Léon Poliakov

Origins and early life

Léon Poliakov was born in Saint Petersburg on 25 November 1910 into a family of the Russian Jewish bourgeoisie; his father was a publisher who named him after Tolstoy, and the family fled the Bolshevik revolution for France in 1920.

Work and career

He served in the French army, was captured at Saint-Valery-en-Caux in June 1940, escaped three months later, and joined the resistance under a false identity, smuggling Jews to safety and moving weapons. In 1943 he became secretary to a rabbi and helped Isaac Schneersohn found the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, and at the Liberation he was among those who seized the German archives, including Gestapo files on the Jews of France.

He served on the French delegation at the Nuremberg trials. Out of those documents he wrote Bréviaire de la haine in 1951, the first substantial history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, published when almost no one was yet writing that history and prefaced by François Mauriac. He then produced the five-volume History of Antisemitism, tracing the hatred from antiquity to the twentieth century, and in 1971 The Aryan Myth, on the racial theories that made it lethal. He spent his later years answering Holocaust denial with archives. He died at Orsay on 8 December 1997.