Born on 23 August 1920 in Berlin (Weimar Germany's capital city), Wilhelm Leo Guttsmann was the son of an engineer father and a teacher mother.
His family were bourgeois, German and Jewish; in 1933 (following the Nazi's rise to power), state-sanctioned antisemitism made the country increasingly hostile for the Guttsmanns.
Following Kristallnacht, Guttsman was one of many young Jewish men rounded up and detained in concentration camps; he spent six weeks in Buchenwald.
[1] In England, he adopted Guttsman (with one "n") as his name and joined efforts with other German-Jewish refugees to plan their return to Germany and build a new social-democratic system of government there.
[7] Guttsman also appointed a team of specialist librarians under them, whose jobs were to order books in their subject areas; a novelty, this freed up academics' time for research, but it was a regime which would not last when funding cuts set in during the late 1970s and 1980s.
This used biographical data about Britain's frontbench politicians to analyse their social and educational backgrounds; it demonstrated similarity between the leadership of the Conservatives and Labour, key evidence for the notion that British politics had become based on consensus.