As part of the Humanities Center’s Fall 2025 speaker series on New Histories of Fascism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, Doris Bergen, the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, will present on how Weimar Germany’s democratic system collapsed piece by piece after the Nazi takeover in 1933. Dr. Bergen’s lecture will illustrate how democracies can be much more vulnerable than is often believed and serve as an occasion for the university community to reflect on warnings from this dark historical era of fascism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship for contemporary democratic societies.

Doris Bergen is the author of many books, including War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 4th edition, 2024), Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). She is also the editor of Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich (with Andrea Löw and Anna Hájková, Oldenbourg, 2013), Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation (Northwestern University Press, 2008), and The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.)

This lecture is free and open to the public.