Walter Laqueur, Scholar of Terrorism and the Holocaust, Dies at 97

Walter Laqueur, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager and, without a college degree, became a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, European decline, the Middle East conflict and global terrorism, died on Sunday at his home in Washington. He was 97.

His wife, Susi Genzen Wichmann Laqueur, confirmed his death.

Mr. Laqueur was a prodigious author who spoke a half-dozen languages and wrote scores of books, novels and memoirs as well as his writings on geopolitics, in which he could be prescient.

While much of the world was basking in the breakdown of Soviet communism, Mr. Laqueur, whose London apartment overlooked Karl Marx’s grave, was predicting the emergence of “an authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism.”

That is largely what developed, as he wrote two decades later, in 2015, in “Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West.” ...