Richard Grunberger (7 March 1924

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– 15 February 2005) was a British historian who specialised in study of the Third Reich. He was born in Austria to

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parents. His father died when he was young, and he was raised by his mother in relatively difficult economic circumstances. After the 1938

Anschluss The (, or , ), also known as the (, ), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938. The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a "German Question, Greater Germany") arose after t ...

with Hitler's Germany, he was put on the first Kindertransport train to leave

. He was initially housed in a refugee camp at Lowestoft in

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. After this he lived with a Jewish family, who were West End tailors in

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, and later was interned on the Isle of Mann. Grunberger entered their tailoring business. His desire for education however led to his taking A levels at Birkbeck college. He gained an exhibition scholarship in history at King's College London. When he went to the Wiener Library in London, he expressed to a friend his frustration at the absence of a book that held together the masses of documentation surrounding Nazism and 20th-century

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. A friend asked why he did not write one, and so he did. The product was ''A Social History of the Third Reich'', first published in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It has since become a significant text for studying the social history of Nazi Germany in schools and at undergraduate level. Initially, much of Grunberger's leisure time in Britain was taken up by the communist youth group Young Austria, which functioned as a substitute family for him. However, he grew disillusioned with communism, and in his political outlook became a staunch social democrat. He was a critical supporter of the State of Israel.

Publications

*''A Social History of the Third Reich'' *''Germany 1918–1945'' *''Hitler's S.S.'' *''Red Rising in Bavaria''

References

1924 births 2005 deaths Austrian Jews English Jews English people of Austrian-Jewish descent Jewish historians Alumni of King's College London Alumni of Birkbeck, University of London Kindertransport refugees 20th-century British historians Austrian emigrants to the United Kingdom {{UK-historian-stub