British professor awarded Yad Vashem book prize

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A British university professor was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

Christoph Dieckmann of Keele University was recognized for his two-volume book “German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941-1944.”

The Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, in memory of Holocaust survivor Abraham Meir Schwarzbaum and his family members murdered in the Holocaust, is awarded for path-breaking scholarly research on the Holocaust.

More than 200,000 Lithuanian Jews — nearly the entire community of the country — were murdered in the Holocaust.

“Over the past two decades, many inaccessible archives in Eastern Europe have been opening to scholars, and Dieckmann’s study makes use of them and all additional relevant material, including survivors’ memoirs, in a variety of languages, including Lithuanian, German, Yiddish and Hebrew,” said Yad Vashem’s Dan Michman, chairman of the prize committee. “His monumental work is a shining model for how an integrative study of the Holocaust in a certain country should be written.”

The prize committee called Dieckmann’s work “a model for similar research to be done in other countries.”