Martin Rumscheidt. Courtesy photo.
Martin Rumscheidt will speak about his experience as the son of a man complicit in Nazi crimes as part of the Heilbronner Lecture series on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017 at 5 p.m. in 115 Murkland Hall. The lecture, titled "White Collar Crimes Against Humanity: IG Farben Auschwitz, My Father's Company," is free and open to the public.
Rumscheidt is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada and retired professor of historical theology at the University of Windsor, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Charles University, Prague. He is the translator of "Act and Being" (1996) in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, and cotranslator with the late Barbara Rumscheidt of Soelle’s "Against the Wind" (1999) and "The Silent Cry" (2001).
Rumscheidt’s father was an employee of IG Farben, the chemical company and second largest producer in Hitler's military-industrial complex. The senior Rumscheidt’s colleague and close friend Walter Dürrfeld was in charge of constructing and administering IG Farber Auschwitz-Monowitz, a production site that drew the majority of its workforce from the Birkenau concentration camp. Dürrfeld was sentenced to 8 years in prison by the Nuremberg court for his crimes, though he was released early. Rumscheidt’s father never addressed the implications of his work for IG Farben and its participation in the "extermination through labor" program the company implemented at Monowitz.
The Hans Heilbronner lecture series honors the memory of Hans Heilbronner, professor of history, who served the University of New Hampshire with distinction from 1954 until 1991. This event is sponsored by the Endowed Fund for Holocaust Education.
More information can be found at: https://cola.unh.edu/heilbronner2017
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Written By:
Susan Dumais '88 '02G | College of Liberal Arts
