Martin Pollack

Martin Pollack (23 May 1944 – 17 January 2025) was an Austrian journalist, book author, translator, Slavist and historian. "One of Austria's most distinguished public intellectuals", Pollack propagated a fact-based truth and reconciliation in Austria for WWII crimes, which he saw as lacking in public discourse. Born into a family of devout Nazi supporters and war criminals at the end of World War II, Pollack managed to free himself from the beliefs of his family by way of his secondary schooling in the late 1950s in Salzburg.

Pollack's 2004 bestselling account of his father Gerhard Bast's violent death in the wake of World War II in 1947 near the Brenner border of Austria with Italy created a new genre of WWII truth and reconciliation non-fiction literature in German. Pollack often linked historical research with his own family history. Pollack's father, SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Bast, was found dead while on the run in 1947 near the Brenner border of Austria with Italy. Pollack's uncle was involved in the deportation of the Slovenes from Upper Carniola, for which Eberhard Kranzmayer's dialectological "studies" were used as rationales between "Re-Germanization" and extermination. Provided by Wikipedia