Loyola University New Orleans’ Department of History presents guest lecturer Geoff Megargee, Ph.D., in a lecture, “A Blind Eye and Dirty Hands: The German Army's Crimes in the East,” on Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. in Monroe Hall, Room 157. The event is free and open to the public.

“One of the persistent myths to come out of the Second World War is that the German armed forces – the Wehrmacht – fought an honorable war, and did not involve itself in the Nazi regime’s horrible crimes,” said Megargee. “In reality, the Wehrmacht’s senior leaders worked hand-in-hand with Adolf Hitler and the Schutzstaffel in violating both legal and moral norms, especially during the campaigns in Poland and the Soviet Union. The generals shared the Nazis’ vision of Germany’s racial and cultural superiority. From that basis, they planned a program of conquest, enslavement, starvation and massacre without equal in modern history.”

Megargee is a senior applied research scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A leading expert on the Holocaust, he is the author of “Inside Hitler’s High Command,” which received the 2001 Distinguished Book Award of the Society of Military History. In addition, he is organizing and editing a multivolume encyclopedic history of the camps and ghettos in Nazi-dominated Europe.

For more information, contact Loyola history professor Waitman Beorn, Ph.D., at 504-865-2564 or wbeorn@loyno.edu.