Gerald Fleming was born Gerhard Flehinger in Baden-Baden in 1921. His German-Jewish background would strongly influence his academic life and lead to his legacy as one of Europe’s foremost Holocaust historians. The family moved to England following his father’s US manoeuvred release from a concentration camp, soon after the Nazi party’s rise to power. At the start of World War II he was briefly detained in Canada but returned to England to work in a munitions factory. He began his teaching career in 1949 and, together with cartoonist Kenneth Bird, pioneered a new form of language teaching featuring the animated characters La Famille Carré. But it is his research into the question of the significance of the Holocaust to Nazi regime that he will be most publicly remembered for. Years of research into documents emanating from Nazi Germany and SS records from Auschwitz, many of which had been kept closed to western historians, allowed him to trace patterns of codes and repeated euphemism that had helped to disguise Nazi plans for the handling and execution of Jewish people in death camps across Europe. In 1982 he published Hitler and the Final Solution and research he conducted in secret KGB archives was used in the 1994 BBC documentary, Auschwitz: The Blueprint of Genocide. Fuelled by a desire to counteract growing attention to revisionist historians, most notably David Irving, he wanted his work to stand as a record of the true horrors in modern history. “As the death camps recede into history, we can no longer assume that the world knows what once seemed so horribly certain.” Gerald Fleming died on February 25th 2006, aged 84.