Hans W. Gatzke
American historian
Hans Wilhelm Gatzke (1915–1987) was a German-born historian of German foreign policy since World War I and belonged to the young emigrants from Nazi Germany who became historians in the United States. He is remembered by a named professorship in his honor (the Hans W. Gatzke '38 Professor of Modern European History) at Williams College and a named dissertation prize at Yale University.
Biography
Born in Dülken, Germany, he attended the University of Bonn and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, before immigrating to the United States in 1937. He received a B.A. from Williams College in 1938 and an M.A. from Harvard University the following year. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the United States Army. His 1947 PhD. dissertation at Harvard University dealt with Germany's war aims at western front during World War I.
He taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1947 to 1964, during which time he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956. He joined the department of history at Yale University in 1965 and remained there until his retirement in 1986.
Gatzke anonymously funded a prize, awarded biennially by the American Historical Association, in honor of Paul M. Birdsall (who was dean of students at Williams when Gatzke arrived there in the late 1930s) for the best work in the field of European military or strategic history since 1870. His involvement was revealed upon his death in 1987.
Bibliography
Carl von Clausewitz, Principles of War, translated and edited, with an introduction by Hans W. Gatzke (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1942; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003.
“Hans W. Gatzke” enters the record as american historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hans, Gatzke and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5650800. VIAF identifies the subject as 74782268. The Library of Congress control number is n79042191. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1987, 1937 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hans W. Gatzke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.