Gerald Feldman; historian studied business's Nazi ties
NEW YORK - Gerald D. Feldman, an eminent historian of 20th-century Germany who concentrated on the intersection of economics and politics to explore subjects like the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the cozy relationships between financial companies and the Nazis, died of cancer Oct. 31 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 70.
Mr. Feldman was noted for his original research into how banks and insurance companies collaborated with Hitler's regime. He was part of a team of international historians that found documents proving that
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Mr. Feldman also firmly established how Allianz Group inspectors had toured concentration camps and were fully aware of what was going on. He later turned his attention to Austrian banks' interactions with the Nazis. While he sometimes said that it sounded blasphemous to study business matters underlying the Holocaust, he asserted that full understanding required it.
Mr. Feldman taught at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he held the Jane K. Sather chair. He also directed the institute. He wrote 12 books, edited 15, and wrote 130 scholarly articles, according to H-German, a website run by historians of Germany. H-Net called Mr. Feldman "one of the most respected and influential historians of his generation."
He held prestigious fellowships, including a Guggenheim and a Woodrow Wilson, and was named a Berlin Prize Fellow in 1998-99. He wrote books and articles in both English and German, many of which were translated to the other language. He advised the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.
Gerald Donald Feldman was born on April 24, 1937, in the Bronx. He graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1964. He went to Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1963.
Although he had no formal economics training, he gravitated to financial and business topics. His first book, "Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918" (1966), explored how heavy industry and socialist labor had collaborated to exploit opportunities provided by World War I.
His book "The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924" (1993) analyzed the stupendous inflation that followed World War I. In 1918, immediately after the war, seven German marks purchased one dollar; by the end of 1923, a dollar in Berlin bought 4.2 trillion marks.
Mr. Feldman asked how a state and its financial institutions could "effectively defraud" citizens through this protracted inflation, then bring about their acceptance of a new currency based on paper notes rather than gold. Part of his answer was not kind: "character deficiency."
Mr. Feldman said he turned to studying the Holocaust at age 60 partly because he was Jewish. But he wanted his conclusions to emerge from objective scholarship, not emotion, he said. As an example, Lloyd's List, a British newspaper specializing in insurance and other economic areas, said his Allianz book suggested that the company and its senior officers had "never really had their hearts" in collaborating with Hitler.
Mr. Feldman received what he called full cooperation from Allianz, as did the teams that investigated Deutsche Bank and other companies.
"In a sense, they're disappointed if we don't come up with something nasty about them," he told Newsweek in 1999. "They don't want someone else finding something we missed."
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Feldman was involved in a bitter dispute among historians over whether David Abraham, a young Princeton historian, had fabricated part of his book "The Collapse of the Weimar Republic." After praising the book before it was published, Mr. Feldman wrote a 40-page indictment of the final product for Central European History, a scholarly journal.
Others joined in, and Abraham, though he defended his work, saying errors were common in any historical work, ended up leaving the history profession.
Mr. Feldman was divorced from his first wife, Philippa Blume. He leaves his wife, Norma von Ragenfeld-Feldman, and two children from his first marriage, Aaron J. and Deborah Eve.
