Author: Helen Roche

Thus far, Helen's second book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has received critical acclaim in ten different periodicals, ranging from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Historical Studies in Education.Read more...

Helen's latest article, in collaboration with Lisa Pine, has now been published in The Historical Journal.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’, to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the Napolas.Read more...

Two of Helen's essays have recently been published in edited collections from Palgrave Macmillan: 'Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System', in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jenz, and (with Achim Saupe) 'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History', in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, edited by Sara Jones and Roger Woods.Read more...

The Historical Journal 66 (2), 2023, pp. 413-34.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes.Read more...

in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023, pp. 65-90 (co-written with Achim Saupe).

This chapter gives an overview of the ways in which testimony has been used by historians, and the ways in which it has influenced the development of new historiographical methods. Above all, the authors explore the different contextual frameworks within which testimonies have developed—legal, moral, and practical. What makes a testimony ‘true’ or ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the observer?Read more...

in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jenz, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022, pp. 79-100.

This article uses the elite education provided by the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas) as a case study of the Nazi regime’s drive to eradicate class-based social differences. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Napolas embodied the most ‘socialist’ elements of National Socialism, and that they were instrumental in realising the Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft.Read more...

Review of Anne C. Nagel's Hitlers Bildungsreformer. Das Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung 1934-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012), in Reviews in History.

What's in a name? Often, particularly with books marketed at a more popular audience, all too much seems to be at stake - the controversy caused by Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust being a recent case in point. Thus far, criticism of Anne C. Nagel's 2012 volume, Hitlers Bildungsreformer, has followed similar lines.Read more...

Helen's book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has recently been featured by boarding-school syndrome expert and therapist Piers Cross on his podcast 'An Evolving Man'. You can watch the podcast on Youtube here.Read more...

In 2022, three of Helen's book reviews were published in History. The Journal of the Historical Association, the Journal of Hellenic Studies and Germania: Anzeiger der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts.

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On 13 May 2022, Helen's book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas received an extremely favourable review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's leading broadsheets. The book has also received critical acclaim in the online journal Sehepunkte.Read more...