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Those we’ve lost

David Hackett, Historian and Holocaust Expert, Dies at 80

Professor Hackett translated “The Buchenwald Report,” a vital account of life at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He died of the coronavirus.

David Hackett in 1999. A longtime professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, he was a historian specializing in Germany and early-20th-century Europe.Credit...via Hackett family

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

As a teenager growing up in El Paso in the 1950s, David Hackett looked forward to Sunday evenings with a German family, the Bornsteins.

Goulash and sauerbraten were served, his parents sipped schnapps with Dr. Bornstein and his wife, and David got to sit next to their daughter, Olga. But what he relished most about those evenings was their salon-like atmosphere.

It was at these gatherings that he started to grasp that Dr. Bornstein was a Holocaust survivor who had fled Europe in the 1940s. As he learned more, his fascination with world history grew and later blossomed into a career.

He studied in Munich as a Fulbright scholar in the 1960s and became fluent in German. He became a history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he worked for more than 40 years, specializing in Germany and early-20th-century Europe.

In 1995, he published “The Buchenwald Report,” his translation of an exhaustive document made by German-speaking U.S. Army officers at the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after its liberation in 1945. The complete report, which was originally thought to have been lost after the war, contained interviews with prisoners and graphic details about the camp’s conditions and was partly intended for Germans, with the aim of countering Holocaust denial.

“I transcribed, collated and restored the organization of the original German-language text, contained on 400 yellowed, brittle and blurry sheets of carbon copy paper,” Professor Hackett wrote in a preface.

Professor Hackett died on Nov. 15 at a hospital in El Paso. He was 80. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his daughter Mary-Elizabeth Hackett said.

“I think it was the ultimate puzzle for him,” Ms. Hackett said of her father’s work. “How could a country that produced Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven also be responsible for the horrors of the Holocaust? He wanted to understand it because it was so incomprehensible.”

David Hackett was born David Andrew Welper on Jan. 29, 1940, in Rensselaer, Ind. His father, Andrew Dale Welper, an engineer, died of sepsis when David was 4. His mother, Margaret (Jenkins) Welper, a homemaker, married Clarence G. Hackett, a child psychologist, who adopted David and gave him his surname. The family later settled in El Paso, and David graduated from Austin High School there in 1958.

After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana with a B.A. in history, he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His Ph.D. dissertation, which ran 457 pages, was titled “The Nazi Party in the Reichstag Election of 1930.”

As a Fulbright scholar, Professor Hackett lived in a tiny flat in Munich, where his strict landlady brought him crusty rolls each morning for breakfast. In his spare time, he attended the opera and skied in the Bavarian Alps.

In addition to his daughter Mary-Elizabeth, he is survived by his wife, Anne Hackett; another daughter, Caroline Hackett; a son, Michael; a brother, Don; his stepmother, Helen; two stepbrothers, James and John Macayel; two half sisters, Peggy Heinrichs and Susan Murray; a stepsister, Jennifer Eveler; and six grandchildren.

Publishing “The Buchenwald Report” took its toll on Professor Hackett. He had spent more than five years translating the document’s brittle yellow pages, working late into the night.

“It was an emotional effort,” his wife said. “He found it so shockingly demoralizing to see what one fellow human could do to another. But he also realized its critical importance. To not let it be forgotten. That this history cannot be denied.”

Alex Vadukul is a city correspondent for The New York Times. He writes for Metropolitan and is a two-time winner of the New York Press Club award for city writing and a winner of the Society of Silurians medallion for profile writing. More about Alex Vadukul

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: David Hackett, 80. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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