Peter Lieb
1974 (age 49–50)
Historian, author, military officer in the Bundeswehr
Werner Hahlweg Prize, 2006
20th century
Modern European history, military history
Education and career[edit]
Lieb holds a PhD from the University of Munich, where he researched the radicalization of warfare in the West in 1944. His dissertation was awarded the Werner Hahlweg Prize in 2006 and published in book form in 2007 as Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg? Kriegführung und Partisanenbekämpfung in Frankreich 1943/44 ("Conventional war or Nazi ideological war? Warfare and Anti-partisan fighting in France 1943/44"). Lieb was then a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich and the German Historical Institute in Paris. From 2005 to 2015, Lieb was a senior lecturer at the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.[1]
In 2015, Lieb joined the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. He is a member of the Military History Working Group and the German Committee for the History of the Second World War.[2] He also served as an expert witness at a war crimes trial of Josef Scheungraber in Munich in 2009.[3]
Historian of Nazi Germany[edit]
In his research, Lieb traces the German occupation policy and warfare in the Western theatre of war. He differentiates between the actions and motivations of the Wehrmacht and the SS. According to Lieb, the latter had led an ideological struggle, while the Wehrmacht was guided by its understanding of military expediency, but at the same time rarely protested against this division of tasks.[4] Lieb's 2007 book, ''Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg?, was positively reviewed. Sönke Neitzel praised it as an "exemplary investigation",[5] while Roman Töppel of the Institute of Contemporary History described it as a "work which sets the standard on the history of the war in the West in 1943/44."[6] The historian Armin Nolzen, on the other hand, found that Lieb had uncritically adopted "the perspective of the sources" and "underestimated the criminal role of the Wehrmacht in France".[7]