Profile

Richard Breitman

Professor
Department of History

  • Additional Positions at AU

    Acting Department Chair
  • Richard Breitman teaches courses in modern European history and German history. He is the author or co-author of nine books and many articles in German history, U. S. history, and the Holocaust. His most recent books are editions of the diaries of James G. McDonald (League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1933-35, and chairman of President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, 1938-1945) in a series published by Indiana University Press. The first volume, Advocate for the Doomed, appeared in 2007, and the second volume, Refugees and Rescue, will appear in 2009. Breitman is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is owned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. government records under a 1998 law.

  • Degrees

    PhD, Harvard University
    MA, Yale University
    BA, Yale College
  • DOWNLOAD CV (PDF)

  • OFFICE

  • CAS - History
  • Battelle Tompkins - 119
  • On leave. Contact by email.

  • CONTACT INFO

  • (202) 885-2407 (Office)
  • (202) 885-6166 (Fax)
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  • FOR THE MEDIA

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Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

       
  • Phi Beta Kappa (Yale)
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  • Graduation Honors, Highest Distinction in History and Political Science and Summa cum Laude (Yale)
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  • Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship 1987
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  • Merit of Distinction Award, Center for Holocaust Studies, Anti-Defamation League for Breaking the Silence
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  • Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History for The Architect of Genocide
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  • Finalist, National Jewish Book Award, 1999 for Holocaust Studies, for Official Secrets
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  • Honorary Degree, (Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa), Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, 1999
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  • Who’s Who in America
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  • Ina Levine Invitational Scholar, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005-06.

Selected Publications

       
  • German History in Documents and Images: Nazi Germany (1933-45) (e-book available at  http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_docs.cfm?section_id=13
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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).
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  • Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York:  Hill and Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998).
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  • The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  1991.
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  • Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945,  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
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  • Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence, New York: Simon and Schuster,      1986.
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  • German Socialism and Weimar Democracy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

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