Léon Poliakov

Poliakov was born in St. Petersburg. After the Revolution of 1917, his family emigrated to Paris, where he studied Law and Literature. He then worked as a journalist and, together with his father, published a German-language exile journal.
 

In 1940, he was captured by the Germans as a French soldier. He managed to escape shortly thereafter. Poliakov joined the Résistance and participated in rescuing Jewish children. In 1943, working together with Isaac Schneersohn in the French Underground, he co-founded the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC, Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation), a historical commission to document the crimes against French Jews. Today, it is part of the Mémorial de la Shoah, the central Holocaust memorial site in France.

Poliakov acted as an expert-advisor to the French delegation during the Nuremberg trials. In his function as the director for research at the CDJC, he explored the systematic destruction of Jews. His publication Le Bréviaire de la haine. Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (Breviary of Hate. The Third Reich and the Jews) in 1952 offered one of the first comprehensive studies of the Holocaust. Between 1955 and 1958, Poliakov and Joseph Wulf published three volumes of documents on National Socialist perpetrators in German.
Until the day of his retirement, Poliakov taught at the Sorbonne and researched anti-Semitism and racism.