HMD Guest Lecture 2024, ‘Fragility of Freedom’

On 23rd January 2024 our guest speaker to mark Holocaust Memorial Day was Professor Mary Fulbrook.

Professor Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at UCL. A graduate of both Cambridge and Harvard universities, Mary has written more than a dozen books, including both scholarly monographs and general overviews, and has edited or co-edited a dozen more. She serves on several international academic advisory boards concerned with the Holocaust, including the USHMM Academic Committee, the Buchenwald Academic Advisory Board, and Yad Vashem Studies Editorial Board. Her books include Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships, the Fraenkel Prize winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, and the winner of 2019 the Wolfson History Prize, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. 

During the evening Mary talked to our teacher community about her latest research and powerful new book, Bystander Society, Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as she considered the most troubling of questions, how did ordinary people become complicit in the murder of their neighbours?

A thought-provoking and challenging discussion of the historical evidence, please see the recording of this lecture.