Complicity in the Holocaust

Robert P. Ericksen is Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University. Ericksen is also a Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Kirchliche Zeitgeschicte (Contemporary Church History) and Association of Contemporary Church Historians. Ericksen is the author of Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (1985) and co-editor of Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (1999).

• 1. Why the Holocaust matters in a century of death; 2. Churches and the rise of Hitler; 3. Universities and the rise of Hitler; 4. Consent and collaboration: the churches through 1945; 5. The intellectual arm: universities through 1945; 6. Repressing and reprocessing the past: denazification and its legacy of dissimulation; 7. A closer look: denazification at Göttingen University; 8. Implications.

'Based on decades of his own research and complete mastery of both German- and English-language scholarship in the field, Robert Ericksen demonstrates convincingly how a critical mass of churchmen and academics in Germany enthusiastically embraced the Nazi regime and provided the rationalizations and adjustment of moral norms that permitted ordinary Germans to accept and even implement the regime's brutal and murderous policies.' Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill