Eberhard Kolb

Professor Eberhard Kolb (born 8 August 1933, Stuttgart) is a historian, best known for his research of the German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Eberhard Kolb studied at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn, and attained a doctorate 1960 at the University of Goettingen on the topic of the influence of workers' councils on German domestic politics.

He wrote his habilitation in 1969, and one year later became a professor of modern history at the University of Würzburg. He served as a professor at the University of Cologne from 1979 until his retirement in 1998. In 1981 he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Professor Kolb has published outstanding books on Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. His learned summary of research on the Weimar Republic is mandatory reading for all students of modern German history. It has been frequently revised and reissued since its publication in 1984, and was translated into English in 1988.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp plays a key role in Kolb's work. In 1959 he was a participant in the first study trip on behalf of the state government of Lower Saxony for political education to Israel. In 1960 he compiled a scientific presentation of the camp's history. Initiated by the government of Lower Saxony, it was the first official Belsen exhibition.

Kolb's monograph, "Bergen-Belsen", was published in 1962 in an abbreviated form. It is now in its sixth edition. A "document house" built in 1966 at Bergen-Belsen was conceived by Kolb, and in the 1980s he was instrumental in the redesign of the memorial, which opened in 1990.

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