[2] His work at the Institute included serving as an expert witness for the prosecution at the 1963–1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials,[3] and helping to debunk the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983.
In the 1970s he became interested in Alltagsgeschichte and examined everyday life under the Nazis, developing the concept of "Resistenz" (immunity) and co-editing a six-volume work about Bavaria under National Socialism, Bayern in der NS-Zeit (1977–1983).
[7][8] Born in Leipzig, Germany (the Weimar Republic), to a Protestant family, the second son of a postmaster,[9] Broszat attended the Königin-Carola Gymnasium from 1937 and completed his Abitur there in 1944.
The historian Norbert Frei writes that making a false statement would have been risky, and concludes that Broszat probably did not know that a membership card had been issued in his name.
[2] The Institute had been founded to study the Nazi era; the head of its advisory board at the time was Hans Rothfels, who also edited its journal, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte.
[18] Initially Broszat's work focused on German Ostpolitik (policy in the east), and antisemitism and fascism in south-eastern and eastern Europe.
"[1] In his book Der Nationalsozialismus (1960), published in English as German National Socialism 1919–1945 (1966), Broszat examined Nazi ideology, which he regarded as incoherent.
Broszat saw the primary supporters of the Nazis as the middle classes, who turned to Nazism to alleviate their anxieties about impoverishment and "proletarianization" in the wake of hyperinflation in the early 1920s and the mass unemployment that began with the Great Depression.
[11] In 1962 Broszat wrote a letter to the Die Zeit newspaper to "hammer home, once more, the persistently ignored or denied difference between concentration and extermination camps".
Holocaust deniers such as Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and David Hoggan made much of the fact in the 1960s that there had been no functioning gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
Hagen, who had worked during the war in the health department of the General Government area of German-occupied Poland, insisted he had done everything in his power to save the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and asked the Institut für Zeitgeschichte to support his version of events.
[24] Broszat wrote: Because of the multiplicity of conflicting forces the Fuhrer's will (even when Hitler had something different in mind) was ultimately only able to influence events in this or that direction in an uncoordinated and abrupt fashion, and it was certainly not in a position to watch over and curb the new organizations, authorities and ambitions which developed as a result.
Broszat's essay was first published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte journal in 1977[27] and later in English as "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses".
[32][34] In the same essay, Broszat was extremely critical of Irving's handling of sources, accusing him of repeatedly seeking to distort the historical record in Hitler's favour.
[35] He complained that Irving focused too much on military events at the expense of the broader political context, and that he accepted Nazi claims at face value, such as accepting the claim that the Action T4 "euthanasia" program of the "incurably sick" began in September 1939 to free up hospital space for wounded German soldiers, when in fact it began in January 1939.
[36] Broszat criticized Irving's claim that one telephone note written by Himmler stating "No liquidation" with regard to a train convoy in November 1941 of German Jews passing through Berlin to Riga (whom the SS intended to have shot on arrival) was proof that Hitler did not want the Holocaust.
Broszat argued that the "No liquidation" comment referred only to that train and was probably related to concerns that American reporters had been asking about the fate of German Jews deported to Eastern Europe.
[11] The six-volume Bayern in der NS-Zeit ("Bavaria in the National Socialist Era") depicted actions such as refusal to give the Nazi salute as a form of resistance.
For example, the Bavarian peasants who did business with Jewish cattle dealers in the 1930s, despite the efforts of the Nazi regime to stop them, often expressed approval of the antisemitic laws.
Resistenz referred to the ability of institutions such as the Wehrmacht, the Roman Catholic Church and the bureaucracy to enjoy "immunity" from the Nazis' claims to total power, and to continue functioning according to their traditional values, without having to challenge the regime's political monopoly.
[11] In "A Plea for a Historicization of National Socialism", an essay published in Merkur in May 1985, Broszat argued that historians should approach Nazi Germany as they would any other period of history, without moralizing.
[8] In 1990 the Broszat-Friedländer correspondence was translated into English and published in Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust and the Historians' Debate, edited by Peter Baldwin.