Maxime Steinberg

His father had immigrated from Poland in 1930.

During World War II, his parents were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps in the Holocaust.

His mother was killed.

Maxime and his brother survived the war as hidden children (enfants cachés) in rural Walloon Brabant.

Steinberg studied at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) under Jean Stengers, initially interested in the history of the Belgian far-left.

He worked as a history teacher and was active within the General Union of Public Services (Centrale Générale des Services Publics, CGSP) and was political secretary of the education section of the Communist Party of Belgium.

Maxime Steinberg (1936–2010) was a Belgian historian and teacher who wrote extensively on the Holocaust in Belgium.

Maxime Steinberg was born into a Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium, on 13 December 1936.

There had been approximately 66,000 Jews living in Belgium on the eve of the German invasion of May 1940 of whom at least 28,000 were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps.

Only approximately 4,000 held Belgian citizenship.

According to the historian Lieven Saerens, the series

"analysed in minute detail the steps taken by the Germans to further isolate the Jews and the devastating role which the 'policy of the lesser evil' of the Belgian authorities had played here. He analysed what he described as the 'xenophobic paradox of the Endlösung'. He described how the occupier had taken the xenophobia of the Belgian authorities into account in the execution of the 'Endlösung'. Steinberg did not conceive this xenophobia as a manifest, omnipresent hatred of aliens, but as the historical fact that the Belgian authorities did not feel responsible for the aliens who resided on the Belgian territory. Only when the Jews who had been naturalised as Belgians were concerned did a formal protest from the Belgian authorities follow. The responsibility of the Association of Jews in Belgium, founded by the occupier, was given due attention. But just as much did he do justice to the non-Jewish helpers."

Steinberg was also known as a public historian.

He served as a historical expert witness called during the much-publicized trial of Kurt Asche in West Germany (1980–81) and was on the committee responsible for designing the permanent exhibition at the Museum of the Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen, Belgium in 1995.

He was also consulted by the Auschwitz Museum.

In 1982, he returned to ULB to work as an associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Judaism (Institut d'Etudes du Judaïsme).

He has been described as "Belgium's principal Holocaust historian" and was best known for his three-part history of the subject entitled L'Étoile et le Fusil (French; ), published in 1983–87.

Steinberg is best known for his magnum opus on the Holocaust in Belgium, published as L'Étoile et le Fusil ("The Star and the Rifle") between 1983 and 1987 which grew out of his doctoral dissertation.

The series "revolutionised historiography on the persecution of the Jews in Belgium".

It was published in three volumes (four tomes), representing the first scholarly narrative on the subject.

He completed his doctoral thesis on the Holocaust in Belgium in 1987 under Stengers' supervision.

He was the first academic historian in Belgium to focus directly on the Holocaust.

His role in Belgian historiography has been compared to that of Serge Klarsfeld in France.

He was one of the experts consulted on the literary hoax Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997) by Misha Defonseca.

Steinberg was a member of the Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique.

He was a vocal public critic of Holocaust denial.

Steinberg's life was the subject of the documentary Maxime Steinberg, un seul homme peut faire la différence which was broadcast on RTBF on 25 September 2022.