Heinrich August Winkler

Heinrich August Winkler
Heinrich August Winkler (2014)
Born	19 December 1938 Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (since 1946 in the Kaliningrad Oblast of the USSR / Russia)
Nationality	German
Occupation	Historian

Heinrich August Winkler (born 19 December 1938 in Königsberg) is a German historian.

With his mother he joined the westward flight in 1944, after which he grew up in southern Germany, attending a Gymnasium in Ulm. He then studied history, political science, philosophy and public law at Münster, Heidelberg and Tübingen. In 1970 he became professor at the Free University of Berlin. From 1972 to 1991 he was professor at the University of Freiburg. Since 1991 he has held a chair of modern history at the Humboldt University Berlin. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and has ties to numerous prominent politicians within that party, including former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He is the author of a book detailing a comprehensive political history of the Weimar Republic, among others.

During the Historikerstreit, Winkler was a leading critic of Ernst Nolte. In an essay first published in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 14 November 1986, Winkler wrote of Nolte’s essay "The Past That Will Not Pass" that:

“Those who read the Frankfurter Allgemeine all the way through to the culture section were able to read something under the title “The Past That Will Not Pass” that no German historian to date had noticed: that Auschwitz was only a copy of a Russian original-the Stalinist Gulag Archipelago. For fear of the Bolsheviks’ Asiatic will to annihilate, Hitler himself committed an “Asiatic deed”. Was the annihilation of the Jews a kind of putative self-defence? Nolte’s speculation amounts to that.”