Ronald Smelser

Ronald Michael Smelser (* 1942 in Altoona , Pennsylvania ) is an American historian .

career

Smelser studied history at the University of Wisconsin and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1970 with a thesis on Nazi foreign policy and the "Sudeten problem". PhD. From 1983 to 2016 he was a professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City .

Smelser's main research area is the foreign and social policy of National Socialist Germany. In 1988 he presented the first scientific biography of the leader of the German Labor Front (DAF) Robert Ley .

Smelser became known in particular as the co-editor of four prosopographical anthologies published between 1989 and 2000 , in which he and his co-editors each compiled a large number of biographical essays on leading figures of the National Socialist movement and the Nazi state, written by various experts : It all started with the volume Die Braune Elite I from 1989, published by him and Rainer Zitelmann in 1989, with twenty-two sketches by leading politicians of the NSDAP (before and after 1933) and by officials of the military and the Nazi state of the Second World War. The follow-up volume Die Braune Elite II followed in 1993, which contained twenty-one other sketches of the same direction ( Enrico Syring joined Smelser and Zitelmann as the third editor ). In 1995 the volume The Military Elite of the Third Reich followed , which included twenty-seven sketches specifically about leading members of the Reichswehr / Wehrmacht in the 1930s and 1940s, and in 2000 the volume Elite unter dem Totenkopf , in which thirty leading members of the Schutzstaffel were examined (Only Smelser and Syring were the editors of these two volumes). All four volumes have developed into widely used and frequently referenced research tools in specialist research.

Works

As an author

• The Henlein Party. An interpretation , in: Karl Bosl : The first Czechoslovak Republic as a multinational party state. Lectures at the meetings of the Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee from November 24th to 27th, 1977 and from April 20th to 23rd, 1978 (Bad Wiesse meetings of the Collegium Carolinum) Oldenbourg, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-486-49181-4 . Pp. 187-202.
• The Sudeten Problem and the Third Reich, 1933-1938: From Volkstumsppolitik to National Socialist Foreign Policy , Munich / Vienna 1980 (original: Volkstumsppolitik and the Formulation of Nazi Foreign Policy: the Sudeten Problem, 1933-1938 , 1973)
• Robert Ley: Man on the “labor front”. A biography (original title: Robert Ley. Hitler's Labor Front Leader , Oxford 1988, translated by Karl and Heidi Nicolai), Schöning, Paderborn 1989, ISBN 3-506-77481-6 .
• Robert Ley - The brown collectivist , in: Ders. and Rainer Zitelmann: Die brown Elite I , WBG, Darmstadt 1989, pp. 173-187.
• The social planning of the German Labor Front , in: Michael Prinz, Rainer Zitelmann (Ed.): National Socialism and Modernization , WBG, Darmstadt 1991, pp. 71–92.
• How "Modern" were the Nazis? DAF Social Planning and the Modernization Question , in: German Studies Review 12 (1989), pp. 285-302.
• With Edward J. Davies II: The Romanticization of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in the USA. The "Gurus" and their influence on the American public , in: Jens Westemeier (ed.): "That was how the German soldier ...". The popular image of the Wehrmacht , pp. 63–78, Paderborn (Ferdinand Schöningh) 2019. ISBN 3-506-78770-5

As (co-) editor

• The brown elite I. 22 biographical sketches , WBG, Darmstadt 1989 (with Rainer Zitelmann ).
• The brown elite II. 21 further biographical sketches , WBG, Darmstadt 1993 (with Rainer Zitelmann and Enrico Syring ).
• The military elite of the Third Reich. 27 biographical sketches , Ullstein, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1995 (with Enrico Syring).
• The SS. Elite under the skull. 30 CVs , Paderborn 2000 (with Enrico Syring).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Emeritus - History Department - The University of Utah. Retrieved February 6, 2020 .