Rothfels was born to a wealthy
Jewish family in
Kassel,
Hesse-Nassau. In 1910, he converted to
Lutheranism. He was studying history and philosophy at
Heidelberg University when
World War I broke out in 1914. As a student, Rothfels had been a leading pupil of
Friedrich Meinecke. Rothfels served in the
German Army as a reserve officer and was badly wounded near
Soissons. He lost one of his legs and was in a hospital until 1917. In 1918, Rothfels's dissertation on
Carl von Clausewitz, "Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg", led to Heidelberg granting him a degree in history. In 1920, Rothfels's dissertation was published as a book. In 1922, he edited and published a collection of Clausewitz's private letters. In addition, Rothfels published several collections of
Otto von Bismarck's letters, and was the first historian to be authorized by the Bismarck family to publish the Iron Chancellor's correspondence. Rothfels was noted for his claim that Bismarck was neither the "iron chancellor" of "banal legend" nor an "opportunist", but rather a profoundly religious man struggling to deal with a reality whose full complexity was only understandable to God. Between 1924 and 1926, Rothfels taught at the
University of Berlin. From 1926 to 1934, he worked as a professor, holding the Chair of History at the
University of Königsberg. During his time in
Königsberg, he was well known for his highly nationalistic interpretation of German history. A
reactionary in his politics, Rothfels was hostile towards the
Weimar Republic, As a historian, his major interests were
Otto von Bismarck, Clausewitz, and later on, the conservative German opposition to
Adolf Hitler. A major interest of Rothfels in the 1920s was his belief in the obsolescence of the nation-state, and the need for a "loosening up" of the Versailles borders through increased protection of minorities. Rothfels promoted an idea of race classification based on readiness of non-German ethnic groups in Eastern Europe to submit themselves to rule of German Third Reich. The Eastern and Southeastern nationalities were to be "restructured" and integrated with German "
master race". Eventually, Rothfels was forced to leave his university position due to his Jewish ancestry, despite intervention by
Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi president of Danzig Senate, and
Theodor Oberlander, director of
League of German East (Bund der Deutschen Osten) and NSDAP's East Prussian intelligence agency, Subjected to increasing persecution and discrimination by the State, he reluctantly left
Germany in 1938 for the United Kingdom. What decided the issue for him was his experience during the
Kristallnacht pogrom when his house was looted and trashed by the
SA and he himself was arrested and held by the
Gestapo for several hours, during which he was deprived of his crutches and beaten up. Together with his wife and their three children, Rothfels left for the United Kingdom, where he hastily began to learn
English, a language that he subsequently mastered.
Exile After teaching at
St. John's College,
Oxford from 1938 to 1940, Rothfels was interned on the
Isle of Man. Rothfels, who remained a steadfast German nationalist all his life, saw the conspirators against the
National Socialist regime as representative of all that was best about German life and argued that the actions of the conspirators had restored Germany's honour from the disgrace the Nazis had brought upon it. Rothfels accepted
Edmund Burke's idea that the best defenders of liberty come from the upper crust of society and cast the men and women of 20 July as a perfect example of Burke's theory. Rothfels claimed that the German opposition was motivated by the highest possible ethical and moral considerations, and asserted that there were no self-interested motives whatsoever amongst the men and women of the 20 July. Rothfels argued that the actions of the 20 July conspirators were motivated a sense of
noblesse oblige, devotion to the principles of
Christianity and the highest form of
patriotism. Rothfels was fond of pointing out the difficulties involved in attempting to overthrow one's government in war-time, which in Rothfels view, was a sign of the true patriotism of the 20 July conspirators. Rothfels saw Nazism as a type of
totalitarianism, and often argued that there was no moral difference between
Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union; in his view, the
Cold War was merely a continuation of the struggle between what he called the "conservative freedom movement" and totalitarian forces. In particular, Rothfels was opposed to any sort of
Sonderweg interpretation of
German history, and argued that
Nazism was the result of the general problems of modern civilization, which Rothfels saw as based on a set of values that were overtly materialistic, secular, and dehumanizing, and which had reduced most people to a mindless mass. Rothfels wrote "In many respects, Nationals can be considered as the final summit of an extreme consequence of the secularization movement of the nineteenth century". Rothfels argued that the Nazis came to power as a result of a series of unfortunate developments that had occurred in
Germany after World War I such as the Great Inflation of 1923 and the
Great Depression, and often criticized those in his view promoted the view that sought to equate
Deutschum with Nazism such as Sir
Lewis Bernstein Namier,
William L. Shirer,
A.J.P. Taylor and Sir
John Wheeler-Bennett. Moreover, far from Nazism being rooted in German traditions, Rothfels claimed that the strongest opposition to Nazism came from those grounded in traditional values. In Rothfels's opinion, "the traditions of a genuine 'Prussian militarism'" provided the principle "bulwark against nationalistic and demagogic excesses".
The German Opposition to Hitler ended with a call for people all over the West to embrace what Rothfels regarded as the noble ideas of the conservative opponents of Nazism, which Rothfels saw as leading to back to the higher values of the West.
The German Opposition To Hitler was a controversial book because Rothfels focused his attention largely on anti-Nazis on the Right and for the most part ignored anti-Nazis on the Left. He worked hard for the rest of his life to exonerate German nationalism from the taint of Nazism. Upon his return to Germany, Rothfels founded the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), an historical study center devoted to the Nazi period. The institute's journal, the
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Journal for Contemporary History) has become one of the world's leading periodicals for the study of
Nazi Germany. Within a few years, the
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte had the highest circulation of any historical journal in West Germany. During the 1950s, Rothfels was one of the few German historians who attempted a serious examination of
the Holocaust, which was a subject that most German historians preferred to ignore during that decade. In particular, he broke new ground by publishing
Kurt Gerstein's reports relating to the Final Solution in the first edition of the
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1953 and another article in 1959 that examined the plight of Polish Jewry under Nazi rule. In his works Rothfels aimed at minimising the German hostility to Jews, while highlighting any attempts to save them by German individuals. Crimes and support for anti-semitism were downplayed, and opposition to racial discrimination portrayed by Rothfels as dominant. As such his text produced a vision of history in which for example the 1930s were virtually absent from anti-semitism, and non-Jewish Germans were completely willing to help Jews. After his return to Germany, Rothfels was a pioneer of contemporary history, the study of the "epoch of those who lived at the time" to use Rothfels's words. In Rothfels's view, contemporary history was the study of the recent past, where despite or rather because the lack of documentation caused by studying events so close to the past and the challenge of writing about events that one experienced oneself, required special patience, skill and ability of the part of the historian. In particular, Rothfels called for historians working in the field of contemporary history to approach matters in an objective and neutral matter while keeping in mind the moral questions. In practice, contemporary history came to refer history from 1914 on. After his return to Germany, Rothfels took a strong stand against those whose work he felt could exonerate the Nazis. In 1954, he and one of his star pupils from the University of Chicago,
Gerhard Weinberg had a renowned debate on the pages of
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte with
Andreas Hillgruber and Hans-Günther Seraphim over the issue of whether the German
invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had been a "preventive war" forced on
Adolf Hitler by the possibility of Soviet attack on Germany. Hillgruber and Seraphim argued for the "preventive war" thesis while Rothfels and Weinberg opposed it, arguing that it was Nazi racial theories that were the origins of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The majority opinion was that Rothfels and Weinberg destroyed Seraphim's and Hillgruber's arguments. Indeed, Hillgruber himself did a volte-face and renounced his former thesis as mistaken. Later, in 1961, Rothfels took a strong stand against the American
neo-Nazi historian
David Hoggan who claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to an
Anglo-
Polish conspiracy against Germany. Also in 1961, Rothfels assisted Weinberg with the publication of
Adolf Hitler's
Zweites Buch which Weinberg had discovered in 1958, and for which Rothfels wrote the introduction. Another area of interest for Rothfels was the
expulsion of the ethnic German population from
Eastern Europe after
World War II. In the 1950s, Rothfels worked with
Theodor Schieder,
Werner Conze and other historians to produce the multi-volume
Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe. Many later prominent historians such as
Martin Broszat,
Hans-Ulrich Wehler and
Hans Mommsen were involved in this project. ==Controversy==