Peter Longerich
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Professor Peter Longerich (born 1955, in Krefeld, Germany) is a German historian.
In 2002-03, Professor Longerich was the third holder of the Visiting Chair at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt. In 2003-04, he was J.B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, where he worked on a biography of Heinrich Himmler. In 2005-06, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Professor Longerich is the Director of the Research Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth-Century History at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), where he works alongside David Cesarani. His major research interests include the history of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Heinrich Himmler.
He has appeared in the media to comment upon the links between Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, which he believes implicitly exist, as well as on related topics[1]. He published a book on this topic in 2003 titled The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution. This stance has given him some notoriety amongst Holocaust deniers, and also led to his calling as a major witness in the libel trial between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt.[2]
Historian Ian Kershaw called Peter Longerich "one of the leading German authorities on the Holocaust and the author of an outstanding study of Nazi extermination policies".[3]
