Richard Grunberger was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 historian, who specialised in study of the Third Reich.

He was born in Austria to Jewish parents. After the 1938 Anschluss

Anschluss

The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

 with Hitler's Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

, he was put on the first Kindertransport

Kindertransport

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...

 train to leave Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. He was initially housed in a refugee

Refugee

A refugee is a person who outside her country of origin or habitual residence because she has suffered persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or because she is a member of a persecuted 'social group'. Such a person may be referred to as an 'asylum seeker' until...

 camp at Lowestoft

Lowestoft

Lowestoft is a town in the English county of Suffolk. The town is on the North Sea coast and is the most easterly point of the United Kingdom. It is north-east of London, north-east of Ipswich and south-east of Norwich...

 in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. After this he lived with a Jewish family, who were West End tailors in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Grunberger entered their tailoring business. His desire for education however led to his taking A levels at Birkbeck college

Birkbeck, University of London

Birkbeck, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It offers many Master's and Bachelor's degree programmes that can be studied either part-time or full-time, though nearly all teaching is...

. He gained an Exhibition scholarship in History at King's College London

King's College London

King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...

.

When he went to the Wiener Library

Wiener Library

The Wiener Library is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a...

 in London, he expressed to a friend his frustration at the absence of a book that held together the masses of documentation surrounding Nazism

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 and 20th Century Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. A friend asked why he did not write one, and so he did. The product was A Social History of the Third Reich, first published in 1971 by Weidenfield & Nicholson. It has since become a significant text for studying the social history of Nazi Germany in schools and at undergraduate level.

Initially, much of Grunberger's leisure time in Britain was taken up by the communist youth group Young Austria

Communist Youth of Austria — Young Left

The Communist Youth of Austria is an independent marxist-leninist Youth Organization.-History:The Communist Youth was founded in 1918 as the Youth Organization of the Communist Party of Austria. When Dollfuss came into Power in 1934, the Communist Youth became the most important antifascist youth...

. In spite of this, his political outlook was social democratic.