Georges Haupt, also known as George or Gheorghe Haupt (January 18, 1928–March 14, 1978), was Romanian and French a historian of socialism, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International.

Biography

Haupt was born on January 18, 1928, into a Jewish family in Satu Mare, Transylvania—which was at the time part of the Kingdom of Romania. At the age of sixteen, his native region, along with the rest of Northern Transylvania, were assigned to Regency Hungary, as part of the Second Vienna Award; as a result of Hungarian extermination policies, Haupt was deported to Auschwitz. His whole family disappeared in Nazi concentration camps, except for his big brother, Mircea Haupt, colonel and political commissar in the Tudor Vladimirescu Division (organized by Romanian communists and prisoners of war to fight the Axis powers alongside the Soviet Union).

Following the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, Haupt returned to Transylvania (which was again assigned to Romania). An adherent of the Communist Party (which rebranded itself as the "Workers' Party", PMR), he began higher education in the Soviet Union, at Leningrad State University. Here, he wrote a thesis on the relationship between Russian and Romanian revolutionaries in the late 19th-century. After starting his academic career in the Romanian People's Republic (he lectured at the University of Bucharest, edited the PMR journal Studii, and oversaw the Modern and Contemporary History section at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of History).

Haupt was allowed to leave Romania for France in 1958, but, following news of a purge carried out by PMR General Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, refused to return, and, in August, applied for political asylum.^[1] In 1962–1963, Haupt produced a thesis on the Second International under the leadership of Ernest Labrousse, and joined the editorial staff of the periodicals Le Mouvement social and Les Cahiers du monde russe. In 1969 he became director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and, in 1976, director of the Center for Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He started The Socialist Library Collection with publisher François Maspero in 1963, and directed it until his death. On March 14, 1978, he died unexpectedly in Rome, leaving several projects on hold, many of which could not be completed. The Socialist Library Collection came to an end in 1981 with its forty-first title.

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