Henry Egon Friedlander[1] (24 September 1930 – 17 October 2012) was a German-American Jewish historian of the Holocaust who was noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of casualties of the Holocaust.
From 1975 until his retirement in 2001, Friedlander served as a professor in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Personal life
The son of physician Bernhard Fritz Friedländer and Ruth Friedländer, née Löwenthal,[4] Henry Friedlander was married to fellow historian Sybil Milton (1941–2000),[2] who has a German Studies Association memorial prize named after her.[5]
Views on the Holocaust
Friedlander argued that three groups should be considered victims of the Holocaust, namely Jews, Romani, and the mentally and physically disabled,[6] noting that the latter were Nazism's first victims.[7] His opinions concerning the inclusion of both the disabled and the Romani as victims of the Holocaust often gave rise to intense debates with other scholars, such as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, who argued that only Jews should be considered victims of the Holocaust.[citation needed]
Like Friedlander, Sybil Milton supported a more expansive, inclusive definition of the Holocaust, arguing against the "exclusivity of emphasis on Judeocide in most Holocaust literature [that] has generally excluded Gypsies (as well as blacks and the handicapped) from equal consideration",[8] and exchanging views on the topic with Yehuda Bauer.[9]
According to Friedlander, the origins of the Holocaust can be traced back to the coming together of two lines of Nazi policies: the antisemitic policies of the Nazi regime, and its "racial cleansing" policies that led to the Action T4 program.[citation needed] Arguing that the ultimate origins of the Holocaust came from the Action T4 program, he pointed to the fact that both the poison gas and the crematoria were originally deployed at the start of the Action T4 program in 1939.[citation needed] It was only later, in 1941, that the experts from the T4 program were imported by the SS to help design, and later run, the death camps for the Jews of Europe.[citation needed] Friedlander did not deny the importance of the Nazi's antisemitic ideology, but, in his view, the T4 program was the crucial seed that gave birth to the Holocaust.[citation needed]
Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection Of Selected Documents. Co-editor with Sybil Milton. New York, NY: Garland Pub. 1989.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide. The San Jose Papers. Co-editor with Sybil Milton. Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications. 1980.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
Détente in Historical Perspective: The First CUNY Conference on History and Politics. New York, NY: Cyrco Press. 1975.
Andreas W. Daum, "Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians: Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities", in The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, ISBN978-1-78238-985-9, pp. 1‒52.
