BERLIN – Arno Lustiger, an autodidactic historian and author who brilliantly and meticulously chronicled Jewish resistance to the Hitler movement, died on Tuesday in Frankfurt.

Lustiger, who survived six Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and two death marches, was 88 years old. He was born in 1924 to Polish-speaking Jews in Bedzin (Bendzin in Yiddish), in that part of Upper Silesia which became part of Poland after World War I.

He worked tirelessly to debunk the prevailing German historical view that Europe’s Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to Nazi extermination camps “like sheep to the slaughter.”

Lustiger’s seminal work, Fighting to the Death: The Book of Jewish Resistance 1933-1945, was published in 1994....