22 Facts About Gerhard Weinberg

Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg was born on 1 January 1928 and is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II.

Gerhard Weinberg has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974.

Gerhard Weinberg received his MA and PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

Gerhard Weinberg recounted some of his childhood memories and experiences in a two-hour long oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Gerhard Weinberg has studied the foreign policy of National Socialist Germany and the Second World War for his entire professional life.

In 1958, Gerhard Weinberg made the discovery of Hitler's so-called Zweites Buch, an unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, among captured German files.

Gerhard Weinberg's find led to his publication in 1961 of Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928, later published in English as Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf.

Gerhard Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Red Army in 1945 as Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany.

Gerhard Weinberg noted that Hoggan's method comprised taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and simply ignoring evidence of German intentions for aggression such as the Hossbach Memorandum.

Gerhard Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives.

Gerhard Weinberg in turn published letters rebutting Barnes's and Hoggan's claims.

Gerhard Weinberg published dozens of articles on the war and volumes of collected essays such as World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II.

Gerhard Weinberg continued his studies of the era of the war even after the publication of his general history by examining the conceptions of World War II's leaders about the world that they thought they were fighting to create.

In that book, Gerhard Weinberg looked at what eight leaders were hoping to see after the war ended.

Gerhard Weinberg has continued to be a critic of those who claim that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler.

Gerhard Weinberg has established that Hitler regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat, which deprived Germany of the war that was intended to begin on October 1,1938.

Gerhard Weinberg has argued against the thesis that Chamberlain was responsible for the failure of the proposed putsch in Germany in 1938.

In 1983, when the German illustrated weekly magazine Der Stern reported its purchase of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler, the US weekly magazine Newsweek asked Gerhard Weinberg to examine them hurriedly in a bank vault in Zurich, Switzerland.

Together with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jackel, Gerhard Weinberg was one of the three experts on Hitler asked to examine the alleged diaries.

Gerhard Weinberg was elected president of the German Studies Association in 1996.

Gerhard Weinberg has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright professor at the University of Bonn, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum among many other such honors.

In June 2009, Gerhard Weinberg was selected to receive the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime excellence in military writing, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation.