Literatureשאול פרידלנדר

Saul Friedländer

Saul Friedländer is a Prague-born Israeli historian of the Holocaust and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

born 1932Nazi Germany and the JewsHolocaust history researchDebate with Martin Broszat

Born: 11 October 1932, Prague
Occupation: writer, historian, university teacher
Education: Graduate Institute of International Studies, Lycée Henri-IV
Founded: Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (1979)

Saul Friedländer was born in 1932 in Prague

Friedländer was born in Prague in 1932 to a German-speaking Jewish family. The family fled to France in 1939. From 1942 he was hidden in a Catholic boarding school, where he was raised as a Catholic, while his parents were caught trying to reach Switzerland and were murdered at Auschwitz.

He learned of his parents' fate only in 1946 and then returned to Judaism. In 1948 he came to Israel on the ship Altalena. After high school he served in the IDF, and from 1953 to 1955 he studied political science in Paris.

He worked as secretary to Nahum Goldmann and in 1959 became an assistant to Shimon Peres. He earned his PhD in Geneva in 1963 and taught there, and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. In 1979 he was among the founders of the history quarterly Zmanim.

In the 1980s he was active in Peace Now. He became a professor at UCLA, and in 1998 he chaired a commission that examined the conduct of Bertelsmann under the Nazi regime. His two-volume study Nazi Germany and the Jews won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.