Wolfgang Benz

The Holocaust

Benz is known for confirming that 5.29–6.2 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Benz worked on data from declassified Eastern European government archives in the 1990s, contributing to the death toll's confirmation. He concluded in 1999:

The goal of annihilating all of the Jews of Europe, as it was proclaimed at the conference in the villa Am Grossen Wannsee in January 1942, was not reached. Yet the six million murder victims make the Holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims — and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case — cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien [sic] (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.

Comparison of Islamophobia to antisemitism

Benz claimed in 2010 that "anti-Semites [sic] of the 19th Century and some detractors of the Islam of the 21st Century work with similar methods on their concept of the enemy", warning against Islamophobia, which he saw as a "declaration of war against tolerance and democracy". He was criticized by historian Julius H. Schoeps who considered Benz's claim "dubious – if not dangerous" and by journalist Henryk M. Broder.

They said that Islamophobia – unlike antisemitism – has a real basis, e.g. terrorist acts, the way dissidents are treated in Islamic countries etc. However, educator Micha Brumlik argued that as far as social-psychological aspect is concerned, Benz was right when comparing today's Islamophobia and antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th century. Historian Norbert Frei agreed with Brumlik.

Opposition to Polish monument construction

Benz objected to building a monument in Berlin to honor the Polish victims of Nazi occupation (1939–45). As the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Benz warned the Bundestag's president of the "danger of nationalizing memory" by building such monuments.

Monographs

As an editor

As a co-editor