New Books In German Studies

Cindy Schweich Handler’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Redbook, The Huffington Post, and a host of other national publications. She is a former editor and writer for the USA Today Network. A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany (McFarland, 2025) is based on primary sources such as Fritz’s contemporaneous World War I diaries, journals kept by his wife, Elsbeth, and a copious collection of letters he wrote to her during their long separations. After 9/11, Harry Handler decided to explore this inheritance to see whether he could learn more about his grandfather’s life. A towering personality packed into a 5'3" frame, Oppenheimer was a wealthy Jewish Berliner who fled the Third Reich in mid-1938, joined basic training in the U.S. Army at forty-five, and ultimately became General Eisenhower’s legal aide and translator—tasked with helping to build a sustainable postwar democracy in his former homeland. This historical biography present