Richard Grunberger (7 March 1924 Vienna, Austria – 15 February 2005) was a British historian who specialised in study of the Third Reich.[1][2]
He was born in Austria to Jewish parents. His father died when he was young, and he was raised by his mother in relatively difficult economic circumstances.[3] After the 1938 Anschluss with Hitler's Germany, he was put on the first Kindertransport train to leave Vienna. He was initially housed in a refugee camp at Lowestoft in England. After this he lived with a Jewish family, who were West End tailors in London, and later was interned on the Isle of Mann.[3] Grunberger entered their tailoring business. His desire for education however led to his taking A levels at Birkbeck college. He gained an exhibition scholarship in history at King's College London.[2]
When he went to the Wiener Library in London, he expressed to a friend his frustration at the absence of a book that held together the masses of documentation surrounding Nazism and 20th-century Germany. A friend asked why he did not write one, and so he did. The product was A Social History of the Third Reich, first published in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It has since become a significant text for studying the social history of Nazi Germany in schools and at undergraduate level.[2]
Initially, much of Grunberger's leisure time in Britain was taken up by the communist youth group Young Austria, which functioned as a substitute family for him. However, he grew disillusioned with communism, and in his political outlook became a staunch social democrat.[2][3] He was a critical supporter of the State of Israel.[3]
