Gerald S. Kaplan Endowed Lecture – The Nazi Menace, At Home and Abroad with Dr. Benjamin Carter Hett

Born in Rochester NY, Benjamin Carter Hett earned a J.D. at the University of Toronto (1990) and practiced litigation in Canada for four years before earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard (2001). He has taught at Harvard College and the Harvard Law School and, since 2003, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (Henry Holt, 2018), winner of the 2019 Vine Award for History and named one of the year’s best books by The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, and The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) named an editors’ choice by the New York Times Book Review.  His other books include Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (Oxford, 2014), winner of the 2015 Hans Rosenberg Prize, and Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford, 2008), which won the 2007 Fraenkel Prize and was made into a documentary film and a television drama for the BBC. Hett has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.