WAISer Donald Detwiler

WAIS has some impressive Germanists, including Jim Tent, who, as I informed you. is undergoing a serious operation.  Another is Donald S. Detwiler, Professor Emeritus of History, Southern Illinois University.  In response to my inquiry about his academic background, he writes: "In 1954 I graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., my home town, with a baccalaureate in history and a reserve commission through ROTC. In 1954, the Air Force sent me to Germany, where I served until 1957, when I separated from active duty in Germany, having decided to begin my graduate work there rather than returning immediately to the USA.  By the end of my second semester at Goettingen, however, I dropped the idea of returning to the USA for my doctorate. I had come to realize that for me, an American studying European and German history, I was gaining something in Goettingen that could not be duplicated in the finest American university: a  fundamentally new understanding of German language and culture. I had studied enough German in college to qualify as an Air Force intelligence language officer, but until I started living in a village outside Goettingen and attending the university, I had involuntarily regarded German
essentially as a kind of code. I was translating German words into real words and then thinking through the result and reflected on it in English. What gradually dawned on me during that first year was that German was actually a way of thinking, of shaping one's ideas and perceptions. It was similar to English, to be sure, yet very different. In fact, I found that, like the second lens of a stereoscopic camera, it afforded a kind of depth perception, adding a third dimension where I had taken a two-dimensional view for granted.

But there was also a second and no less important reason for deciding to stay at Goettingen. I had the good fortune of being able to work under Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, a distinguished medievalist who during World War II had served as the war diary officer of the High Command of the German Armed Forces (the OKW, Hitler's headquarters). He served as my mentor and directed my dissertation on Spanish-German relations during the war and, when my veteran's allowance under the Korean GI Bill (for which I was eligible, having been called to active duty in 1954) ran out, he arranged for me to complete my dissertation, "Hitler, Franco und Gibraltar," with a research fellowship at the Institute of European History in Mainz, which published it in 1962 (as noted on the bio-bibliographical notes appended as a postscript).

In 1971, I published a volume with two of my Doktorvater's studies of Hitler-his introduction to a scholarly edition of Hitler's table conversations, 'The Anatomy of a Dictator' (that had been serialized in the German newsweekly Spiegel) and 'Hitler as a Military Leader' (his introductory essay to his scholarly, multi-volume edition of the OKW War Diary)-entitled Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader. Initially brought out by Quadrangle, it was issued in England by Allen Lane - Penguin Press, and was reprinted in 1999 by Academy Chicago Publications. In 1976, the press at Southern Illinois University, to which I had moved in 1967, brought out my short history of Germany, published in its third (post-unification) edition in 1999. Although now retired (as a twentieth-century historian, I met my last class in mid-December 1999), I remain active as chairman of the World War Two Studies Association and vice-chairman of the Comite international d'histoire de la deuxieme guerre mondiale, with which the WWTSA and
corresponding national committees in some two dozen other countries committees are affiliated".

RH: Donald Detwiler was visiting research professor of history, in 1987, at National Taiwan University; and director,
from 1979 through 1982, of the SIUC-USICA German-American History Textbook Project, the records of which have been deposited in the Detwiler Collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California. (For the final report on the project, see Donald S. Detwiler, Ilse E. Detwiler, & John Anthony Scott, "The Distorting Mirrors of History: Final Report on the SIUC-USICA German-American History Textbook Project," Tamkang Journal of American
Studies, Vol. IV, No. 1 [Tam-kang University, Kinhua Street, Taipei 10637, Taiwan, R.O.C.: Fall, 1987, pp. 149-157.])
In 1984 he was president and subsequently permanent board member, Association for the Bibliography of History; since 1997, editorial board member, H-War (Military History Network of H-Net-The Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine). 

BOOK PUBLICATIONS:

Hitler, Franco und Gibraltar. Die Frage des spanischen Eintritts in den Zweiten Weltkrieg "[Hitler, Franco, and Gibraltar: The Question of the Spanish Entry into the Second World War]. Publications of the Institute of European History, Mainz, vol. 27. Edited by Martin Goehring. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1962. Pp. xi, 185 (my Goettingen doctoral dissertation)

Translated, edited and annotated, and wrote the introduction to Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader by Percy Ernst Schramm. Chicago: Quadrangle,  1971; London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1972; repr., Malabar, Florida:
Robert E. Krieger, 1986; repr., Chicago: Academy Chicago Publ., 1999. Pp. x,  214 (studies of Hitler's character and of his military leadership by my Doktorvater [mentor], former war diary officer of the High Command of the German Armed Forces [OKW]).

Germany: A Short History. 3rd ed., rev. Carbondale and Edwardsville:Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii, 342 (the first edition having been published in 1976, the second in 1989).

Edited & annotated Der Krieg in Italien und im Heimatkriegsgebiet vom 1. Januar - 31. Maerz 1944. Nachtrag zum Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Wehrmachtfuehrungsstab)" [The War in Italy and on the Home Front, 1 January - 31 March 1944: Supplement to the War Diary of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces (Armed Forces Operations Staff)]. Munich: Bernard & Graefe, 1979. Pp. 85 (a segment of the war diary missing when the rest of it was published in the 1960s by Prof. Schramm,  printed with a subvention from the German Ministry of Defense).

Edited (with Charles B. Burdick & Juergen Rohwer, associate editors), with introductory essay, World War II German Military Studies. 24 vols. New York: Garland Publ., Inc., 1979. Ca. 13,500 pp. in archival facsimile.

Edited (with Charles B. Burdick, joint editor), with introductory essay, War in Asia and the Pacific, 1937-1949: Japanese and Chinese Studies and Documents". 15 vols. New York: Garland Publ., Inc., 1980. Ca. 8500 pp. in archival facsimile.

Advisory editor, The Holocaust: Selected Documents, edited by John Mendelsohn. 18 vols. New York: Garland Publications, Inc., 1982. Ca. 4200 pp. in archival facsimile

Authored (with Ilse E. Detwiler as joint author), "West Germany: The Federal
Republic of Germany", World Bibliographical Series, vol. 72. Oxford,
England, Santa Barbara, California, Denver, Colorado: Clio Press, 1987. Pp.
xv, 355 (an extensively annotated and indexed bibliography with over 1200
citations)

PUBLISHED ARTICLES AND REVIEW ESSAYS (SELECTED):

'The State and the University: The West German System',  Bulletin of the Committee on Science and Freedom,
 No. 18 (Manchester, England: March 1961), pp. 16-23 (an account of the German university, in historical context, as experienced it as a doctoral student)

'Spain and the Axis During World War II', Review of Politics, Vol. 33, No.1 (Jan. 1971), pp. 36-53, based on my dissertation

'Percy Ernst Schramm, 1894-1970', Central European History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (March 1971), pp. 90-93, my mentor's obituary

With Ilse E. Detwiler as joint author, articles on Dr. Joseph Mengele and Raoul Wallenberg for the  Encyclopedia of World Biography, supplemental vols. 2 and 3, resp. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987 & 1988, resp.), pp. 487-88
and 512-13, resp.

'Review Essay: Two Major Publications from the Republic of China', with Chu Shao-kang as co-author, Journal of Military History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (October 1992), pp. 669-684, on two dozen volumes of documentation on the World War II era

RH: Göttingen University, which I once visited briefly, was founded by George II of England in 1737. In the 19th century it attracted many students from England and the US, and it greatly influenced the development of graduate schools in those countries. It was closed when Hitler came to power and reopened after 1945.