Detlef M¨¹hlberger, professor of modern German history at Oxford Brookes University, has died of lung cancer at the age of 65.

Born in Germany on 6 May 1943, he was immediately caught up in the global conflict raging around him when his father, a Luftwaffe medic, was killed in the Russian campaign ¨C listed simply as ¡°last seen somewhere south of Moscow¡±. Most of the younger M¨¹hlberger¡¯s scholarly career was to be devoted to the nature of Nazism.

Often separated from his sister and widowed mother, his early life was difficult as he passed through a series of foster homes. When his mother married a sergeant in the British Army, the family moved to England in the early 1950s, although this was not always a particularly tolerant environment for a German child.

He attended a secondary-modern school, but became interested in acquiring a more academic education and took classes in Latin to enable him to go to university. After graduating in history from King¡¯s College London in 1965, he embarked on a PhD at University College London, financing his studies by working in a variety of roles, including landscape gardener and long-distance lorry driver.

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Professor M¨¹hlberger took a teaching job at Cambridge Technical College and in 1979 moved on to a senior lecturership at Oxford Polytechnic, later Oxford Brookes, rising through the ranks to become professor in 2005.

His thesis on ¡°The Rise of National Socialism in Westphalia, 1920-1933¡± ¨C the region in which his home?town of Iserlohn lies ¨C was completed in 1975 and argues that the Nazis were a people¡¯s party, supported by all strata of German society, including the working classes. This put him at odds with his supervisor, Francis Carsten, who adhered to the then-mainstream view that the Nazi movement was largely an outcome of lower middle-class resentments.

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However, Professor M¨¹hlberger¡¯s position, summarised in his 1991 book Hitler¡¯s Followers: Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement, is now widely accepted. His two-volume edition of extracts from Hitler¡¯s most important newspaper, Hitler¡¯s Voice: The V?lkische Beobachter, 1920-1933 (2004), makes a further major contribution to understanding the rise of the Nazi Party.

Donal Lowry, reader in imperial and Commonwealth history at Oxford Brookes, describes Professor M¨¹hlberger as a man of great moral integrity, ¡°animated by a sense that the Nazis offered a ¡®warning from history¡¯¡±, as well as ¡°a supreme exemplar of archival research¡±. He also remembers ¡°a most generous host¡±, notable for a ¡°dry, self-deprecating sense of humour, and entertainingly direct and acutely apposite comments, not least in staff meetings¡±.

Professor M¨¹hlberger died on 6 October 2008 and is survived by his wife, Sue, and daughter, Tania.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com