Richard Breitman

Richard Breitman
Occupation	Educator, historian, author
Notable works	The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and The Final Solution

Richard David Breitman, born in 1947, is an American historian best known for his study of the Holocaust.

Education and career

Breitman received a B.A. from Yale College (1969), an M.A. from Yale University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has spent most of his career in the history department at American University in Washington, D.C., joining the faculty in 1976, becoming a Professor in 1985 and a Distinguished Professor in 2011.

He has written extensively about German history, U.S. history, and the Holocaust. Well known books include FDR and the Jews (co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman); The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution; and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew. He is editor of the scholarly journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group.

Publications

• German Socialism and Weimar Democracy, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981
• Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
• Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
• Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew. New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998.
• Ausbildungsziel Judenmord?: Weltanschauliche Erziehung von SS, Polizei, und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der ‘Endlösung’, ed. Jürgen Matthäus, Jürgen Förster, Konrad Kwiet and Richard Breitman (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003).
• Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, and Timothy Naftali, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, Washington, D. C.: The National Archives Trust Fund for the Nazi War Criminals Records Interagency Working Group, 2004.
• Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-35, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
• German History in Documents and Images: Nazi Germany (1933–45)
• Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
• Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (U.S. National Archives, 2010)
• Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. (Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Booke Award)