Gerhard Weinberg

Military Historian Weinberg to Give Bone Lecture on Oct. 11

Noted diplomatic and military historian of  World War II Gerhard Weinberg will deliver the Bone Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 11, at 7:30 p.m. in 138 Schroeder Hall.  The lecture, “World War II in Postwar Politics,” is free and open to the public.

The Bone Lecture Series was established in 1978 by Illinois State University President Robert Bone to bring distinguished scholars to campus.

Weinberg is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He was born in Hanover, Germany.  Weinberg and his family emigrated to England in 1938 and to the United States in 1941.  After becoming a U.S. citizen and serving in the U.S. Army during its occupation of Japan in 1946-1947, Weinberg received a bachelor’s degree in social studies from the State University of New York at Albany and a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Weinberg was on the faculties of the University of Kentucky and the University of Michigan before joining the History department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Professor at the University of Bonn and a Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Weinberg studied the foreign policy of Nazi Germany and the Second World War for more than 50 years.  His doctoral dissertation, “German Relations with Russia, 1939-1941,” was published as “Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941.”  He served as a research analyst for the War Documentation Project at Columbia University and as director of the American Historical Association Project for Microfilming Captured German Documents.  Weinberg wrote the “Guide to Captured German Documents” and after discovering Hitler’s “Zweites Buch,” an unpublished sequel to “Mein Kampf,” among captured German files, Weinberg published the translated version, “Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf.” 

Weinberg’s “The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany,” a two-volume study of Nazi Germany’s diplomatic preparations for war, portrayed Hitler as an ideologue determined to use foreign policy to effect a specific set of policies.  Weinberg published “A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II,” “World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II,” “Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History” and “Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders.” Weinberg contended that Hitler harbored plans for world conquest and formulated plans for the Holocaust long before assuming power in Germany.