As a young Israeli historian, Dr. Bauer did not aim to become an authority on the Holocaust, or the Shoah, another term used to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. In a 2004 interview with Dimensions, a Holocaust studies journal, he traced the origins of his research to a conversation with Abba Kovner, a leader of the Jewish partisans during the war who later became a poet.

“What was the most important event in Jewish history? Dr. Bauer remembers Kovner asking him.

“The Shoah,” he replied.

“Well,” Kovner asked, “why don’t you take care of it?”

“Because I’m scared,” Dr. Bauer said.

“It’s a really good place to start,” Kovner told him.

Over the next half century, Dr. Bauer wrote dozens of books that helped lay the foundation for modern understanding of the Holocaust. He had lost his extended family in the massacre and his work served, in part, to document what happened to them and so many other victims of Nazi persecution. But he did not see his role as simply “memorizing” the dead, he wrote in his book “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001). Instead, he wrote: “I’m asking questions about what happened and why. »

In the early years of his career, this line of inquiry led him to move beyond existing studies of the Holocaust, which relied largely on the written records of the Nazi bureaucracy and were perpetrator-centered. No true understanding of the Holocaust can ever be achieved, Dr. Bauer argued, without studying the victims.

In books like “They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust” (1973), Dr. Bauer challenged a pernicious idea circulating at the time that Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Delving into his diaries, correspondence and oral histories, he showed that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, in which hundreds of Jewish fighters staged the best-known revolt against the Nazis, was far from the only act of insurrection committed by Jews in the ghettos or elsewhere. .

Jewish supporters in Europe, Dr. Bauer discovered, number in the tens of thousands, including women and children. He told the story of a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy called Motele, whose parents and sisters had died in a concentration camp. Posing as a violinist, he smuggled explosives into the basement of a restaurant where he performed in front of German soldiers and blew up the building. The boy later died fighting alongside the partisans.

While these accounts provide perhaps the most dramatic examples of resistance, Dr. Bauer also shed light on the daily efforts Jews made to maintain the dignity that the Nazis attempted to take away from them.

When Jews in the ghettos established underground schools or organized plays, concerts and lectures, they were committing acts of resistance, Dr. Bauer said.

Dr. Bauer “added a critically important dimension to the study of the Holocaust,” said Debórah Dwork, a specialist in Holocaust and genocide studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “No one could ignore the humanity of the victims. These were no longer numbers in the conversation.

Dr. Bauer was admired by his colleagues for following historical evidence wherever it led, for his willingness to evolve in his opinions, and for his comfort in challenging widely held opinions.

He wrote extensively on the American response to the Holocaust, including in the book “American Jewry and the Holocaust” (1981), and was among the scholars who argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unjustly convicted for what critics considered his efforts insufficient. to stop the Holocaust as it was underway.

In the decades following the Holocaust, an often bitter debate arose over whether the Allies should have bombed the railway line to Auschwitz or the gas chambers of the camp, the largest of the centers of Nazi extermination, where more than 1.1 million people were killed. people were murdered.

Dr Bauer argued that bombing the railways would have been ineffective because the Germans were able to repair them quickly, that it would have been extremely difficult to accurately target the gas chambers and that prisoners would certainly have been killed in such a attack, said Richard Breitman, the co-author, with Allan J. Lichtman, of the 2013 book “FDR and the Jews.”

As his career progressed, Dr. Bauer had the painful experience of observing the emergence of pseudo-historians who sought to deny the existence of the Holocaust or to suggest that the murder had been of a more limited scale than was generally thought.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, who now holds the rank of U.S. ambassador as special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, documented this trend in her book “Denying the Holocaust” (1993) and later gained cause in a libel suit brought in England by David Irving. , whom she described as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” Her story was dramatized in the 2016 film “Denial.”

It was Dr. Bauer who first encouraged her to pursue the subject of Holocaust deniers in her research, Lipstadt said in an interview for this obituary.

In subsequent years, Dr. Bauer found himself forced to confront not only Holocaust denial but also the distortion of its history, such as when Poland in 2018 passed a law, later relaxed , making it punishable by prison time to suggest that the Polish nation was complicit in the Holocaust.

“He was my greatest ally … in the fight against the distortion of the Holocaust,” said Jan Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian professor at the University of Ottawa who ultimately won his case in a defamation case in Poland for his writings on the role of Poles during the Holocaust. Grabowski described Dr. Bauer as a “master” of history, for whom this history was very fresh.

Martin Yehuda Bauer, an only child, was born in Prague on April 6, 1926. His mother was an artist who also made women’s belts. His father, an engineer, found work in a factory when the family arrived in Mandatory Palestine.

Dr. Bauer attended high school in Haifa and began his university studies at Cardiff University in Wales, where he added Welsh to the long list of languages ​​he would learn to speak, including Czech, Slovak, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French and English.

A member of the Palmach, a branch of the pre-state Zionist military organization the Haganah, he interrupted his studies to fight in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. He then moved to a kibbutz and pursued his doctorate at the University Hebrew of Jerusalem. , where he graduated in 1960.

Dr. Bauer taught for years at the Hebrew University; served as academic advisor to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped found the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

In addition to his writings on the Holocaust, he has explored topics such as the founding of the State of Israel and the nature of modern anti-Semitism. His latest books include “The Jews: A Contrary People” (2014).

Dr. Bauer’s honors include the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honors, which he received in 1998. He has criticized Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of using the Holocaust for nationalist purposes and as “a tool for politics.” »

In 2011, Dr. Bauer joined a declaration calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, which he saw as of central importance to the preservation of the Jewish state.

“We are occupying people who hate us, and that is not a good thing,” a Times of Israel obituary quoted Dr. Bauer as saying. “As long as the type of nationalist government we have is in power, there is no possibility of a solution.”

Dr. Bauer’s first marriage, to Shula Sugarwhite, ended in divorce. His second wife, Ilana Meroz, predeceased him. He leaves two daughters from his first marriage, Danit Cohen and Anat Tsach; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

In debates surrounding the Holocaust’s place in history, Dr. Bauer took the position that it was an “unprecedented” but not “unique” phenomenon.

“If it was a one-time thing, we could forget about it, because it could only happen once,” he said. “But it could happen again.” Referring to senior Nazi officials Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler, he said that “we all have a tiny element within us which, if developed, could make us an Eichmann or a Himmler.”

Decades after beginning his studies, Dr. Bauer reflected on the conversation that set him on his path. After all he had learned in his long search for understanding, Dr. Bauer said, “I am still afraid. »