Saul Friedländer (Hebrew: שאול פרידלנדר; born October 11, 1932) is a Czech-born Jewish historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

[1] His parents attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French gendarmes, turned over to the Germans and were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In 1998, Friedländer chaired the Independent Historical Commission (IHC) that was appointed to investigate the activities of the German media company Bertelsmann under the Third Reich.

The 800-page report, Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, written with Norbert Frei, Trutz Rendtorff and Reinhard Wittmann, was published in October 2002.

[2] It confirmed the findings, first reported by Hersch Fischler in The Nation, that Bertelsmann collaborated with the Nazi regime before and during World War II.

However, Friedländer rejects the extreme Intentionalist view that Adolf Hitler had a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people originating when he wrote Mein Kampf.

In the 1980s, Friedländer engaged in a spirited debate with the West German historian Martin Broszat over his call for the "historicization" of Nazi Germany.

[7] Friedländer felt that Broszat's longue durée view of German history with stress on the continuities – many of them positive – between different eras would diminish the Holocaust down as an object of study.

[8] The first problem for Friedländer was that the Nazi era was too recent and fresh in the popular memory for historians to deal with it as a "normal" period as, for example, 16th-century France.

[9] The third problem for Friedländer was that the Nazi period was so unique that it could not easily be fitted into the long-range view of German history as advocated by Broszat.

In 1990, the Broszat–Friedländer correspondences were translated into English, and published in the book Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate edited by Peter Baldwin.