Dr. Sinner is presently working on a path-breaking essay on Georg Leibbrandt, an official Nazi government participant at the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference attended by such upper-level figures as Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich. The Wannsee Conference concentrated on how to effectively continue and complete the global extermination of Jews. Two motion pictures have dramatized the conference, the 1984 Heinz Schirk-directed Hitler’s Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference, and the 2001 HBO/BBC production Conspiracy: The Wansee Conference, directed by Frank Pierson. The actors Jochen Busse and Ewan Stewart played Leibbrandt’s role in the two films. Though involved at Wannsee and in the documented carrying out of tens of thousands of executions of Jews during World War II, Leibbrandt was never prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials, and went on to enjoy a successful and prestigious government career in West Germany until his death in 1983. At his death, Leibbrandt was widely and warmly praised and eulogized for his supposed service to humanity and his nation.
To add insult to injury, Leibbrandt’s brother Gottlieb (1908-1989), another rabid Nazi anti-Semite, immigrated to Canada after World War II. Gottlieb never renounced or apologized for his Nazi career or for the anti-Semitic essays he had published in the 1930s. Amazingly, in the later years of Leibbrandt's life, the Canadian Minister of State Multiculturalism added his official seal of approval to one of Leibbrandt’s published monographs on the history of Germans in Canada, a book in which Leibbrandt excuses rather than condemns Nazis. Like his brother, upon the death of Gottlieb Leibbrandt, he was lauded for his reputed service to humanity. Not a word of his Nazi past was mentioned in published obituaries.
Surprisingly, though a Wannsee Conference attendee, Georg Leibbrandt has received little attention, and his brother Gottlieb none at all, in over half a century of Holocaust scholarship. Few, if any, full-length scholarly essays devoted to Leibbrandt have been published. No single monograph on him has appeared, though some attention has been paid to him in recent dissertation work. Most historical studies contain only brief references of merely an anecdotal nature on this important figure. Sinner’s current research on Leibbrandt, based on unique archival and other previously unknown and unavailable documents, will be of international concern and interest. Sinner’s initial findings were, because of usual conference time constraints, presented in a highly abbreviated form at the 2003 German Studies Association conference in New Orleans.
Early Holocaust interpretation argued that SS personnel were chiefly responsible for the Holocaust’s mass murder. This model was particularly advanced and supported in post-World War II Germany. Eventually, the circle of perpetrators was widened by Holocaust research to include the rank and file of the German Wehrmacht. To associate common German soldiers with the Holocaust was not surprisingly quite unpopular in Germany. Dr. Sinner’s research is on the cutting edge of the school of historical interpretation widening even further the circle of Holocaust collaborators to include Nazi-era academic scholars and scientists. Without the collective efforts of German scholars and scientists in such fields as ethnography, anthropology, cartography, economics, archaeology, and similar disciplines, the Nazi government and military organizations would have been unable to practicably and concretely implement the Holocaust’s mass murder.
The most comprehensive English-language analysis of Georg Leibbrandt was published by Oxford University Press. Read the abstract of this important essay by Dr. Samuel D. Sinner and Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz.
A revised version of the same essay, containing important new findings, is available in the award-winning book, German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1920-1945, edited by Ingo Haar of Berlin and Michael Fahlbusch of Basel, Switzerland, and published by Berghahn Books in New York and Oxford. Read a synopsis and description of the book German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1920-1945, which has now also been published in paperback.
