Hellmut G. Haasis

Hellmut G. Haasis (born 7 January 1942) is a German historian, author, and broadcaster. He is particularly known for his biographies of Georg Elser who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939; Reinhard Heydrich who was one of the main architects of the Holocaust; and Joseph Süß Oppenheimer who was executed in 1738 and in 1940 was the subject of a notorious Nazi anti-semitic propaganda film, Jud Süß. Haasis was born in Mühlacker, a town in the Swabia region of Germany, and has written two novels in Swabian dialect as well as a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of the Thaddäus Troll Literature Prize, the Schubart Literature Prize, and the Civis Media Prize.

Haasis was born in Mühlacker in southwestern Germany in 1942, the youngest of Edwin and Gertrude Haasis's three children. His father was a Protestant pastor who was killed in 1944 during an Allied Forces bombing raid on Strasbourg where he was serving as a purser on German military hospital trains. Initially intending to become a clergyman, Hellmut Haasis studied Protestant theology, history, sociology and political science at universities in Tübingen, Marburg and Bonn from 1961 to 1966. After completing his doctoral thesis under Jürgen Moltmann in 1971, he worked as a political commentator, writer and broadcaster. He also made study trips to Italy during the worker and student unrest there in the 1970s. His observation of a major series of strikes at Fiat's Mirafiori plant led to his 1976 article, "Fiat–Legende und Wirklichkeit" which discussed the company's "reorganization in the name of humanization" as an attempt to destroy its militant work groups. During that period he also travelled to Sardinia where he photographed the island's political graffiti murals. He later published the images as a series of postcards.

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