John M. Steiner collection

John Michael Steiner (1925-2014) was born August 3, 1925 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the son of Kurt and Ilse Steiner. Raised as a Christian, Steiner and his family nevertheless were identified as being Jewish by the Nazis during the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. In August 1942, Steiner was arrested and sent to a series of concentration camps, beginning with Theresienstadt, and including Auschwitz-Birkenau (1943), Blechhammer (early 1944), Reichenbach (early 1945), and ending with Dachau (February 1945), from which he was liberated in April 1945. His father also survived the Holocaust, but his mother and her relatives perished. Steiner returned to Prague to begin his studies at Charles University in 1946. After the Communist seizure of power, he fled Czechoslovakia in 1949 for Australia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in German language and psychology at Melbourne University in 1952. He then moved to the United States, where he earned a master’s degree in German language and sociology at the University of Missouri in 1955, then continuing his studies at the University of California, while teaching as adjunct faculty and working as a social worker at the San Quentin State Prison.

In 1962, he moved to Germany to pursue his doctorate at the University of Freiburg, examining social structures of the National Socialist regime and its concentration camps. During this period, he began the work for which he became best known: conducting surveys among former concentration camp guards and members of the S.S. Between 1962 and 1966, with the help of a former general in the Waffen-SS, Felix Steiner, and former SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, who were supportive of his research, he distributed several hundred questionnaires to former Nazis, and attended some of their meetings in order to make further contacts and do research. Few of those he met realized that he was a Holocaust survivor who had spent several years in concentration camps. His work was also encouraged by those who were involved in the prosecution of former Nazis, such as Fritz Bauer and Heinz Meyer-Velde, of the ministry of justice in the West German state of Hessen, as well as criminologist Armand Mergen. While at Freiburg, Steiner also worked at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, doing work in nearby prisons in order to implement group counseling as a means of rehabilitating prisoners. He completed his doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of sociologist Eduard Baumgarten, titled “Power Politics and Social Change in National Socialist Germany.” He returned to California, where he was appointed as a sociologist to the faculty of Sonoma State University, where he remained until being named professor emeritus in 1997.

During his tenure at Sonoma State, he conducted research in a number of areas related to criminology, including conducting studies of theft and shoplifting, and working with Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo on the latter’s well-known “Stanford Prison Experiment.” He also remained engaged with the subject of the authoritarian personality and other topics related to the sociology of Nazi perpetrators. He collaborated with scholars such as Joel Dimsdale, Jochen Fahrenberg, and Jobst Freiherr von Cornberg, among others. In relation to this work, he continued to correspond and meet with a number of former Nazis and members of the S.S., and to collect testimonies and source documentation from them. Steiner also founded the Holocaust Studies Center at Sonoma State University, and was a prominent as a Holocaust survivor and speaker in Northern California during his later years. He was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit) by the German government in 2004. John Steiner died in Novato, California on May 6, 2014.