Professor Gerald Feldman, historian at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow on 23 January 2007.

Professor Feldman's lecture will look at the extent to which German and Austrian banks were complicit in the Holocaust.

Professor Feldman said: "If the Holocaust is understood to include the expropriation and despoliation of Jews in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany, then the German and Austrian banks played a key role in carrying out these measures. These banks also provided credits to enterprises and SS agencies involved in the employment of Jewish slave labour and handled other banking business for them as well. It is much more difficult, however, to determine the degree to which they were aware of the 'final solution' itself.

"As research has advanced so has the interest of historians in complicity in and knowledge about the Holocaust on the part of those not directly engaged in the murder of the Jews. Throughout my lecture I will be examining to what extent German and Austrian banks were aware of the role they were playing in the Holocaust."

The lecture will take place at 6.15pm on 23 January 2007 in the Western Infirmary Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow. The event is free and open to the public.

Kate Richardson (K.Richardson@admin.gla.ac.uk)

For more information please contact the University of Glasgow Media Relations Office on 0141 330 3683 or email K.Richardson@admin.gla.ac.uk

Professor Feldman, historian, received his doctorate at Harvard University in 1964 and is an expert in the area of German and European history. He has taught history at the University of California at Berkeley since 1963, and served as Director of the Institue of European Studies there between1994 and 2006. He is the author of numerous essays, studies and books on the history of industrial relations in World War I and Weimar Germany, the inflation period during the early 1920s, and the political culture in Weimar. In 1995 Feldman won the German Studies Association's DAAD Book Award for his work The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924. The same year, he and his co-authors received the Financial Times/Booz-Allen & Hamilton Business Book Award for their in-depth presentation of the history of the German Bank: The German Bank 1870-1995.

The University of Glasgow is one of the United Kingdom?s oldest and most prestigious universities, with an international reputation for its research and teaching and an important role in the cultural and commercial life of the country.

First published: 18 January 2007