called Zweites Buch (Second Book), an unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, among captured German files. His find led to his publication in 1961 of Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928, later published in English as Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (2003).
In 1953-1954, Weinberg was involved in a major scholarly debate with Hans-Günther Seraphim and Andreas Hillgruber on the pages of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte journal over the question of whether the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a “preventive war” forced on Hitler by an imminent Soviet attack. Seraphim and Hillgruber argued for the “preventive war” thesis, which Weinberg stoutly opposed. Rothfels, editor of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, was annoyed by Hillgruber’s and Seraphim’s arguments and invited Weinberg to write a reply to their article. Weinberg argued that the German invasion was primarily prompted by Nazi racial theories concerning the necessity of winning Lebensraum at the expense of Russia together with Hitler’s ideological animosity towards what Hitler often called the “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime in the Soviet Union, and that the evidence for Soviet plans for an invasion of Germany in 1941 was slight. In the opinion of most historians, Weinberg effectively demolished Hillgruber’s and Seraphim’s case. This marked the beginning of the first of many clashes between Weinberg and Hillgruber over interpretations of German foreign policy, through it should be noted that in regard to the intentionalist-functionalist and globalist-continentalist debates (see below), the views of Weinberg and Hillgruber were broadly similar.
Another major scholarly debate involving Weinberg occurred in 1962-1963 when Weinberg wrote a review of David Hoggan’s 1961 book Der erzwungene Krieg for the American Historical Review. Weinberg wrote a hostile review generally considered quite devastating, in which Weinberg suggested Hoggan had probably engaged in forging documents (the charge was later confirmed). Subsequently both Hoggan and his mentor Harry Elmer Barnes wrote a series of letters to the American Historical Review protesting Weinberg’s review and attempting to rebut his arguments. Weinberg in turn published letters rebutting Barnes's and Hoggan’s claims.
[edit] Major Scholarly Works
Weinberg's early masterpiece was the two-volume history of Hitler's diplomatic preparations for war: The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (1970 and 1980; republished 1994). In this work, Weinberg portrayed a Hitler committed to his ideology, no matter how inane or stupid it might seem to others, and therefore as a leader determined to use foreign policy to effect a specific set of goals. Weinberg thus countered others, such as British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who had argued in The Origins of the Second World War (1962) that Hitler had acted like a traditional statesman in taking advantage of the weaknesses of foreign rivals. The first volume of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 1971.
Weinberg's attention then turned to the Second World War. He published dozens of articles on the war and volumes of collected essays such as World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (1981). All such work was preparation for the release in 1994 of his 1000-page one-volume history of the Second World War, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Weinberg continued his studies of the World War II era even after the publication of his general history by examining the conceptions of World War II's leaders about the world they thought they were fighting to create. It was published in 2005 as Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders.
In the globalist versus continentalist debate, concerning whether Hitler had ambitions to conquer the entire world or merely the continent of Europe, Weinberg takes a globalist view, arguing Hitler had plans for world conquest. On the question of whether Hitler intended to murder Europe's Jews before coming to power, Weinberg takes an intentionalist position, arguing that Hitler had formulated plans for the Holocaust by the time he wrote Mein Kampf.
[edit] Hitler Diaries Controversy
In 1983, when the German illustrated weekly magazine Der Stern sensationally reported its purchase of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. weekly magazine Newsweek asked Weinberg to examine them hurriedly in a bank vault in Zürich, Switzerland. Together with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jäckel, Weinberg was one of the three experts on Hitler asked to examine the alleged diaries.
Squeezing the visit into just a few hours so as not to miss any of his teaching assignments at Chapel Hill, Weinberg reported in Newsweek that "on balance I am inclined to consider the material authentic." But Weinberg also noted that the purported journals would likely add less to our understanding of the Second World War than many might have thought and that more work would be needed to "make the verdict [of authenticity] airtight." When that work was undertaken by the German Federal Archives, the "diaries" were deemed forgeries.
[edit] Professional Accomplishments
Weinberg supervised over two dozen Ph.D. dissertations during his career, along with many more M.A. theses. In 2003 thirteen of his former doctoral students presented him with a Festschrift honoring his contributions to the study of history and to their lives (The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy). Weinberg was elected president of the German Studies Association in 1996.
Weinberg has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright professor at the University of Bonn, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum among many other such honors.
[edit] Life Today
Weinberg resides in Efland, North Carolina, with his wife Janet.
[edit] References
- Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-340-76028-1.
- Harris, Robert. Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. London: Faber and Faber, 1986 ISBN 0-571-14726-7.
- Steinweis, Alan E. and Daniel E. Rogers, eds., The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003 ISBN 0-8032-4299-9.
[edit] Other Sources
- The United States in World War II by Gerhard Weinberg.
[edit] Works by Gerhard L. Weinberg
- Guide to Captured German Documents. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University, Human Resources Research Institute, 1952.
- "Der deutsche Entschluß zum Angriff auf die Sowjetunion". Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1, 4 (1953):301-318.
- The Partisan Movement in the Yelnya-Dorogobuzh Area of Smolensk Oblast, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air Research and Development Command, Human Resources Research Institute Headquarters, United States Air Force, 1954.
- Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954.
- "The May Crisis, 1938" The Journal of Modern History 29, 3 (September 1957):213-25.
- Supplement to the Guide to Captured German Documents. Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1959.
- Review of Der erzwungene Krieg. American Historical Review 68,1 (October 1962):104-5.
- The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36'. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 ISBN 0-226-88509-7.
- (editor) Transformation of a Continent: Europe in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis, Minn.: Burgess Pub. Co., 1975 ISBN 0-8087-2332-4.
- The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 ISBN 0-226-88511-9.
- World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II. Hanover, New Hampshire: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1981 ISBN 0-87451-216-6.
- "Munich after 50 years". Foreign Affairs 67,1 (Fall 1988:165-78.
- “The Munich Crisis in Historical Perspective". International History Review 11,4 (November 1989):668-78.
- A World at Arms : A Global History of World War II, Cambridge [Eng.]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, revised edition 2005 ISBN 0-521-44317-2.
- Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-521-47407-8.
- (editor & translator) Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, New York: Enigma Books, 2003 ISBN 1-929631-16-2.
- Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-521-85254-4.
