Norman Goda | |
---|---|
Born | 25 April 1961 |
Occupation(s) | Historian, author, editor |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Academic work | |
Era | 20th century |
Institutions | University of Florida Ohio University |
Main interests | Modern European history History of international relations Intelligence operations |
Norman J. W. Goda (born April 25,1961) is an American historian specialised in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is a professor of history at the University of Florida,where he is the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies. [1]
Goda is the author of several books on the international policy of Nazi Germany,the Holocaust,and the Cold War. He also serves as a historical consultant for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group of the United States National Security Archive,tasked with reviewing the previously-classified intelligence documents of World War II and its aftermath. [2]
Goda is the co-author of the book U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,which was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press and based on materials that were declassified under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
Reviewing the book in the journal History ,the historian Steven Casey called the book "remarkable" and noted that book "sheds new light on three controversial aspects of the war and post-war period:" how much US intelligence organisations knew about the Holocaust,the crimes of individual Nazi perpetrators,and the "extent to which US intelligence knowingly collaborated with war criminals during the cold war." Casey noted: [3]
Breitman et al. have used these [declassified documents] to write a series of measured case studies,which,unsurprisingly,confirm that many post-war exculpatory accounts by leading Nazis were highly misleading. Indeed,whereas figures such as SD Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenberg sought to depict themselves as reluctant Nazis who had tried their best to save the lives of concentration camp victims or to bring the war to a swift conclusion,the new documents confirm that they were actually ruthless individuals who not only had plenty of blood on their hands but also remained wedded if not to the Nazi cause then at least to their Nazi comrades long after May 1945.
Heinrich Müller was a high-ranking German Schutzstaffel (SS) and police official during the Nazi era. For most of World War II in Europe, he was the chief of the Gestapo, the secret state police of Nazi Germany. Müller was central in the planning and execution of the Holocaust and attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe—The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". He was known as "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller.
Horst Kopkow was a Nazi German SS major who worked for German Security police and, after the war, was concealed by British intelligence to use his knowledge during the Cold War.
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a United States government interagency group, which is tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to Nazi German and Imperial Japanese war crimes.
The ratlines were systems of escape routes for German Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in the Americas, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Switzerland.
Count Fidél Pálffy ab Erdőd was a Hungarian nobleman who emerged as a leading supporter of Nazism in Hungary.
Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović was a Bosnian Croat Catholic priest associated with the ratlines which aided the escape of Ustaše war criminals from Europe after World War II while he was living and working at the College of St. Jerome in Rome. He was an Ustaša and a functionary in the fascist puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia.
Robert Wolfe was a World War II U.S. Army officer, historian, and retired senior archivist of the US National Archives. He was wounded in both the Pacific and European Theaters of Operation. He commanded a recon team and also an anti-landmine platoon. He was a subject-matter expert on captured Nazi war documents. Wolfe worked for 34 years at the Archives, functioning as its senior specialist for captured German and related records.
Martin Sandberger was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era and a convicted Holocaust perpetrator. He commanded Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A, as well as the Sicherheitspolizei and SD at the time of Nazi German occupation of Estonia during World War II. Sandberger perpetrated mass murder of the Jews in German-occupied Latvia and Estonia. He was also responsible for the arrest of Jews in Italy, and their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp. Sandberger was the second-highest official of the Einsatzgruppe A to be tried and convicted. He was also the last-surviving defendant from the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.
Mykola Kyrylovych Lebed or Lebid, also known as Maksym Ruban, Marko or Yevhen Skyrba, was a Ukrainian nationalist political activist and guerrilla fighter. He was among those tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the murder of Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki in 1934. The court sentenced him to death, but the state commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. As a leader of OUN-B, he was responsible for the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
While the United States was involved in the prosecution of people involved in the war crimes of World War II, US military and intelligence agencies protected some war criminals in the interest of obtaining technical or intelligence information from them, or to recruit them for intelligence work. The relationships with German war criminals started immediately after the end of the Second World War, but some of the relationships with Japanese war criminals were slower to develop.
Die Spinne was a post-World War II organisation that helped certain Nazi war criminals escape persecution. Its existence is still debated to this day. It is believed by some historians to be a different name for, or a branch of ODESSA, an organisation established during the collapse of Nazi Germany, similar to Kameradenwerk and der Bruderschaft, and devoted to helping German war criminals flee Europe. It was led in part by Otto Skorzeny, as well as by German intelligence officer Reinhard Gehlen. Die Spinne helped as many as 600 former SS men escape from Germany to Francoist Spain, Juan Peron's Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Walter Huppenkothen was a German lawyer, Sicherheitsdienst (SD) leader, and Schutzstaffel (SS) prosecutor in the Hauptamt SS-Gericht.
The Gehlen Organization or Gehlen Org was an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities in the United States zone of post-war occupied Germany, and consisted of former members of the 12th Department of the German Army General Staff. It was headed by Reinhard Gehlen who had previously been a Wehrmacht Major General and head of the Nazi German military intelligence in the Eastern Front during World War II.
Helmut Beck-Broichsitter was a German Wehrmacht officer during World War II. Following the war, Beck-Broichsitter was involved in several neo-Nazi movements.
Eugen Dollmann was a German diplomat and member of the SS.
The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was important to the historiography of the Holocaust, but it has come under increasing criticism in the twenty-first century. Related claims include the claim that the Holocaust is external to history, beyond human understanding, a civilizational rupture, and something that should not be compared to other historical events. Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust, a frame that is preferred by proponents of Zionist narratives.
Richard David Breitman, is an American historian best known for his study of the Holocaust.
Heinz Michael Pannwitz was a German war criminal, Nazi Gestapo officer and later Schutzstaffel (SS) officer. Pannwitz was most notable for directing the investigation into the assassination of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May 1942 in Prague. In the last two years of the war, Pannwitz ran the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle, a combined Abwehr and Gestapo counterintelligence operation against the Red Orchestra espionage network, in France and the Low Countries.
The Order Police battalions were militarised formations of the German Ordnungspolizei during the Nazi era. In World War II, they were subordinated to the SS and deployed in German-occupied areas, specifically the Army Group Rear Areas and territories under German civilian administration. Alongside detachments from the Einsatzgruppen and the Waffen-SS, these units perpetrated mass murder of the Jewish population and were responsible for large-scale crimes against humanity targeting civilian populations.
Aleksandras Lileikis was the chief of the Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania and a perpetrator of the Holocaust in Lithuania. He signed documents handing at least 75 Jews in his control over to Ypatingasis būrys, a Lithuanian collaborationist death squad, and is suspected of responsibility in the murder of thousands of Lithuanian Jews. After the 1944 Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he fled to Germany as a displaced person. Refused permission to immigrate to the United States because of his Nazi past, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s. In 1955, his second application for permission to immigrate was granted and he settled in Norwood, Massachusetts, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1976. Eli Rosenbaum, an investigator for the Office of Special Investigations, uncovered evidence of Lileikis' war crimes; proceedings for his denaturalization were opened in 1994 and concluded with Lileikis being stripped of his United States citizenship. He returned to Lithuania, where he was charged with genocide in February 1998. It was the first Nazi war crimes prosecution in the post-Soviet block of Europe. He died of a heart attack in 2000 before a verdict was reached.