Author: Helen Roche

Invited lecture, given via zoom to pupils at Brentwood School, 20 January 2022.Read more...

Research Conversation, held as part of the Transnational History Research Cluster seminar series, Department of History, Durham University, 10 November 2021.Read more...

At 10pm on Wednesday 16 March, Helen will be speaking about her research on the Napolas on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme, with presenter Anne McElvoy, author Philip Oltermann, playwright Pamela Carter, and Germanist Karen Leeder. You can tune in here or on BBC Sounds.Read more...

Helen's work is now officially represented by Andrew Gordon of David Higham Associates, one of the world's leading literary agencies. Her third book, a popular history exploring the appeal of fascism for ordinary people in interwar Europe, is to be published by Head of Zeus in the UK and Commonwealth.Read more...

Following its publication in November 2021, Helen's book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas received widespread media coverage in the national and international media - click here for more details. Since January, the book has been featured in further media interviews, including on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking, WW2TV, at the Wiener Library, and on the Real Dictators and House of Modern History podcasts.Read more...

Since its publication on 11 November 2021, Helen's book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has received widespread attention in the national and international media, including features in The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and interviews on the BBC, Scottish and Irish National Radio.Read more...

Helen has just been interviewed about her new book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools, by BBC Radio Scotland's 'Good Morning Scotland' programme, and by Sean Moncrieff on NewsTalk's "The Moncrieff Show".Read more...

Research Introduction, presented virtually at the NETWoRC seminar, Northumbria University, 3 November 2020.Read more...

History of Humanities 5 (1), 2020 (special issue on "Forgetting in the History of the Humanities", ed. Han Lamers, Toon Van Hal), pp. 165-77.

This case study takes Volker Losemann’s recently published collection of essays, Clio und die Nationalsozialisten, and the (often far from complimentary) reception of his groundbreaking work on classics in the Third Reich since the 1970s, as a starting point to reflect on wider discourses that have led to academic “forgetting” of this period in German classical scholarship.Read more...

Helen's second monograph, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, has now been published by Oxford University Press.

Helen's research draws on material from eighty archives in six different countries worldwide, as well as eyewitness testimonies from over 100 former pupils. The book, which has been over a decade in the making, presents the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich’s most prominent elite schools, the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas / NPEA).Read more...