Author: Helen Roche

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...

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

On 3 November 2021, Helen presented a brief research presentation on her third monograph project at the NETWoRC lunchtime research seminar.Read more...

On 20 October 2021, Helen presented a brief overview of her recently-published second monograph, The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (OUP, 2021) to members of the History Department at Durham University.Read more...

Review of Moritz Föllmer's in Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

All too often, it is glibly assumed that the rise of individuality, the spirit of modernity, and the triumph of democracy must necessarily go hand in hand. Moritz Föllmer’s new monograph provides an important corrective to this frequently uninterrogated set of assumptions.Read more...

Review of Christian Ingrao's Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

In 2006, a publishing sensation erupted in France with the publication of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a novel which sought to recreate the motivation and incremental brutalisation of an intelligent, educated SS officer, as he becomes ever more damningly implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust.Read more...

Helen has recently been appointed to the position of Secretary of the German History Society, with responsibilities for communication, administration, and conference organisation.Read more...

Helen has now been promoted to the position of Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at Durham University, in recognition of her contributions to research, teaching, and departmental citizenship.Read more...

On 29 May 2021, Helen was invited to give a presentation on 'Getting Ahead in Classical Reception Studies' to attendees at the launch conference of the European Classical Reception Research Network, hosted by the University of St. Andrews.Read more...

Since 2015, Helen has worked with Macat, an academic technology start-up which aims to develop critical thinking skills, as well as curating a library of analyses of the world's most influential intellectual works of non-fiction and works of scholarship. With a growing list of titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analyses that focus on the ideas and the impact of the most influential works ever written. Routledge has now published Helen's first two analyses in their Macat Library series of educational guides - Sir Ian Kershaw's The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich and Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.Read more...