New Book: The Last Transport by Anthony McElligott

The Last Transport

The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean

Anthony McElligott is emeritus professor of history, and founding professor of the Department of History. He joined the University in 2002 from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and retired in 2020, latterly as Head of Department.

He has held a variety of visiting professorships in the universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1991/92), Hamburg, Faculty of Economic and Social History (1996), the Aegean at Rhodes, Mediterranean Studies (ongoing), the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (2017), the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico City (2018), and The Humboldt University of Berlin (2018/19). In 2013 he was Visiting Senior Academic of the Council of Sciences, Taiwan.

His research has concentrated on political and social conflict during the Weimar Republic and early years of the Third Reich, and latterly on the Holocaust. He has just completed a monograph on the destruction of the Jewish Communities of the Eastern Aegean in 1944, titled: The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in autumn 2024. A summary article drawn from this project has appeared as The Last Transport: 'The Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes, 1944: An Integrated History' in Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece Cambridge University Press, 2018); he is currently preparing a book reflecting more widely on approaches to the Holocaust titled: Stepping Stones to Genocide: The Nazi Holocaust. He has published widely on the history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Among his recent principal publications are Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916-1936 (2014); The German Urban Experience 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (2001); Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona 1917-1937 (Runner-up Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, 1997); editor, The Weimar Republic=Short Oxford History of Germany (2008); editor with Tim Kirk Working Towards the Führer. Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (2003); editor with Jeffrey Herf, Antisemitism before and since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (2017). Prof McElligott is consultant historian and a former contributor to the Holocaust Education Trust (Ireland) annual Summer School Teaching the Holocaust'(2007-2018), and works closely with the Jewish Community Rhodes on their education and research programs. Formerly a founding editor of the prestigious journal Cultural and Social History, he now sits on its wider editorial board. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1999 and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2015.

Research Interests

Core competencies - Social and Political history of Germany in the Twentieth Century, notably 1900-1945. Europe: 19th/20th Centuries. Current research interests - The development of civic culture in twentieth century Germany; Weimar Republic and the Third Reich; development of forensics in early twentieth century Germany; sexual mores and state regulation from Wilhelm II to Adenauer. Holocaust in Eastern Mediterranean; Jewish communities in Mediterranean seabord.