Author: Helen Roche

Helen has recently published two new articles in the leading historical journals Ricerche Storiche and European History Quarterly; 'Italiani Cattiva Gente? Anti-Italian Stereotypes and the Obfuscation of War Crimes in German Perpetrator Narratives from the Italian Theatre of War' (with Dario Pasquini), and 'Nazi Elite-School Pupils as Youth Ambassadors Between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich'.Read more...

This year saw numerous media reports and broadcasts surrounding the publication of Helen's second book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, in November 2021. Subsequent presentations included a guest lecture to pupils at Brentwood School and an in-person book-launch at Durham Castle. Helen's work on 'Sparta and the Nazis' was featured on The Ancients, a History Hit podcast, while her research on everyday life under Nazism was featured in four episodes of the Real Dictators podcast series on Hitler. Helen also contributed two articles entitled ‘Founding of the Napolas in Austria’ and ‘Bundeserziehungsanstalten / Staatserziehungsanstalten' to the online Encyclopedia of Contemporary Austrian History.Read more...

Helen recently contributed a podcast on ‘Classics in Nazi Germany’ to a series of podcasts on Classics and decolonisation hosted by Khameleon Productions.

The series, entitled ‘Interrogating Classics’, forms part of Khameleon’s commitment to exploring new narratives, platforming untold stories, and discovering fresh outlooks through interdisciplinary forms.Read more...

In 2023-2024, Helen has been appointed as a Christopherson-Knott Foundation Fellow at Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, leading a Major Interdisciplinary Research Project as part of the Institute's programme for the academic year.Read more...

Helen's monograph The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has now been released in an affordable paperback edition. To purchase a copy, you can visit the Oxford University Press website here.Read more...

Helen has recently been interviewed by Konstantinos Poulis of 'The Press Project', a news organisation based in Athens. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.Read more...

During 2019-2020, the world moved from some semblance of 'normality' to a totally online world, with workshops, public lectures and seminars all being held in virtual form. Engagements with the general public during the year included contributing a lecture in German on Nazi elite-school exchange programmes with British public schools to the 11th public-facing scholarly symposium at the Wewelsburg, alongside historians Mary Fulbrook, Caroline Pearce and Helen Boak.Read more...

Review of Kim Beerden and Timo Epping (eds) Classical Controversies: Reception of Greco-Roman Antiquity in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2022), Journal of Anthropological Research 80 (1), 2024, 98-9.

Classics is often bedevilled by the need to assert its ‘relevance’ to the modern world. This timely and thought-provoking collection of essays demonstrates that the stakes of such ‘relevance’ can be all too high when the contemporary appropriations of antiquity in question often fuel extreme right-wing political agendas.Read more...

Review of Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance, by Stephan Malinowski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), in the American Historical Review 127 (4), December 2022, pp. 1942–1943.

The relationship between Nazism and the German aristocracy tends to be drawn in one of two ways, each verging on caricature – lionisation of the heroic, noble resistance fighters behind the July bomb plot, or caustic castigation of the be-monocled Junkers and the Cabinet of Barons who smoothed Hitler’s road to power.Read more...

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), History. The Journal of the Historical Association 107, Issue 374, January 2022, pp. 184-6.

Thomas Brodie’s engaging and eminently readable study of German Catholicism during the Second World War represents both a tour de force of highly original and meticulous scholarship, and an exceptional work of Alltagsgeschichte. Brodie provides his readers with a fully nuanced account of Catholic reactions to war and genocide.Read more...