A. Tooze: Der Krieg gegen die Juden: Strategie und Ökonomie als treibende Kräfte des Holocaust

Simon Wiesenthal Lecture Adam Tooze: The War Against the Jews: Strategy and Economics as Driving Forces of the Holocaust Date: Thursday, March 14, 2013 Location: Austrian State Archives, 1010 Vienna Research into the history of the Holocaust from a purely perpetrator-centric perspective—after the opening of archives in Eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War and the new research approaches of the 1990s yielded many valuable insights—is now reaching its limits. A synthesis of the results of the most recent research is now on the agenda. In this process, the perspective shifts noticeably toward a "socialization" of the Holocaust: not only in the German context, but also in the Eastern European context. However, this broadening of the perspective all too easily obscures the central control of the murder of the Jews and the ideological motivations of the perpetrators. The lecture will focus on the ideologically, strategically, and economically determined considerations and practices that connected the events in Central and Eastern Europe with the global war between 1938 and 1945. Adam Tooze teaches contemporary German history at Yale and directs the Institute for International Security Studies there. Previously, he taught at the University of Cambridge. In the field of Nazi studies, he is best known for his work Wages of Destruction (2006, German: *Ökonomie der Zerstörung*, 2007), a book that redefined the economic history of the Third Reich. He is currently involved in research on the history of the Reich Ministry of Finance during the Nazi era, as well as a history of the Reich Ministry of Economics. He is also completing a history of world politics between 1916 and 1933.