1971: Professor Erich Goldhagen publishes Albert Speer, Himmler, and the Secrecy of the Final Solution in Midstream.
1973: Joachim Fest’s massive biography Hitler is published in German to critical acclaim. It is the first major work on Hitler since Alan Bullock’s influential 1952 opus Hitler: A Study in Tyranny.
1974: Gitta Sereny publishes Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka – probably the greatest single work ever published on the psychology of a ‘genocidaire’.
1975: Speer’s Spandauer Tagebücher is published in Germany and becomes a bestseller. It’s translated into English and published the following year as Spandau: The Secret Diaries.
1975: Primo Levi publishes his brilliant Il sistema periodico (ten years later published in English as The Periodic Table).
1976: Terrence Des Pres’ work The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps comes out – a vital and harrowing book (which should be far more widely known than it is today).
1979: Filip Müller, one of the very few survivors of the Birkenau Sonderkommandos, publishes his searing memoir Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers.
1980: The historian Walter Laqueur publishes The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s Final Solution.
1981: The British historian Tim Mason writes an essay, ‘Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, in which he coins the terms ‘Intentionist’ and ‘Functionalist’ to describe two strands of historiography regarding the Holocaust – intentionists (later renamed ‘intentionalists’) being those who believe that the Holocaust was all planned and ordered from the very top of the Nazi state, i.e. Hitler; functionalists being those who believe that no such ‘master plan’ existed, and that much of the Holocaust was organised, and improvised, by agencies and lower-ranked figures in the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany.
1985: Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah is released – the result of more than a decade’s work. The film-maker Marcel Ophüls calls it ‘the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made’.
1986: Primo Levi, in the year before his death, publishes the most important collection of essays ever written on the Holocaust, The Drowned and the Saved.
1986: The beginning of the ‘Historikerstreit’ (the ‘Historians’ Argument’) in Germany, with right-wing historians, led by Ernst Nolte, arguing that the Holocaust should not be seen as a unique event, and nor should the German people bear any unique guilt for the extermination. Nolte also attempted to draw an equivalence between crimes committed under German Nazism and Soviet Communism. Unsurprisingly, with the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and most German historians including Broszat and Mommsen, and the vast majority of international historians ranked against him, Nolte and his supporters lost this argument comprehensively.
1986: Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust is published – a very useful overall account of the Shoah (and under 1,000 pages too).
1987: Peter Hayes’s Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era is published.
1988: Steve Reich’s Different Trains is composed (the Kronos Quartet’s recording in 1990 winning a Grammy Award).
1989: The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman publishes Modernity and the Holocaust, which attempts to see the Holocaust in a wider context – looking beyond ideology at how modern constructs of bureaucratisation and rationalisation made the extermination possible.
1989: Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle is published.
1991: The Good Old Days – The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders (ed. Klee, Dressen and Reiss) is published in English – a riveting collection of eyewitness documentation of the Holocaust.
1991: Alan Bullock publishes Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.
1991: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel, is published to great acclaim, and later wins a Pulitzer Prize.
1992: Christopher Browning publishes his groundbreaking work Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland – a detailed study showing that a culture of terrifying obedience to authority, more than blood lust or violent antisemitism, was responsible for much of the mass killing in the Holocaust.
1992: Susan Griffin’s brilliant A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War is published – an extraordinary interweaving of memoir and history.
1992: Sven Lindqvist’s book Utrota varenda jävel is published in English as Exterminate All the Brutes – and makes a powerful argument that the Holocaust had its roots in earlier European colonial genocides.
1994: Between April and July, 800,000 people, around 70 per cent of the total Tutsi population, are killed in the Rwandan genocide.
1994: Jorge Semprún’s L’Écriture ou la vie is published in French (English edition, Literature or Life in 1997).
1994: GÖtz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross publish Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene – a brilliant study of the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme and the corruption of the German medical establishment under Nazism.
1995: In July, Europe experiences its worst atrocity since the Second World War, when over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims are massacred at Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb army under General Mladić.
1995: Gitta Sereny’s monumental work Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is published, the most revealing book ever written on Speer.
1995: Bernard Schlink’s The Reader is published in Germany, and two years later, in English (and eventually translated into forty-five languages).
1996: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants is published in English, the first of an incomparable series of books looking at the legacy of the Holocaust.
1996: Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is published, to some controversy. Goldhagen, like Browning, shines a light on the perpetrators – but, unlike Browning, he argues that an ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ of a specifically German type, played a critical role in the Holocaust.
1996: Mommsen and Grieger pubish Volkswagen and its Workers during the Third Reich.
1997: Martin Gilbert’s Holocaust Journey is published – a diary of a 1996 journey across Europe and sites connected to the genocide, made with his University College London Holocaust Studies MA students the year before.
1997: Laurence Ree’s much praised The Nazis: A Warning from History is broadcast by the BBC in six episodes.
1998: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is published in English.
1998: The first volume of Ian Kershaw’s definitive biography is published – ‘Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris.
1998: Philip Gourevitch’s brilliant work about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is published.
1998: Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century is published.
1999: W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (‘Air War and Literature’) is published in Germany (in 2003 in English as The Natural History of Destruction) – essays on the way post-war German culture dealt with the traumas of the Second World War.
2000: The Holocaust denier David Irving sues the writer Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, but he loses the trial at the High Court in London comprehensively, the judgment declaring him to be an ‘active Holocaust denier … anti-semitic and racist’.