Occupation Historian, author | ||
Notable works The Rabka Four (2011)
Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide (2009) Books Oskar Schindler: Stepping, The Rabka Four: Instrumen, Belzec: Stepping Stone to, Jewish Genocide in Galicia | ||
Robin O'Neil is a Holocaust researcher and author. After a career as the British major crimes' investigator who worked on criminal investigations for Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police Service, and London Home Counties Police, he obtained his Masters and Doctorate with the Hebrew and Jewish Department at University College London. He now specialises in researching Nazi war crimes and the destruction of the European Jewish communities (1933–1945).
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Biography
Robin O'Neil has pursued his work to the Baltic States and former USSR. He has launched a number of investigations into the perpetrators of the Holocaust, particularly those active in Lithuania and occupied Poland during World War II. He has conducted research regarding the Schutzstaffel (SS) and extermination camp commandants of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
O'Neil has performed extensive source research into the Oskar Schindler story. A historical consultant to several TV documentaries and radio broadcasts in the UK and abroad, he is an honoured guest of Schindler's home town, Svitavy, Czech Republic, and is a regular lecturer at universities in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Eastern Europe. In his spare time he conducts research into the House of Habsburg and Shakespeare's England. In 2013, after prolonged research, O'Neil completed his work on a new book about the Gustav Mahler family under the Third Reich.
The Rabka Four
O'Neil's work The Rabka Four - Instruments of Genocide and Grand Larceny. A Warning from History was first published completely online in 2011 by the Yizkor Book Project. It was made available by O'Neil to JewishGen for the purpose of fulfilling their mission of disseminating knowledge about the Holocaust. The monograph is devoted to the history of the German SS training facility at Rabka in occupied Poland where, "under the cloak of war – personal vendetta, corruption, robbery and murder [became] endemic among the SS" functionaries. O'Neil reveals how the euphemistic language spoken within the Nazi State allowed for the sanitization of genocide and the creation of the complete illusion of 'plain speak' in phrases such as 'treatment', 'processing', and 'resettlement' which enabled the SS to turn mass murder into a "bureaucratic paper chase".