Horst Boog

Horst Boog (5 January 1928 – 8 January 2016) was a German historian who specialised in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. He was the research director at the Military History Research Office (MGFA). Boog was a contributor to several volumes of the seminal work Germany and the Second World War from the MGFA. He was an expert on the Luftwaffe and the German side of the aerial war in Europe during World War II.

Boog also wrote for the extreme conservative/far right newspaper Junge Freiheit and became politically active in context of debates about the Allied strategic bombing during World War II. Since the early 1990s almost all of his work concentrated on attempting to claim that Nazi Germany did not start bombing of civilians.

Education and career
Born in 1928 in Merseburg, Horst Boog grew up in Nazi Germany. In 1944, he joined the Hitler Youth and trained as a glider pilot. Towards the end of the war, he was drafted into the Volkssturm. Unable to secure a placement for university studies in the difficult economic conditions of post-war Germany, he attended a foreign-language school in Leipzig. Subsequently, Boog worked as a translator at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. For the academic year 1949–50, he received a scholarship as an exchange student at Middlebury College in the United States, where he earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts in history and philosophy.

Returning from the U.S., Boog worked at the Federal Intelligence Service. He attended evening classes at the University of Stuttgart in 1950/51 and took unpaid time off to attend classes at the University of Heidelberg. In 1965 he earned his PhD under the guidance of at Heidelbeg; the topic of his dissertation was the career of Ernst Graf zu Reventlow (1869–1943), a German naval officer, journalist and Nazi politician.

Military historian of Nazi Germany
Boog joined the Military History Research Office (MGFA) at Freiburg, where he became a senior research director. While at MGFA, Boog initiated the first scientific conference on the German air war of World War II. Boog contributed to several volumes of the seminal work Germany and the Second World War. Since the 1980s, he was an internationally recognized expert on the Luftwaffe and on the laws of war, such as the right to war (jus ad bellum) and the law of war (jus in bello).{{sfn|Benda-Beckmann|2010|pp=170–171} In his works he started to identify with the Luftwaffe{{sfn|Benda-Beckmann|2010|pp=199} and he made a divide between the Nazis and British on one hand and "respectable Germans", writing about "brave decisions and personal courage" of Wehrmacht General Staff.

Defense of German bombing campaigns
In his works Boog defended terror bombings of Guernica, Rotterdam and Warsaw and claimed Luftwaffe was engaging in "tactical" attacks compared to "terror bombings" by the RAF{

In his writings Boog aimed at portraying Allied bombings of Nazi Germany as equal to Nazi crimes

Political activity
In his later political writings starting from mid-90s Boog engaged in criticism of German guilt for Second World War, which he accused of "hypersensitivity" and claimed that just because Hitler was presented as "villain" everything done in his name was presented as "wrong" Boog asserted that it was Germany that was "victim" during Second World War air war and not everything done in Nazi Germany was "wrong" or "evil". In doing so he continued a narrative that presented Germans as suffering in Second World War and majority of Germans as "respectable"

In English

 * Germany and the Second World War:
 * Vol. IV: The Attack on the Soviet Union, with Joachim Hoffmann, Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär
 * Vol. VI: The Global War 1941–1943, with Werner Rahn, and Bernd Wegner
 * Vol. VII: The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia 1943–1944/5, with and Detlef Vogel

In German

 * Graf Ernst zu Reventlow (1869–1943). Eine Studie zur Krise der deutschen Geschichte seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg, 1965.
 * Die deutsche  Luftwaffenführung  1935–1945. Führungsprobleme. Spitzengliederung. Generalstabsausbildung. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-421-01905-3.