WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO BECOME A HISTORIAN?
I didn’t decide to become a historian. I planned to study German language and literature but I became
interested in the particular problem of what happened to universities, supposed bastions of academic
freedom, under the Nazi dictatorship? When I applied for graduate studies at Cambridge University my
advisor was a historian and my paperwork came back showing that I was registered as a history student.
I found this slightly terrifying since I found history courses extremely boring in high school and stopped
taking classes around the age of 14 or 15.
After a year of graduate studies I got a year-long fellowship to the University of Hamburg, where I was
given unusually free access to the university archives. I was particularly interested in the student body,
which seemed more aggressively National Socialist than the faculty. I was having a difficult time finding
much material until I went to the archives at Würzburg and the friendly archivists, who I suppose were
getting fed up with all of my requests, one day let me go up to the attic and search for material myself.
There, in the corner covered with dust, I discovered five big bundles of files from the Hamburg student
government that had not been looked at since 1945. The Hamburg student government had sent the files
to Würzburg at the height of the bombing of Hamburg and people had since forgotten about them. These
were the only local Nazi student government files that had survived in their entirety. Out of that came
the Ph.D. and later the book Students and National Socialism in Germany, which was published by Princeton University Press.
DID ANY OF THE FORMER NAZI STUDENT GROUP LEADERS THAT YOU INTERVIEWED EXPRESS
REMORSE?
No, none of the leaders that I interviewed were in the slightest bit apologetic. They all said “Well compared
to these Marxist student groups today (this was the early 70s), we had ideals. We were fighting to make
Germany great again.” I said, “Well, what about the Jews?” to which they responded, “We didn’t know
about them, we didn’t know about the Holocaust.”
WHAT ARE YOU ENJOYING THE MOST ABOUT RETIREMENT?
I think the biggest enjoyment of retirement is the freedom to conduct more research and to continue the
projects that I’ve been doing and trying to finish up the book that I’ve been working on. I’m also able to
spend more time at conferences and things without having to rush back to teach.
TELL ME A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT YOUR BOOK.
I think I am going to call it The Homosexual ‘Problem’ in Nazi Germany because they indeed considered it