Gideon Greif – An Israeli Historian Documented the Holocaust in Germany While Denying the Massacre of Muslims in Bosnia

The German government has announced its retraction from awarding of the country's highest honor to Israeli historian Gideon Greif over his pro-Serb activities and his denial of the occurrence of genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the German news agency dpa reported on December 31, 2021.

It is noteworthy that Greif's research in "Israel" and the United States on units tasked with aiding the Nazis in the Nazi death camps has been widely hailed as pioneering.

Gideon Greif (70 years old) is an Israeli historian specializing in the history of the Holocaust and is known for his pro-Serb and anti-Bosnian Muslim activities, according to observers.

Unworthy of Honor

“The German Foreign Ministry has withdrawn its candidacy for Gideon Greif to receive the German Order of Merit, as scheduled,” the dpa said.

The Bosnian news portal klix.ba was the first to report the decision on December 29, 2021, and cited a letter sent by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to Bosnian historian and resident of Germany Esnaf Begic.

“This decision does not diminish the advantages that Professor Greif has gained in researching the Holocaust and the German Jews who immigrated to Israel,” the letter, published by the Bosnian media, said.

In November 2021, Bosnia warned Germany against honoring the Israeli academic, Greif, who is accused of denying the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, according to what was stated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bisera Turkovic, to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“If Germany had honored Greif, it would have contributed to the destabilization of the Balkans and was seen as a prelude to new conflicts, divisions and war crimes,” Turkovic indicated.

The award ceremony was supposed to take place on November 10, 2021, but the German embassy in Tel Aviv announced at the beginning of last November that it would reconsider whether Greif should receive the Medal of Merit for his research on the Holocaust, after a public outcry which focused on Greif’s views regarding the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

Speaking to Haaretz last November—in response to the German review—Gideon Greif claimed that “any cancellation of the award would be considered a German attack on Holocaust remembrance, and that Bosnian objections were fueled by anti-Semitism.”

“I cannot imagine that the German government would even consider not giving me the medal I deserve, because this would be interpreted as Holocaust denial,” Greif added.

Greif claimed that members of the Bosnian Muslim Brotherhood are responsible for organizing a campaign to discredit him as a Jew and an Israeli scholar.

Neither the German embassy in Tel Aviv nor the office of the Federal President responded to repeated requests for comment on Greif's criticism.

In response, Turkovic provided Haaretz with a list of Bosniaks who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Centre declared them to be righteous among the nations.

“The denial of the Srebrenica genocide is the same as the Nazi ideology of Holocaust and genocide denial,” Turkovic said.

His Career

Gideon Greif, born on March 16, 1951. He finished high school in Tel Aviv in 1969. Later, he graduated from the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University in 1976.

In 1982, Greif obtained a master's degree in Jewish history from the same university.

In 2001, he obtained a PhD in the same field from the University of Vienna in Austria.

Greif served as a visiting lecturer of Jewish and Israeli history at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin during the 2011-2012 academic year.

Gideon Greif's book We Wept Without Dears about the memory of the Holocaust inspired a film director to create a film under the name “Son of Saul.”

This film won the 2016 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, and it also won the 2016 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

What Happened in Srebrenica?

Gideon Greif was commissioned in 2019 by the leader of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina Milorad Dodik—who works to separate the Republic of Serbia from the Federation of the Bosnian State—to chair an international panel of inquiry to investigate the events of the Srebrenica massacre during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995).

In June 2021, the panel of historians chaired by Greif denied the genocidal character of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces, in a report that came to more than a thousand pages.

Historians have widely criticized the findings of Greif’s report as a historical review and denial of the genocide, and it contradicts the findings of international criminal courts and international law.

In Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladic killed more than 8,000 Muslims, aged between 7 and 70, during the Bosnian War in 1995, after Dutch UN forces operating there handed over tens of thousands of Bosnians to the Serb forces.

This massacre is considered one of the worst atrocities committed during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), it is the first mass massacre perpetrated in Europe since the end of World War II.

In 2007, the Hague Criminal Court ruled that what happened in Srebrenica was a genocide, in light of the evidence obtained by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

However, Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighboring Serbia have downplayed and denied it in some cases, despite the compelling evidence that proves its occurrence.

Former Serbian general Ratko Mladic was convicted in 2017 as the main suspect in the Srebrenica genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In turn, the High Representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, approved, on July 23, changes to the country's legislation to prohibit the denial of this genocide, and set a penalty for that with imprisonment of up to 5 years, as part of efforts to counter the Bosnian Serbs' attempts to deny this heinous massacre.

A Falsified Historian

Many historians and activists have decried the work of the Israeli historian Gideon Greif, famous for his pioneering research on the Holocaust, because of his alleged participation in the panel that denied genocide in connection with the 1995 Bosnian war and which also challenged the allegations of the International Criminal Courts.

Menachem Rosensaft, Professor of Law at Columbia University and General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, indicated in a statement to Haaretz that he was appalled by the insolent tampering of the truth by Greif's report.

“The German government's decision not to honor Greif was entirely appropriate, as his honor would have amounted to endorsing his deceptive distortion of the massacre of Bosniak Muslims,” Rosensaft added.

In turn, Emir Suljagic, Director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, tweeted on December 29, 2021 that “Greif was paid by the apartheid regime of genocide denial and the exclusion of Bosniaks from their history, just because they are Muslims.”

“This is how we should remember him for the rest of his life and into history,” he said.

“Greif’s report is on the whole a set of lies that we have been hearing over the years from Serbian extremists,” Suljagic added.

In turn, Marko Attila Hoare, a Balkan historian and associate professor at the Sarajevo College of Science and Technology, told Al-Jazeera on December 03, 2021 that “Greif's ideas represent a betrayal of academic principles by an academic for political and mercenary reasons.”

On its part, the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada (IGC) described Germany's decision to step back from honoring Israeli historian Greif was another major victory in the fight against genocide deniers and falsifiers of historical and judicial facts.

The Head of the IGC, Emir Ramic criticized German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for announcing his intention to reward historian Gideon Greif in November 2021.