The nine essays assembled here for the first time are a representative selection of a larger corpus of work on National Socialist Germany produced over the last twelve years. Broadly speaking, these essays cover three interests: the German ‘east’, so-called ‘euthanasia’ and Nazi racial exterminism, with the activities of professionals forming one bridge between all three, the other being an interest in the history of morality within this period.

My earliest work was on medieval history, albeit late medieval Prussia. Study of the medieval past necessarily entailed wider reading in the historiography of the subject over the last 200 years, reading which suggested the extent to which the history of the Middle Ages had been instrumentalised and manipulated for contemporary political uses. This was obviously not unique to either this subject or German historical writing in general. History has probably been used by politicians since the activity was first thought worthwhile, and continues in more or less subtle ways in the present. The opening chapter below, slightly altered to locate the Stasi state known as the German Democratic Republic in the past, follows the complex shifts in how over two centuries historians and others conceived of the history of an international military religious order, whose historical reality was usually strikingly at variance with what they made of it. Although the subject was a far frontier of western Christendom, it is gratifying to see that the article is still regarded as serviceable by writers concerned with the protean contemporary scene on the borderlands between eastern and western Europe.