Holocaust refugee who became an eminent historian in Britain
John Grenville, who has died aged 83, was a distinguished historian of the modern world. While dispassionate in his scholarly judgment, he also seemed driven to convey through his research and writings an understanding of himself as an Englishman of German descent and early education.
Born in Berlin, he escaped the Holocaust together with his older brothers, Julian and Walter, via Kindertransport in 1939. Torn out of a sheltered middle-class life, they confronted the challenges of having to cope with a different language, unfamiliar customs and strange sports such as cricket. As a teenager, Hans Guhrauer – his name before he became naturalised as a British citizen – struggled with remarkable determination against the many obstacles to his educational progress, supported but also inhibited by largely anonymous sponsors.
His mother died in a concentration camp, while his father, a high-ranking judge in Berlin who managed to emigrate and worked in an English munitions factory, had limited means to support his son. After two years at a good preparatory school in Essex and one year at the Cambridgeshire Technical school, he left school at 14. Although he remained critical of the Jewish Refugees Committee for its failure to maintain him after that, the historian in him acknowledged that this body was a rescue operation and not equipped to advance careers.
Four years of manual labour culminated in a gardener's job at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Grenville gained access to its library on condition that he was not to seek admission to the college, though he was encouraged to think of himself as a future head porter. Instead he pursued the educational path for which his German-Jewish background had singled him out. He combined daytime school teaching with evening classes at Birkbeck College, University of London, where one of his teachers was the young Eric Hobsbawm, another refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe. Thanks to a London county council grant, he was able to move to the London School of Economics.
After graduating with a first he went on to gain his PhD under the inspired guidance of Sir Charles Webster, who persuaded him of the importance of personality as an agent in the power play between nations. Grenville's thesis, published in 1964 as Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the 19th Century and still a standard work, established him as a diplomatic historian. There followed a lectureship and readership at Nottingham, a Harkness Fellowship at Yale, through which he met his first wife, Betty Anne Rosenberg, and, in 1966, a professorship at Leeds, where he showed his innovative and organisational talents by founding a degree course in international studies and promoting the use of film both to illustrate history and to use it as a source. With Nicholas Pronay he produced two films, The Munich Crisis and The End of Illusions: From Munich to Dunkirk.
Grenville's stay at Yale had meanwhile resulted in a partnership with George B Young that produced Politics, Strategy and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873-1917.
With his appointment to the professorship of modern history at Birmingham in 1969 there began the period of his mature achievement, both as head of department and as an author, despite the tragedy of his wife's death and the need to care for three young sons. Crucially, he received comfort from Patricia Carnie, whom he married in 1975. His first Birmingham publication was The Major International Treaties 1914-1973, now in its fifth edition. This was followed in 1976 by Europe Reshaped 1848-1878, which remains a widely used textbook. Being a passionate teacher, Grenville undertook the monumental A World History of the 20th Century (1980), synthesising a large body of knowledge. It is now in its third edition.
Although Germany was inevitably covered in all his historiographical work, for many years he showed no special interest in the events that had shaped his own trajectory; indeed, when he joined Birmingham University he was reluctant to admit that he could speak German. This perspective changed on a visit to a schoolbook conference in Braunschweig in 1976, where he met, and then became friends with, Professor Bernd Jürgen Wendt, who eventually persuaded him to take up a visiting professorship at Hamburg University for one term in 1980. Having been stimulated by questions from Wendt's children about his early life, he retraced his boyhood steps in Berlin, revived his mother tongue and rekindled his interest in a past that had scarred him. Encouraged by Professor Werner Jochmann, he embarked on a joint project about the Jews of Hamburg. He also produced three documentary series for German public television.
Now belatedly absorbed by the events of his own traumatic past, he became associated with the Leo Baeck Institute in London and, from 1991, acted as editor of its yearbook, a position he held until shortly before his death. His magnum opus, The Jews of Hamburg: The Death of a Civilization from 1790 to the Holocaust, will appear this autumn. He is survived by Patricia, his sons, Murray, Edward and George, his daughters, Claire and Annabel, and Walter.
• John Ashley Soames Grenville, historian, born 11 January 1928; died 7 March 2011