33 Facts About Martin Broszat

Martin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history.

Martin Broszat held an honorary professorship at the University of Konstanz.

Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, when Martin Broszat was six, and World War II had started when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, and France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, as they had warned they would.

Martin Broszat graduated in 1949, then undertook graduate studies at the University of Cologne.

Martin Broszat obtained his PhD in 1952, supervised by Theodor Schieder, for a thesis on German antisemitism, Die antisemitische Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland.

Martin Broszat acknowledged having joined the Hitler Youth, but that a Nazi Party card existed in his name was first made public after his death.

Martin Broszat's card is one of ten million held by the German Bundesarchiv.

The historian Norbert Frei writes that making a false statement would have been risky, and concludes that Martin Broszat probably did not know that a membership card had been issued in his name.

Martin Broszat saw the primary supporters of the Nazis as the middle classes, who turned to Nazism to alleviate their anxieties about impoverishment and "proletarianization" in the wake of hyperinflation in the early 1920s and the mass unemployment that began with the Great Depression.

In 1962 Martin Broszat wrote a letter to the Die Zeit newspaper to "hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps".

Martin Broszat noted in the letter that a gas chamber was built there shortly before the end of the war to convert Dachau into a death camp, but it was never used.

Martin Broszat argued that the confusion in the public's mind between concentration and death camps, and the tendency erroneously to describe Dachau as a death camp, was aiding the deniers.

Martin Broszat wrote a letter to Wulf demanding that he retract his allegations against Hagen "in the interest of the tidiness of the historical document".

Martin Broszat accepted Wulf's version of events only after Wulf produced a war-time memo written by Hagen urging that sick Jews "wandering around" be shot down.

In Der Staat Hitlers Martin Broszat argued against characterizing Nazi Germany as a totalitarian regime and criticized Karl Dietrich Bracher and Ernst Nolte for advancing such a notion.

Martin Broszat's essay was first published in the Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte journal in 1977 and later in English as "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses".

Martin Broszat did accept that there was no evidence of a written order from Hitler to enact the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".

Martin Broszat's essay was the first account of the origins of the Holocaust by a respected historian in which responsibility for the genocide was not assigned entirely to Hitler.

Martin Broszat complained that Irving focused too much on military events at the expense of the broader political context, and that he accepted Nazi claims at face value, such as accepting the claim that the Action T4 "euthanasia" program of the "incurably sick" began in September 1939 to free up hospital space for wounded German soldiers, when in fact it began in January 1939.

Martin Broszat criticized Irving's claim that one telephone note written by Himmler stating "No liquidation" with regard to a train convoy in November 1941 of German Jews passing through Berlin to Riga was proof that Hitler did not want the Holocaust.

Martin Broszat argued that the "No liquidation" comment referred only to that train and was probably related to concerns that American reporters had been asking about the fate of German Jews deported to Eastern Europe.

Martin Broszat criticized Irving for accepting the "fantastic" claims of the SS Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff that he did not know about the Holocaust, despite the fact that Wolff was convicted of war crimes in 1963 on the basis of documentary evidence implicating him in the Holocaust.

Martin Broszat accused Irving of seeking to generate a highly misleading impression of a conference between Hitler and the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, in April 1943 by re-arranging the words to make Hitler appear less brutally antisemitic than the original notes showed.

Martin Broszat was a pioneer of Alltagsgeschichte.

Martin Broszat led the "Bavaria Project" between 1977 and 1983, a comprehensive look at Alltagsgeschichte in Bavaria between 1933 and 1945.

In "A Plea for a Historicization of National Socialism", an essay published in Merkur in May 1985, Martin Broszat argued that historians should approach Nazi Germany as they would any other period of history, without moralizing.

Martin Broszat used as an example the wide-ranging reform of the German social insurance system proposed in 1940 by the DAF, which he argued was in many ways the forerunner of the West German social insurance plan of 1957, with such features as pensions guaranteed by the state indexed to the level of GNP.

Bartov argued that Martin Broszat was calling on German historians to show more empathy for their own history.

Against this, the German historian Rainer Zitelmann suggested that Martin Broszat's approach was a fruitful one, arguing that just as not everything was evil in the Soviet Union, not everything was evil in Nazi Germany, and that the Nazi regime had accomplished many successful social reforms.

Martin Broszat was particularly critical of an earlier claim of Nolte's that Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization during World War II, had effectively declared war on Germany in 1939, on behalf of world Jewry.

Martin Broszat ended his essay by arguing that, to ensure the German people a better future, they should not be persuaded to become less critical of their past.

Martin Broszat's call for the "historicization" of the Nazi era involved him in a vigorous debate with three Israeli historians in the latter half of the 1980s: Otto Dov Kulka, Dan Diner, and above all the Franco-Israeli historian Saul Friedlander.

Martin Broszat married Alice Welter in 1953; the couple had three children.