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Richard David Breitman (born 1947) is an American
historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
best known for his study of
The Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
. Richard Breitman is an American historian who has written extensively on modern German history, the Holocaust, American immigration and refugee policy, and intelligence during and after World War 2. He has spent his career in the history department at
American University The American University (AU or American) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Its main campus spans 90-acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, in the Spri ...
in Washington, D.C., from which he retired as distinguished professor emeritus in 2015. He has written or co-authored twelve books and served for twenty-five years as editor of ''Holocaust and Genocide Studies'', a scholarly journal owned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.


Education and career

Breitman was born in 1947, in
Connecticut Connecticut ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. ...
. His grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. from
Odessa ODESSA is an American codename (from the German language, German: ''Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen'', meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) coined in 1946 to cover Ratlines (World War II aftermath), Nazi underground escape-pl ...
and Krakow in 1905 and settled in
Hartford Hartford is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The city, located in Hartford County, Connecticut, Hartford County, had a population of 121,054 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 ce ...
. His parents were American-born, his father, Saul, a businessman, his mother, Gloria (nee Salz) a homemaker. Breitman attended public schools in West Hartford, and he credits an inspiring high school history teacher, Robert Derosier, with bringing European history to life for him. Breitman graduated from Yale summa cum laude and earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern European history at
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
. His first book, ''German Socialism and Weimar Democracy'' (University of North Carolina Press, 1981), explored the tensions between socialist goals and democratic convictions in the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic. Not long after, Breitman read an article by the historian Walter Laqueur that traced the story of an anonymous German industrialist who in 1942 brought to the West information about
Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
’s planned use of gas chambers and crematoria to destroy European Jewry. This man’s identity had remained a mystery for decades. Breitman, after months of archival research, proved that he was Eduard Schulte, a prominent-but-secret anti-Nazi CEO of a large mining firm who traveled frequently between
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
and
Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
. Together, Breitman and Laqueur then wrote Schulte’s story that detailed the muted reactions to his warnings: ''Breaking the Silence: the German Who Exposed the Final Solution'' (Simon & Schuster, 1986; University Press of new England, 1991). Translated into several languages, it remains in print. In 1994, Breitman requested that the
National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...
declassify its holdings of World War II intercepts and decodes of enemy radio messages. The NSA Historical Cryptographic Collection, amounting to some 1.3 million pages, was turned over to the U.S. National Archives. In this mass, Breitman found a small file of ''British'' decodes of German police radio messages that revealed important information about the first stage of the Holocaust. Prodded by Parliament, the British government followed with its own, larger, declassification of German police decodes. Breitman mined both archives for his 1998 book ''Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew'' (Hill & Wang). Still in print in a number of languages, it examines the relationships among German, British, and American policies toward European Jews. Breitman then served as director of historical research for a small U.S. government body set up to oversee implementation of a 1998 declassification law called the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. This organization helped to declassify more than eight million pages of U.S. government records, and a team of four historians used them to write ''U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis'' (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Breitman’s best-known books are ''The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), which made the case for Heinrich Himmler’s central planning of the Holocaust; and a work co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, '' FDR and the Jews'' (Belknap-Harvard, 2013). In the latter, Breitman and Lichtman argued that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies toward European Jewry fluctuated substantially over time according to circumstances and political calculations and constraints, but that his record nonetheless compared well with that of Winston Churchill, and also with later presidents when they were confronted with genocide abroad. Both books won prizes. In 2019, Public Affairs published a book by Breitman about a previously overlooked mid-level American consul and diplomat based in Berlin from 1930 to 1939, Raymond Geist. Despite his modest rank, Geist was superb at dealing with Nazi officials and for urging greater use of the U.S. immigration quota for Germany to help Jews escape from Nazi persecution. Geist personally provided a visa to
Albert Einstein Albert Einstein (14 March 187918 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence f ...
(and his wife) and helped extract
Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
from
Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...
. In December 1938, Geist, who had a secret source high in the Gestapo, predicted the coming Holocaust. That he was secretly gay made Geist’s career and his achievements all the more remarkable. In 1999, Breitman received an honorary doctorate from
Hebrew Union College Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until ...
, and in 2018 he was given a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Holocaust Educational Foundation. He and his wife, Carol Rose (nee Wax), live in the Washington, DC area where he continues to write.


Publications

*''German Socialism and Weimar Democracy,'' Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981 * Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, ''Breaking the Silence'', New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. *Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, ''American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945,'' Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. *''The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution,'' New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. *''Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew''. New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998. *''Ausbildungsziel Judenmord?: Weltanschauliche Erziehung von SS, Polizei, und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der ‘Endlösung’,'' ed. Jürgen Matthäus, Jürgen Förster, Konrad Kwiet and Richard Breitman (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003). *Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, and Timothy Naftali, ''U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,'' Washington, D. C.: The National Archives Trust Fund for the Nazi War Criminals Records Interagency Working Group, 2004. *Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., ''Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-35'', Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. *German History in Documents and Images: Nazi Germany (1933–45) *''Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald'', 1935-1945" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). *Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, ''Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War'' ( U.S. National Archives, 2010) * Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, '' FDR and the Jews'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. (Winner of the 2013
National Jewish Book Award The Jewish Book Council (Hebrew: ), founded in 1943, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of qual ...
) *''A Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said about the Holocaust,'' Harvard University Press, 2025.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Breitman, Richard 1947 births Living people Yale College alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni American historians of the Holocaust