Erwin Oberländer

Erwin Oberländer (born 19 March 1937) is a German historian and expert on Eastern European history. He is Professor Emeritus of Eastern European History at the University of Mainz. He is also a former President of the German Association of Historians of Eastern Europe, and was appointed by the Latvian government as a foreign member of the Commission of the Historians of Latvia, which was tasked with studying crimes against humanity in Latvia during the Soviet and Nazi occupations.

He studied history at the universities of Munich, Vienna and Cologne from 1956, and earned a doctorate in 1963. He was employed at the Federal Institute for Eastern and International Studies 1963-1974, and earned his Habilitation in 1972. He was appointed as Professor at the University of Cologne in 1973, and was a senior adviser in the culture department of the Federal Ministry of the Interior 1974-1975, where he was responsible for research on Eastern European affairs.

From 1975 to 1985 he was Professor of Modern Eastern European History at the University of Münster and served as Dean at the Faculty of History 1976-1977. Subsequently, he was Professor of Eastern European History and head of the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Mainz from 1985 to 2002. He also served as Dean of the Faculty of History 1990-1992.

He is the son of the German CDU politician and former Federal Minister Theodor Oberländer.

• 1993: Honorary doctor of the University of Riga (Latvia)
• 2008: Elected member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences