St. Petersburg - Berlin - Paris

As a child, Poliakov had to flee the October Revolution with his parents and travelled to Paris via Berlin, where his father founded the Pariser Tagblatt and turned it into a popular mouthpiece for writers such as Heinrich Mann and Oskar Maria Graf. In 1940, Léon Poliakov was taken prisoner of war. After his escape, he joined the Resistance and took part in the rescue of Jews. During the liberation of France, Poliakov began collecting documents on the perpetrators and was a member of the French delegation at the Nu¿rnberg war crimes trials. As early as 1951, at the suggestion of Alexandre Kojève and Raymond Aron, he wrote his study "Le Bréviaire de la haine", the first systematic attempt to document the mass murder of the Jews. In contrast to German historians, Poliakov emphasised the central role of eliminatory anti-Semitism very early on. However, German historians struggling to interpret the Shoah have ignored the Resistance activist and autodidact in academia to this day.