After reading the book, she became overwhelmed with a need to understand how something that horrible could happen.
After 25 years and several visits to Hitler's 19 concentration camps, Feig is one of the world's experts on the Holocaust, and one of the few who is not Jewish.
Her 1977 book, "Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness," is considered by scholars and survivors to be the definitive work on the killing centers and concentration camps.
She has been teaching a course on the Holocaust at SF State for eight years.
A gentile teaching about Hitler's attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe does not strike her as odd."I don't understand why it's unusual for someone who is not Jewish to be an expert on the subject," said Feig, who also teaches three business classes on campus.
"It never occurred to me that the Holocaust was a Jewish problem, she said."I always assumed it was a human problem."
She has publicly denounced President Reagan's planned visit next Sunday to the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where 47 SS soldiers are buried. "When Reagan lays the wreath he will be laying it on bodies which by their own statements and photos taken are lying satisfied, happy and grinning," said Feig.
Her research on the Holocaust began in 1962 when she began traveling throughout Europe and Russia Feig is reported to be the only person to visit all of the Nazi concentration camps.
"I never had the illusion that I would transplant myself into a camp of strugglers and survivors. But I needed to be in every one of them just to get a sense of it," she said.
Her book is based on more than 500 discussions with former Nazis and Holocaust survivors.
However, she said she never intended to write a book. "My students decided for me. I wrote it for them. I would write chapters and Xerox them. It was just between us but finally they said, "This is silly. You've got to publish it."
Feig no longer talks with ex-Nazis because "all you do is listen to their stories and it's to their advantage to either be lying to you or to themselves, the latter being more prevalent.
To ask them why they did it is very futile and most people have not gotten any thing from it," On the other hand, Feig still maintains contact with survivors and has been formally honored by survivor groups for her work.
But it wasn't always easy to talk with them about their experiences. "I was often the first person outside of their families they had spoken to about it," she said. "I didn't push them in anyway because I had nothing to gain. I was there for them. I wasn't there for me. They must have understood that. That's why we became friends."
Feig was born and raised in a devout Lutheran family in a ranching community.
She grew up learning social responsibility, she said. "After World War 11, we were very poor but Europe was in ruins. And so, through the church (?) we that the problem is too big."
"I could buy into that Christianity; it was the Christianity that I discovered later that I couldn't buy into," she said, referring to a year she spent in a conservative Lutheran college.
She was dismayed by the prejudice she found there.
She grew up in a time when it was not "unusual to avoid issues of death, destruction and dying," she said.
She became aware of the Holocaust by reading Eugen Kogan's "Theory and Practice of Hell. "It was just a story about a survivor of Buchenwald," she said. "But you have to understand that I read it in 1959. I never read any thing like it. It just hit me over the head. It wasn't taught anywhere in the schools."
She said she became a historian to acquire the tools to help her understand the attempted genocide.
She received her doctorate in history from the University of Washington.
Today, only two issues are left for her to explore, she said. "One is why did the Nazis do it? And to those whom it was done to, how did they stand it? "We've only scratched the surface of that," she added.
Feig believes that the Jews of Europe resisted Hitler more than the other Europeans.
People can learn about the will to live from that dark episode in history, she said. "The easiest thing to do in a camp was to walk over a barbed wire. Either you would get electrocuted or they'd shoot you. It was instant suicide. It was the easiest thing to do but very few of them selected that way."
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