Richard Grunberger
Richard Grunberger (7 March 1924 Vienna, Austria – 15 February 2005) was a British historian, who specialised in study of the Third Reich.[1][2]
He was born in Austria to Jewish parents. After the 1938 Anschluss with Hitler's Germany, he was put on the first Kindertransport train to leave Vienna. He was initially housed in a refugee camp at Lowestoft in England. After this he lived with a Jewish family, who were West End tailors in London. Grunberger entered their tailoring business. His desire for education however led to his taking A levels at Birkbeck college. He gained an Exhibition scholarship in History at King's College London.[2]
When he went to the Wiener Library in London, he expressed to a friend his frustration at the absence of a book that held together the masses of documentation surrounding Nazism and 20th Century Germany. A friend asked why he did not write one, and so he did. The product was A Social History of the Third Reich, first published in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It has since become a significant text for studying the social history of Nazi Germany in schools and at undergraduate level.[2]
Initially, much of Grunberger's leisure time in Britain was taken up by the communist youth group Young Austria. In spite of this, his political outlook was social democratic.[2]
References
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- Use dmy dates from August 2012
- Use British English from August 2012
- 1924 births
- 2005 deaths
- Austrian Jews
- British Jews
- British people of Austrian-Jewish descent
- Jewish historians
- Alumni of King's College London
- Alumni of Birkbeck, University of London
- Kindertransport refugees
- 20th-century British historians
- British historian stubs