The pre-eminent American historian of the Holocaust, who has testified in trials relating to Holocaust issues, will deliver the second of this year's Verne Moore Lectures in History at the University of Rochester.
Christopher R. Browning, who is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will discuss "Revisiting the Holocaust Perpetrators: A Look at New Evidence" at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 2 in Room 1-101 Dewey Hall on the River Campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Browning is recognized internationally as an authority on National Socialist policy toward European Jews during World War II. For three decades, he has conducted research in archives in the United States, Germany, Yugoslavia, and in Israel at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Authority. His publications include Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; The Path to Genocide; Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution; and The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office.
In the spring of 1999, Browning delivered the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University, which will be published under the title Nazi Policy, Jewish Labor, German Killers.
Browning has been involved in several trials related to the Holocaust. Currently, he is scheduled to appear as an expert witness in the libel suit of British historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. In her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Lipstadt describes Irving as being one of the most prominent and dangerous Holocaust deniers. The trial began January 11 in London.
Browning also was an expert witness in Britain's first war crimes trial, in which retired British Railway worker Anthony Sawoniuk was charged helping round up and kill survivors of a 1942 massacre in a Belarus Jewish ghetto. Sawoniuk was convicted in the spring of 1999.
In 1988, Browning testified for the prosecution in the second Canadian trial of Ernst Zündel, charged with the criminal offense of spreading "false news" likely to cause racial and social intolerance with publication of his pamphlet, Did Six Million Really Die?
Browning is currently writing a two-volume study of Nazi Jewish policy as part of Yad Vashem's multi-volume comprehensive history of the Holocaust. He also is working on a case study of the Jewish slave labor camp in Starachowice in central Poland, based on nearly 170 survivor testimonies.
The Verne Moore Lectures are sponsored by the Department of History and have been funded by a gift from University alumnus Verne Moore, Class of 1950, since 1996. For more information, call (585) 275-2052.