Graber's Book on Hitler's SS Still Going Strong

David Childs - Independent

Obituary: Gerald Graber

It is a tribute to Gerald Graber that his book on Hitler's SS, History of the SS, first published in 1978, is still going strong today. Library borrowings reveal this as does the fact that it was re- issued in paperback in 1996 and is to be published in Japan. His later book on the Nazis, The Life and Times of Reinhard Heydrich, published in 1981, is also still being borrowed regularly. Graber's first book, Stauffenberg (1973), was a biography of the anti-Hitler plotter Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. Perhaps he needed to reassure himself about this "good German" before confronting the evil deeds of Himmler and Heydrich.

Graber was fascinated by the Nazis all his life and this is not so strange when one remembers his background. He was born in Stamford Hill, London, in 1928, but his parents were of Polish Jewish origin. Had they remained in Poland they would have been in the path of the Nazi hordes and would probably not have survived.

Graber was haunted by this fact and posed again and again the question "Why?" Why were many educated Germans so anti-Semitic? Why were they prepared to order or carry out such murderous acts against women and children as well as civilian men? Even German Jews who had served with distinction in the Kaiser's forces in the First World War were not spared. In his History of the SS he concluded, "It is possible that, given sufficient brainwashing and indoctrination, anyone might be transformed into an instrument of barbarism."

In his biography of Heydrich he tells us much about this Nazi's musical education - his father owned a private musical academy - including his ability to give "exquisite" renderings of Beethoven and Mozart on the violin. Heydrich had doubts throughout his life about his Aryan ancestry, which Graber believed were unfounded. Graber rejected the view that Heydrich's, and other Nazis' self-loathing, because they feared they had Jewish ancestry, was the cause of the Holocaust. In his view they had imbibed anti-Semitism from their family and social circles.

Graber explains how Heydrich rose as the SS expanded but also made his mark with his successful efforts to get the Jews to emigrate from Germany and Austria before 1939. He was even prepared to work with the Zionists to attempt to persuade Jews to go to Palestine. Later Heydrich was to chair the notorious Wannsee Conference at which the extermination of the Jews was planned.

After graduating from the London School of Economics, Graber enrolled for further studies under Karl Jaspers in Basle, Switzerland, before going into the travel business just as the travel boom was beginning in the 1950s. He set up his own company, World Ways, operating from a small office in Upper Regent Street, London. One of his ventures, with Apal of New York, was to bring over American graduates to go on the 1950s equivalent of the "grand tour" of Europe starting in Holland and coaching through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, France, England, Scotland and Belgium.

Graber's business activities did not prevent him from following his hobby - the Third Reich. He moved to California in 1980 where he took up teaching for University of California Los Angeles Extension. It was there that he completed his last book, Caravans to Oblivion: the Armenian genocide 1915 (1996). Like Graber's other books this is very readable - no dry textbook.

The subject is still controversial. Graber argues that the Turks set out deliberately to destroy the Armenian nation. In October 1915, the military authorities rounded up and drove large numbers of Armenians into the desert, where as many as a million died. In this age of "ethnic cleansing" this book is entirely topical.

When he died Gerry Graber was working on a documentary novel about the Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated the Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath, in Paris, thus triggering the pogrom of November 1938 organised by Heydrich.

David Childs

Gerald Samuel Graber, historian: born London 10 June 1928; married 1953 Phyl Fraser (two sons; marriage dissolved 1981), 1982 Beverly Beyette; died Los Angeles 21 February 2000.

Copyright 2012 by Independent