
Raffael Scheck
Title
The John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History; Chair of Jewish Studies
Department
History
Information
- [email protected]
- (207) 859-5340
- Miller Library 250
Address
5331 Mayflower Hill Waterville, Maine 04901-8853
Current Courses
CRS | Title | Sec |
---|---|---|
HI112 | Europe Since the Seventeenth Century | A |
HI224 | Germany and Europe, 1871-1945 | A |
HI321 | The First World War | A |
HI376C | Doing History: 1940 as the Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century? | A |
Education
- Habilitation in Modern History, Universität Basel, Switzerland, April 2003
- Ph.D. in Comparative European History, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, May 1993
- Lizentiat (equivalent to the M.A.), Universität Zürich, Switzerland, May 1988
- Musical training as a cello student, Konservatorium und Musikakademie Zürich, Switzerland, 1980-1981
Areas of Expertise
- The Western European War of 1940
- Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees in World War II
- Crimes against French Black African soldiers in World War II
- German political history 1914-1945
- German history and literature
- Modern European history and politics
Personal Information
I have published seven 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. My fifth book, French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II (Cambridge University Press, December 2014), deals with 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 2020, I published a book on forbidden love relations between western prisoners and German women (Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. Cambridge University Press 2020, pbk. 2024). My latest book is in German and deals with the western European war in May-June 1940: Frühling 1940. Wie Menschen in Europa den Westfeldzug erlebten (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2024). It is based on diaries, letters, and oral history interviews and presents a vision of the defeat of France based on the memory of World War I. I am now working on civilian internees (enemy aliens) in Nazi Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries.
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 Colby Magazine and French journalist Ivan Amar (for Radio France Internationale).
I was interviewed for three episodes of the Netflix series “Road to Victory: World War II in Color” (Dunkirk, North Africa, Liberation of Paris). The series was released in December 2021.
I was born in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) and grew up in Germany, Israel, and (mostly) 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 (2003). 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 seven years (2000-2003, 2005-2008, 2014-15) and as director of the Jewish Studies Program (2011-14, 2016-17, 2024-25).
Current Research
Civilian Internees in Nazi Germany
Publications
Hitler’s African Victims (Cambridge University Press)
”This is a well-written tale of how ordinary men become brutal killers and how racism can corrupt their moral sensibilities.” Martin Klein, University of Toronto
”This elegant, slender volume describes a forgotten war crime: the murder by the German soldiers of thousands of Black African soldiers in the French Army in June 1940.” Jonathan Steinberg, University of Pennsylvania
”Professor Scheck has provided a great service by carefully researching this vile episode and also placing it into the context of a military descending step by step into an abyss of ever worse criminality.” Gerhard Weinberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (emeritus)
”Professor Scheck’s excellent and original study details instances during the French campaign of 1940 when German Army and Waffen SS units killed French colonial troops after they had surrendered …” Charles W. Sydnor, Jr.
Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany
What role did right-wing women play in the Nazi rise to power? Mothers of the Nation analyzes the work of women in the German People’s Party and the German National People’s Party—parties that covered the range from the moderate to the radical right. Looking at politics on both the local and national level, the author discusses issues ranging from social welfare to foreign policy. He shows that right-wing women, in keeping with the tradition of the German bourgeois women’s movement, refused to stand up primarily for women’s interests and instead invoked the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), a vision of harmony and cooperation of the groups involved in production.
”In this excellent study, Raffael Scheck explores a series of fateful paradoxes that imperiled Weimar democracy: attachments to household and motherhood propelled women into the public arena; the mobilization of female voters strengthened the nationalist, anti-democratic Right; the effort to imbue middle-class parties with the virtues of the people’s community only helped the Nazis; and the campaign to protect Christianity legitimized eugenic legislation. Scheck’s great contribution is to trace so well the seams of Germany’s political culture between 1918 and 1933.” Peter Fritzsche, author of Reading Berlin 1900 and Germans Into Nazis
Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics, 1914-1930 (Atlantic Highlands, 1998)
In a skillful combination of biographical case study and contextual analysis, Raffael Scheck presents a readable, often thrilling, account of German right-wing politics in the two decades before the rise of the Nazis and the role played in them by Great Admiral von Tirpitz. In examining that, he explains the predicament of the conservatives during the period.