Saul Friedländer

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

Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He grew up in France and survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Catholic boarding school in Montluçon, near Vichy in France. While hiding, he became a Catholic.^[1]

His parents tried to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French gendarmes, sent to the Germans and gassed at Auschwitz. Friedländer did not know what happened until 1946, when he became a Zionist. In 1948, Friedländer immigrated to Israel on the Irgun ship Altalena. After high school, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. From 1953 to 1955, he studied political science in Paris.

Friedländer served under Nachum Goldman, then President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress. In 1959, he served under Shimon Peres, then the vice-minister of defense. 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 the SS officer Kurt Gerstein. In 1988, he became Professor of History at UCLA. Friedländer later became left-wing, active in the Peace Now group.

In 1998, Friedländer led the Independent Historical Commission (IHC) appointed to investigate the German media company Bertelsmann under Nazi Germany. The 800-page report, Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, written with Norbert Frei, Trutz Rendtorff and Reinhard Wittmann, was published in October 2002.^[2] It confirmed that Bertelsmann worked with Hitler.^[3] Bertelsmann subsequently expressed regret "for its conduct under the Nazis, and for later efforts to cover it up".^[4]

• 1981: Friedländer was awarded the Andreas Gryphius Award for Literature (Düsseldorf) for his memoir When Memory Comes, after its publication in German.
• 1983: He was awarded the Israel Prize for history.^[5]
• 1988: He delivered the Gauss Seminars at Princeton University.^[6]
• 1997: He was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution.^[7]
• 1998: He was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for his work, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. He was also awarded the Shazar Prize of the Israeli Historical Association and the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (Munich) for Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, after its translation into Hebrew.
• 1999: He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.^[8]
• 2000: He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 2007: He was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
• 2008: For his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction,^[9] and the 2007 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-fiction. He was also awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Life Work by the Karl Renner Institut (Vienna) in 2008.
• 2009: He received the Award for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association.
• 2012: He gave the First "Humanitas" Lecture in Historiography, Trinity College, Oxford: "Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust."
• 2014: He received the Dan David Prize for contributing to "History and Memory"^[10] and the Edgar de Picciotto International Prize from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) for lifetime achievement.
• 2019: He addressed the Bundestag on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
• 2021: He was awarded the first Ludwig Landmann Prize by the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and the Balzan Prize for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.^[11]

Friedländer's books have been translated into 20 languages.

• Shira Klein
• Havi Dreifuss
• Shimon Redlich
• Izabella Tabarovsky

• Friedländer, Saul (1979). When Memory Comes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• Baldwin, Peter (1990). Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate. Beacon Press.
• Geulie Ne'eman Arad, (ed.), Passing Into History (History & Memory, 9) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
• Kershaw, Ian (2000). The Nazi Dictatorship. London: Edward Arnold.
• Dieter Borchmayer and Helmuth Kiesel, (eds.), Das Judentum im Spiegel seiner kulturellen Umwelen: Symposium zur Ehren Saul Friedländer (Neckargemünd: Mnemosyne, 2002)
• Karolin Machtans, Zwischer Wissenschaft und autobiographishen Text: Saul Friedländer und Ruth Klüger (Göttingen: Niemayer, 2009)
• Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, (eds.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010)
• Friedländer, Saul (2016). Where Memory Leads: My Life. New York: Other Press. ISBN 978-1590518090.
• The Journal of Holocaust Research, 37(1), 2023.