Martin Broszat
| Martin Broszat | |
|---|---|
| Born |
14 August 1926 Leipzig, Germany |
| Died | October 14, 1989 (aged 63) Munich, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation | Professor, Historian |
| Known for | Arguing against characterizing Nazi Germany as a totalitarian regime |
Martin Broszat (14 August 1926 – 14 October 1989) was a German historian specializing in modern German social history whose work has been described by The Encyclopedia of Historians as indispensable for any serious study of Nazi Germany. Broszat was born in Leipzig, Germany and studied history at the University of Leipzig (1944–1949) and at the University of Cologne (1949–1952). He married Alice Welter in 1953 and had three children. He served as a professor at the University of Cologne (1954–1955), at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich (1955–1989) and was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Konstanz (1969–1980). He was head of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) between 1972 and 1989.
In 1944, as a university student, Broszat joined the Nazi Party. Broszat's protégé Ian Kershaw wrote about the relationship between Broszat's party membership and his later historical work:
"Broszat's driving incentive was to help an understanding of how Germany could sink into barbarity. That he himself had succumbed to the elan of the Nazi Movement was central to his motivation to elucidate for later generations how it could have happened. And that the later murder of the Jews arose from Nazism's anti-Jewish policies, but that these played so little part in the idealism of millions who had been drawn into support for the Nazi Movement (or in his own enthusiasm for the Hitler Youth), posed questions he always sought to answer. It amounted to a search for the pathological causes of the collapse of civilization in German society. But the attempt to find general causes in individual ideological intention and personal culpability seemed misplaced. This perspective pushed him, like Buchheim and others at the Institut, into looking to the structures of Nazi rule that implicated countless functionaries (and ordinary citizens) in the regime's inhumanity and criminality, even though they were far from sharing the ideological obsessions of the regime's leadership. And in his seminal essay on the "genesis of the Final Solution", published in 1977, Broszat specifically deployed a structuralist approach to widen responsibility beyond Hitler and the narrow Nazi leadership".
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