Richard Steigmann-Gall (born October 3, 1965) is an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, and the former Director of the Jewish Studies Program from 2004 to 2010.
Steigmann-Gall received a BA in history in 1989, an MA in European History in 1992 from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in European History in 1999 from the University of Toronto.[1]
On September 30, 2009, Steigmann-Gall was featured on the History Channel in a sensationalist documentary discussing Hitler's religious views.[2][3]
Since 2016, Steigmann-Gall has turned his attention to the question of fascism in the United States. He published a scholarly article named "Star-Spangled Fascism"[4] in the journal Social History that explores the traditions of American historical writing and the ways in which the American far right in the period between World War I and II can be called fascist in spite of these traditions. For the last several years, he has turned to public commentary on the question of fascism in contemporary American politics. His articles on this can be found in Tikkun,[5] the Huffington Post,[6] Politico,[7] and Jacobin.[8]
In 2003, Steigmann-Gall published The Holy Reich through Cambridge University Press, which explored Nazi conceptions of Christianity. The Holy Reich argues that the Nazi Party was not anti-Christian as popularly understood, nor was it in any sense a paganist movement.[9] Rather, Steigmann-Gall writes that many in the Nazi Party leadership believed themselves and their movement to be inherently Christian (positive Christianity).[10]
The Holy Reich has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.[11] A symposium on the book was published by the Journal of Contemporary History in 2007.[11]
