Ingo Haar

Who is Ingo Haar?

Ingo Haar is a German historian. He received his Master of Arts from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and his PhD in History in 1998 at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His doctoral dissertation was on "Historians in Nazi Germany: the German history and the`'Ethnic struggle' in the `East'".

The book "German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945" of which Haar was a co-editor of received the Choice Award for "Outstanding Book of the Year" in 2005.

Dr. Haar is currently on the faculty of the University of Vienna. Previously he was associated with the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Berlin Institute of Technology.

Ingo Haar believes that civilian losses in the expulsion of the Germans fron eastern Europe have been overstated in Germany for decades for political reasons. Haar argues that Cold War political pressure influenced the findings of the Schieder commission and the 1958 West German government demographic study that estimated 2 million expulsion deaths . Haar maintains that the actual number of deaths directly related to the expulsions is between 500-600,000 persons based on the findings of the German church search service and the report of the German government archives. Dr. Haar maintains that the figure of 2 million expulsion deaths includes "a fall in the German birth rate, persons assimilated into the local population, military dead, murdered Jews and missing persons" Haar has criticized the Federation of Expellees for inflating the numbers of German victims of the expulsion of Germans after World War II,; the expellees' president Erika Steinbach in her reply accused Haar of reducing the number of victims.