Jörg Echternkamp


Jörg Echternkamp is a German military historian, who specialises in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. He is a lecturer in modern history at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and a research director at the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the German Army. His is a contributor and editor of the seminal series Germany and the Second World War from the MGFA.

Historian of Nazi Germany

Echternkamp is contributor to two volumes of the Germany and the Second World War series. He served as the editor of volume IX/II: German Wartime Society 1939–1945: Exploitation, Interpretations, Exclusion. Reviewing the volume in the journal German History, historian Jeff Rutherford notes that it "maintains the extremely high standards set by previous volumes in the series. Each essay provides both an excellent summing up of the literature and some fresh insights based on archival research". In the final volume of the series, Echternkamp deals with the aftermath of World War II, "showing how Hitler's war shaped the lives of tens of millions of people beyond the capitulation of the Wehrmacht".
Echternkamp is the co-editor and the contributor to the 2007 volume of essays Die Politik der Nation: Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen 1760–1960 where he explores the topic of German nationalism in the post-World War II period in both East Germany and West Germany. A review in H-Net finds this topic to be "the almost uncharted territory" and that Echternkamp finds that "the main proponents of a new national discourse were often conservative historians who had already been professionally active prior to the Nazi regime". Overall, the goal of editors was to investigate how the abstract notion of a "nation" was evidenced in real-world political aims and programs over the two centuries of German history.

Works

In English