Author: Helen Roche
'The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich's "Special Schools" and "Elite Schools"'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...
'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History'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...
'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, 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...
From Humboldt to Hitler? The Third Reich's Education Ministry RevealedReview 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.
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...
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...