Norbert Frei

Frei's longer-term research projects concerned the practice of reparation in Germany and Israel since 1952 and the history of the Flick Group in the Third Reich, both completed in 2009.

Norbert Frei (born March 3, 1955, in Frankfurt) is a German historian.

He holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and leads the Jena Center of 20th Century History.

Frei's research work investigates how German society came to terms with Nazism and the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II.

Larger ongoing research projects concern the history of political education in the Federal Republic and the experience of the long transformation in East Germany (1970-2010).

From 1973 to 1978 Frei studied modern history, political and communication sciences in Munich, where he also completed editorial training at the German School of Journalism.

In 1979, he received his doctorate with a thesis on the "National Socialist conquest of the provincial press".

Between 1979 and 1997 he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.

He was at Harvard University in 1985 and 1986, on a John F. Kennedy Fellowship.

While there, from 1987 he worked as an editorial member of quarterly periodicals for contemporary history and was editor of the series of quarterly issues.

For the years 1995 and 1996 he was a freelance Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

After his time at the University of Bielefeld in 1996, he wrote a highly regarded study on the policies of the Adenauer era, in book form titled Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit ("Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration").

From 1996 to 2003 and again since 2018 he worked on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt.

Frei joined the Ruhr University Bochum in 1997.

In 1997 Frei investigated how the myth of the clean Wehrmacht was created through the official policies of the West German government led by Konrad Adenauer.

His book was called Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit ("Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration").

Frei wrote that the widespread demand for the freedom of Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of World War II was an indirect admission of the entire German society's enmeshment in Nazism.

He added the war crimes trials were a painful reminder of the nature of the Third Reich that many ordinary people had identified with.

In this context, there was an overwhelming demand for the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht.

Monographs

Publications

Since 1999 he is Chairman of the Scientific Board of Trustees of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.

From 1999 to 2002 he was a member of the Independent Historical Commission for the Study of the History of Bertelsmann in the "Third Reich".

From 2000 to 2016 Frei was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for German History at the University of Tel Aviv.

In his 2000 book Standort-und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz 1940–1945 ("Auschwitz 1940-1945 Concentration Camp Commands and Command Orders"), Frei published a collection of documents from eastern European archives.

For the summer semester 2005 he moved to the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

From 2005 to 2017, he was chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2005, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appointed Frei to the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office, which thoroughly examined the history of the Foreign Service in National Socialism and its handling of this past after 1945.

For the years 2008 and 2009 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In the academic.

In year 2010/2011, he taught as Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.

In October 2010, the Commission published its findings as a book entitled The Office and the Past, followed by a controversial discussion.

In 2011 Frei was elected as a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig.

Since 2012 Frei has led the interdisciplinary working group "Human Rights in the 20th Century" of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, which also runs the website "Sources on the History of Human Rights".

Frei participated in numerous contemporary historical debates and endeavors to convey scientific findings to a broader public.

In the summer semester of 2013, he held a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2015, right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers such as Ursula Haverbeck and Hans Püschel cherry-picked information from the book in order to argue that The Holocaust did not take place.

In a 2015 television interview on the mainstream German ARD channel, Frei explained that the book contains a wealth of information about Auschwitz concentration camp and also Birkenau.

Since 2016, he has written a column in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a national daily newspaper.

In the summer semester of 2019 he was Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor in The Department of German Studies of Stanford University.

Frei is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards and commissions.