Raffael Scheck's Home Page Raffael Scheck Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of History History Department Colby College Waterville, Maine 04901-8853 (USA) E-mail: rmscheck@colby.edu Left picture: In front of Colby, © 2006 by Fred J. Field; right picture: In the Archives nationales, Paris, in front of the discovered Senghor document, © 2011 by Vincent Fournier (Jeune Afrique)

This page contains class materials as well as a curriculum vitae and information on my scholarship. I have published four books and many articles on German history at the time of the world wars. My third book Hitler's African Victims (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [hardcover] and 2008 [paperback]) was translated into French (2007) and German (2009). The book sparked an investigation by the German office for Nazi crimes, and I was interviewed for the documentary “Les 43 tirailleurs” (by Mireille Hannon) in 2010 and by C-SPAN’s book tv program in September 2012. In September 2012, I finished a book manuscript on French colonial prisoners of war in German POW camps, 1940-45, examining the conditions of their captivity, the struggle of the German and French authorities for the loyalty of these prisoners, and the influence of the prisoners' experiences on the postwar move toward independence in the colonies. In 2011, I identified an anonymous manuscript of a Senegalese soldier in German captivity as having been written by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the eminent French-Senegalese poet, cultural philosopher, and first president of the Republic of Senegal (1960-1980). The French newspaper Le Monde and the magazine Jeune Afrique interviewed me about this discovery, as did the Colby Magazine.

I was born in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) and grew up in Germany, Israel, and (mostly) in Switzerland (first in Geneva, later near Zürich). I started out as a cello student at the conservatory in Zürich but then decided to study History at the University of Zürich and Brandeis University (USA). I have a Habilitation Degree from the University of Basel. I am a German citizen (I point this out because French newspapers discussing my book on the massacres of black French soldiers often argued that it took an “American” historian to uncover this crime). Since 1994, I have taught modern European and German history at Colby College, where I also served as chair of the History Department for two terms (2000-2003 and 2005-2008) and as director of the Jewish Studies program (since 2011).

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Commands:

• Get virtual textbook for Germany and Europe, 1871-1945 (HI 224). I expanded this text and published it as a book with Berg Publishers in Oxford. See Germany 1871-1945: A Concise History.
• See information on Hitler's African Victims. It is translated into French (Une Saison Noire) and German.
• Go to the publisher's page for my second book, Mothers of the Nation (2004).
• See the advertisement for my first book (Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics, 1914-1930) at the Colby Bookstore and get a summary of its content.
• Get my Curriculum Vitae with list of publications.
• Get Guidelines for writing a paper.
• See the History Department and International Studies pages.
• Recipe for my Linzertorte.
• I still play the cello in the Scheck Duo and occasionally the Kennebec Quartet (pictures from 2007)
• See pictures of my children Anselm and Adelia and me, Sophia Isabella, my little princess, and all three of them (these pictures are totally outdated, but I will upload new ones sometime soon).

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