A Spiral of Silence? How Germans talked about the murder of the Jews during the Second World War

Making History: Archives, Artefacts and Interpreting the Past - lecture series in partnership with the Wiener Library

Speaker:  Professor Nicholas Stargardt, University of Oxford

Date:      15 February 2012

Time:      6.30 – 8.00pm

Venue:    Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
             Room B33 (Torrington Square main entrance)

During 1941-1943, the murder of the Jews became well-known in Germany and widely commented on, both in private and public. What this spreading awareness of the genocide meant to German society has been widely debated amongst historians. In this lecture, Nicholas Stargardt argues that German perceptions of the Holocaust were primarily shaped by their changing views of the war, with their own predicament, rather than that of the Jews, taking centre stage.

Professor Stargardt is the author of: Witnesses of War: Children's Lives under the Nazis (Cape, 2005), and is completing a social history of Germany during the Second World War. He is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College.