The Department of German and Russian and the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies
proudly present the lecture

“Criminals with Doctorates:
An SS Officer in the Killing Fields of Russia,
as reported by the Jewish novelist Jonathan Littell”

by Henry Lea, Professor Emeritus
University of Amherst, Massachusetts

Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, 2006), focuses on the "Einsatzgruppen,"
death squads sent by the Germans across Russia during World War II to kill Jews and other
"undesirables." The narrator is an SS officer who becomes a murderer and lives to tell the tale.

Henry Lea, born in Berlin in 1920, received his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.
He served as a simultaneous interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials and remains one of two still
alive who served in the Einsatzgruppen case. He has published on literature and music,
including books on Gustav Mahler and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, with a forthcoming article
on "Dictionary-Making in the Third Reich: The Case of Trübners Deutsches Wörterbuch."

Wednesday, November 18, 2009,  at 7:30 p.m.
427 Waterman Building, University of Vermont
Information: (802) 656-1476
ADA: Individuals requiring accommodations please contact Doreen Taylor at (802) 656-3166 as soon as possible