History After Hitler. Philipp Stelzel

Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. There, Langer oversaw the work of scholars such as Crane Brinton, Carl Schorske, Stuart Hughes, Leonard Krieger, Franklin Ford, Gordon Craig, Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, Charles Kindleberger, Barrington Moore, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Felix Gilbert, and Hajo Holborn. The OSS produced a number of regional studies for the purposes of the planned occupation; later, it helped prepare the Nuremberg trials.³⁷ Langer also edited a successful series of textbooks entitled The Rise of Modern Europe.³⁸ Toward the end of his career, Langer became embroiled in the controversy surrounding David L. Hoggan, who had received his PhD at Harvard in 1948. In 1961 Hoggan published Der erzwungene Krieg, which blamed Great Britain’s and Poland’s supposedly conspiratorial diplomacy for the outbreak of World War II. Early in his career, Hoggan had received support from Langer. Yet when Der erzwungene Krieg caused a scandal in both Germany and the United States, Langer quickly repudiated the book.³⁹

      Probably as important as a graduate mentor at Harvard as Langer was Franklin Ford, who advised scholars such as Fritz K. Ringer, Charles S. Maier, and Thomas Childers. As a result of his OSS service in Germany, Ford had gained access to captured German documents and was able to write the first scholarly account of the German resistance.⁴⁰ Ford received his PhD at Harvard in 1950, and after a brief stint at Bennington College returned to his alma mater in 1953, where he taught until 1985. Primarily a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, he also supervised several dissertations on modern German history.⁴¹

      At Columbia, Carlton J. Hayes taught from 1909 to 1950, only interrupted by his service as the American ambassador to Spain between 1942 and 1945.⁴² Hayes was mainly interested in the political and cultural history of modern Western Europe and especially modern nationalism, but nevertheless advised a number of dissertations on German history.⁴³ His younger colleague Shepard Clough (PhD 1930), who taught at Columbia from 1928 to 1970, had done some postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg. Primarily a scholar of modern Italy, he still advised dissertations in German history. Indeed, Columbia graduate students working on modern Germany often had mentors who were not specialists in this field or historians at all: Fritz Stern completed his dissertation under the supervision of cultural historian Jacques Barzun, while Peter Gay and Raul Hilberg received guidance from political scientist Franz Neumann.⁴⁴

      When Gordon Craig arrived at Princeton in 1941, he was among a number of young scholars who joined the history department around the same time and shaped it in the following decades. Craig had been trained at Princeton himself, where Raymond Sontag had advised his dissertation on Great Britain’s policy of nonintervention in the late 1860s. He then taught briefly at Yale and, after Sontag’s departure for Berkeley, took his Doktorvater’s position at Princeton.⁴⁵ During an extended stay in Europe at the end of his Princeton junior year in 1935, Craig also witnessed Nazi Germany firsthand.⁴⁶ From late 1941 to 1945, he worked as an OSS analyst, an assignment that led to the anthology The Diplomats, coedited with Felix Gilbert.⁴⁷ These personal experiences shaped Craig’s future intellectual engagement with German history and contemporary West Germany. Yet while he initially tended toward a Sonderweg interpretation of modern German history, he later modified this view. In 1950, Craig had criticized Friedrich Meinecke’s reluctance “to conclude that Hitlerism was, in fact, a logical outcome of Germany’s development in the nineteenth century.”⁴⁸ Similarly, Craig’s study The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, published in 1955, had emphasized the unique influence of the military on Prussia and later Germany. However, two decades later Craig argued in Germany 1866–1945 that “those German historians of the modern school who argue that Hitler is part of a continuum that includes Bismarck, William II, and Stresemann are wrong.”⁴⁹ Craig left Princeton for Stanford in 1961.⁵⁰

      German history at Yale was almost synonymous with Hajo Holborn from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, since he had by far the largest number of students. Holborn’s student Leonard Krieger (PhD 1949) also taught in the department from 1946 to 1962, when he left for Chicago. Krieger specialized in intellectual history—The German Idea of Freedom became a classic—as well as historiography.⁵¹ Hans W. Gatzke joined Yale’s history faculty in 1964 (he had taught at Johns Hopkins since 1947). Finally, one should also mention Harry R. Rudin, who had authored a study on German colonialism as well as a study on the armistice of 1918 and who remained interested in both subjects.⁵²