Henry Friedlander

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Henry Friedlander (1930-) is an American historian of the Holocaust noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of victims of the Holocaust.

Born in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family, Friedlander came to the United States in 1947 and obtained his BA in History at Temple University in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and 1968. Starting in 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.

Friedlander has argued that three groups should be considered victims of the Holocaust, namely Jews, Roma, and the mentally and physically disabled, noting that the latter were Nazism's first victims. Moreover, Friedlander has argued that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to the coming together of two lines of Nazi policies, the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime and its “racial cleansing” policies that led to the Action T4 program. In Friedlander’s opinion, the decisive origins of the Holocaust came from the T4 Program. Friedlander has pointed out that the poison gas used to commit mass murder and the crematoria used to dispose of the bodies of those killed by poison gas were originally deployed in the T4 Program in 1939, and that only later in 1941 were the experts from the T4 Program imported by the SS to help design and later run the death camps for the Jews of Europe. Though Friedlander does not deny the importance of Nazi anti-Semitic ideology, in his view the T4 Program was the crucial seed that gave birth to the Holocaust. Friedlander’s arguments concerning the inclusion of both the mentally and physically disabled and Roma as victims of the Holocaust have often been embodied in the form of intense debates with those such as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer who argued that only Jews should be considered victims of the Holocaust.

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  • Detente In Historical Perspective : The First CUNY Conference on History and Politics, New York : Cyrco Press, 1975 ISBN 0-915326-01-9.
  • co-edited with Sybil Milton The Holocaust : Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide : the San Jose Papers, Millwood, N.Y. : Kraus International Publications, 1980 ISBN 0-527-63807-2.
  • co-edited with Sybil Milton Archives of the Holocaust : An International Collection Of Selected Documents, New York : Garland, 1989 ISBN 0-8240-5483-0.
  • The German Revolution of 1918, New York : Garland Pub., 1992 ISBN 0-8153-0739-X.
  • The Origins of Nazi Genocide : From Euthanasia To The Final Solution, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1995 ISBN 0-8078-2208-6.
  • Foreword to People in Auschwitz by Hermann Langbein, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8078-2816-5.