[3] From 1975 until his retirement in 2001, Friedlander served as a professor in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
The son of physician Bernhard Fritz Friedländer and Ruth Friedländer, née Löwenthal,[4] Henry Friedlander was married to fellow historian Sybil Milton (1941–2000),[2] who has a German Studies Association memorial prize named after her.
[citation needed] Like Friedlander, Sybil Milton supported a more expansive, inclusive definition of the Holocaust, arguing against the "exclusivity of emphasis on Judeocide in most Holocaust literature [that] has generally excluded Gypsies (as well as blacks and the handicapped) from equal consideration",[8] and exchanging views on the topic with Yehuda Bauer.
[citation needed] It was only later, in 1941, that the experts from the T4 program were imported by the SS to help design, and later run, the death camps for the Jews of Europe.
[citation needed] Friedlander did not deny the importance of the Nazi's antisemitic ideology, but, in his view, the T4 program was the crucial seed that gave birth to the Holocaust.