Persecution of Homosexuals in Germany: During and After the Holocaust
Geoffrey Giles received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. After completing a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, he taught German and European history at the University of Florida for 35 years, before retiring as an emeritus professor in 2013.
Beginning in the 1990s, Giles led several traveling study seminars for college faculty to meet with museum staff at death camps and other Holocaust sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Foundation. Giles also served for many years on the State of Florida Education Commissioner’s Task Force on Holocaust Education. He continues to speak on the Holocaust at nationwide workshops targeted in particular for educators.
In 2000, he spent a year as the senior scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. conducting research on the treatment and victimization of homosexuals during the Third Reich. He continued this research as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich in 2003-2004, and has published numerous essays and articles on this subject in both English and German. In November 2015 he delivered a keynote address at the Sorbonne in Paris on Nazi concepts of masculinity and attitudes toward homosexuality. A book on the topic is forthcoming.
Professor Giles’ Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.
View Video: YouTube with Geoffrey Giles