In Memoriam: Robert Wolfe

Robert Wolfe, who was an expert on Nazi Germany and whose long career focused on tens of millions of German documents captured by the Allies at the end of World War II, died on December 10, 2014 of respiratory failure. He was 93.

Born on March 2, 1921 in Burlington, Vermont to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Lithuania, Wolfe graduated from the University of Vermont in 1942. He then fought in the Pacific and European theaters during World War II. Twice wounded, he received the Purple Heart and other decorations. After the war, he served in the Office of Military Government for the US zone of occupied Germany (OMGUS), working at first on matters connected with the Nuremberg trials.

During his service in postwar Germany Wolfe became acquainted with a German named Ingeborg Kirch who managed an office in a branch of OMGUS. They married and moved to the US in 1948. She survives him, as do their two sons.

Wolfe studied political science at Columbia and received an M.A. there in 1955. Meanwhile, he had begun work for a military project soon taken over by the American Historical Association to organize, declassify, and catalogue the tens of millions of pages of captured German documents brought to the US and kept in the former torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia. A separate, slightly smaller collection of Nazi records assembled in West Berlin remained in a document center under American control there.

Once the American and British military and intelligence agencies had picked over these German records, they could be declassified. But there was a question of how best to ensure their future use for historical research. Postwar Western governments did not trust West German archival authorities to preserve them or make them all available to those who might be critical of Germany. The original records stayed in the US for more than a decade so that they could be microfilmed.

Although the Alexandria project recruited a talented team of experts on German language and German history, including Wolfe and the future eminent historian Gerhard L. Weinberg, limited resources and the pressure of time made it virtually impossible to restore the original sequence of files for each government organization or branch of the Nazi Party. The war and the postwar prosecutors had created a new state of order—or disorder. The Torpedo Factory team had to work with documents in their current placement: one set of documents about the Gestapo might be followed by another set dealing with disputes between two rival SS leaders, then by another dealing with a dispute over property. Future researchers had to be told where each file fit into the labyrinth of government, party, and private organizations in Nazi Germany. It was a task that required detailed written guides to each series of records—painstakingly created by those who had read the mass of documents and knew how organizations and individuals had interacted.

In 1962 Wolfe moved to the National Archives, now in charge of writing the remaining guides. For many years, he headed its Modern Military Branch, which included the captured German records. He remained an indispensable source and adviser for those interested in doing scholarly research in German records there, because he knew what was in which guide (most of the guides lacked an index), and he knew the records for which there were as yet no written guides.

Assisted by Wolfe and with the aid of the guides, researchers could easily access microfilm copies of the records—the originals having gone back to a democratic West Germany in 1968. The process was so convenient that some German scholars preferred to do research at NARA, rather than use the original documents at the Bundesarchiv at Koblenz. Wolfe was a major influence on many books written on the history of Nazi Germany from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Wolfe served as an adviser to the State Department in early negotiations with the German Foreign Office over the eventual transfer of the records in the Berlin Document Center to the Federal Republic of Germany after its so-called biographic records had been microfilmed for deposit in the National...