Gerald Fleming

He was a Linguist, historian, educator, and author whose investigations laid bare the full horror of the Holocaust. He moved with his family in 1927 to Baden-Baden. In1935, on the urging of British friends, he and his brother were sent to England as boarders at King's College. His own father, Artur Flehinger, with photographs of the events of Kristallnacht, the government-sanctioned reprisals against Jews on the night of November 9 1938, in Baden-Baden, culminating in the destruction of the local synagogue and the removal of Jewish men to Dachau. His father was released due to pressure on the government from Rotarian friends, and he emigrated with the family to Britain. At the start of the second world war, Fleming was interned in Canada, but he later returned to Britain to work in a munitions factory in Yorkshire. He then trained as a language teacher, graduating after a year at the Sorbonne in 1949. By now he was trilingual and perfectly acculturated in German, French and English. He became head of modern languages at William Penn school, Dulwich, south London. Fleming's appreciation of the ways in which prejudice can be engendered led him to a critique of visual propaganda and political cartoons, and at Surrey he introduced courses on humour and satire, analysing, in particular, the work of George Grosz, satirist of the Weimar republic and the Third Reich. Fleming's analysis of this area was quite a serious business, designed to expose the finely nuanced differences between German, French and English cultural attitudes to ridicule. His style throughout was decisive and emphatic. After he left Surrey, his reputation in the field of Holocaust studies led to his appointment in 1988 to the international commission of historians investigating the war record of Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general who was then president of Austria. Waldheim had become unwelcome in many countries outside his homeland; the commission found no evidence of his involvement in war crimes, though it concluded that he may have known more than he was by that point willing to admit. In 1993, Fleming was made a master of the University of Surrey, and awarded an honorary doctorate of letters in recognition of his scholarship.