Shlomo Aronson, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, arrived in Tucson in late August as a visiting professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for Judaic Studies. “I was very much interested in the impact of the Holocaust on us Israelis,” says the author of the recently published “Hitler, the Allies and the Jews.”

A native Israeli, Aronson says his mother’s family was totally annihilated — over 100 women, children and men — in Poland during the Holocaust. His mother was the lone survivor because she had gone to Palestine in the late ’20s. She met Aronson’s father, the son of the Zionist chief rabbi of Kiev, while she was doing charitable work in a Warsaw prison. Aronson’s father was on his way from the Soviet Union to Palestine, but was arrested by the Poles for entering the country illegally.

It was Aronson’s family history that led him to study in Germany from 1962 to 1967. As a graduate student at Hebrew University, he had covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for Israeli radio in Tel Aviv for two years. Following the trial, Aronson went to Germany to conduct the “first scholarly research on the background, the education and careers of the high echelon of the SS,” which resulted in his doctoral dissertation. The study, he says, is still used after being published as a book entitled “Heidrich.”

“Most [of the men] who created the machinery of destruction were still alive and kicking,” says Aronson. Two of the most prominent Nazis he interviewed were Dr. Werner Best, the deputy director of the Gestapo, and Albert Spier, the Nazi armaments minister, often considered Hit­ler’s architect. Aronson wanted to know why they joined the SS, and “whether from the beginning they were aiming at Auschwitz, or was it a process that took some time till they adopted the decision to kill all the Jews?”

“It was just terrible” to meet these Gestapo officers face to face, he says. “But I felt that if I hadn’t done it no one else would, which was true. By now all of them are dead.” 

The response of these former Nazis was to blame others for what happened, says Aronson, adding that during the 1960s, for Germans “the Nazi past was taboo and they were talking about their glorious days.” Many confrontations developed while he was conducting his research. For example, the head of the storm troopers “lived in a very beautiful villa not far from Munich and he refused to talk to me. So I simply rung his bell again and inserted my shoe.” The former Nazi official asked Aronson, “Have you served as an officer in your army?”

Aronson replied that he had and the former storm trooper said, “Well, I’m ready to talk with you as an officer to an officer.” Aronson answered, “You were not an officer; you were a gang leader.”

When he returned to Israel, Aronson became the first head of news for Israeli television, but after two years he immersed himself in academia again at Hebrew University.

With the start of the ’67 war, Aronson says he was “more focused on our own politics and foreign affairs.” Now, at age 70, before retiring, he wanted to come back to the States to a place “where I could sit down peacefully and write,” he says. Aronson points out that in Israel “you listen to the news every hour on the hour. You live the realities of the country in a way that doesn’t give you perspective, which is necessary to even evaluate the recent war, because next door a neighbor has lost his son and your best friend has a wounded brother in the hospital.

“I don’t think Israel has lost the war in Lebanon,” says Aronson. But he is “not sure that Lebanon will ever again risk a repetition of what happened in July and August. I would say that we inflicted on them such a blow, and Hezbollah too, that things may change in a way that Hez­bollah has never dreamed of.” At this time, “we don’t know whether Syria can be detached from Iran or what will happen in Iraq.

“Maybe the nuclearization of Iran will become a fact pretty soon,” says Aronson. “In my view, the Iranians will never use the bomb because it’s the only weapon which could destroy them all,” since Israeli retaliation would annihilate Iran, he says. “It’s more a game of threats and prestige, a very dangerous one, of course.”

Middle Eastern wars are very short, says Aronson. “These are local wars of some bloody and extremely unpleasant manifestations, but these are not European wars,” which, he says, “are to the last man. I would call them skirmishes, but Israel is here to stay.”

These “skirmishes” as well as other Israeli foreign policy issues will be discussed in Aronson’s undergraduate course on modern Israel at the UA. He is also teaching an advanced class on the Holocaust.

Already immersed in his new role, Aronson participated in a public forum, “Israel, Lebanon and a ‘New Middle East?’” presented by the UA Center for Middle Eastern Studies on Aug. 31. In a lively debate, he repeatedly pointed out that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial policy showed that he “wanted to wipe Israel off the map.”

Since there is no love lost between Lebanon and Syria, one future possibility that may push the peace process forward, Aronson said at the forum, would be for Israel to turn over the Golan Heights to Syria. If that happens, he said, “something positive may come out of” this summer’s war.