Historians/History

Hans Trefousse: A Scholar and a Gentleman

by Paul A. Thomsen and Joshua Spivak

Paul A. Thomsen has written numerous articles, essays, and the Civil War biography Rebel Chief: The Motley Life of Colonel William Holland Thomas. A doctoral student in American Military History at Kansas State University, he also teaches courses on the American Intelligence Community, the History of Insurgency on American Soil, the American army, and urban studies. He is also the Archivist for the Society for Military History.

Joshua Spivak, a public relations executive and attorney, is a research fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of over 100 op-eds and book reviews in leading newspaper and magazines throughout the country and is regularly interviewed on the subject of the recall of elected officials and other political process topics. He wrote his master’s thesis under the guidance of Professor Trefousse, which was later adapted into the article “California’s Recall: Adoption of the ‘Grand Bounce’ for Elected Officials” in California History.

On January 8, 2010, the academic community lost a leading scholar of American history, Hans L. Trefousse. When we first met him in the early 1990s, Hans Trefousse was already an accomplished Civil War and Reconstruction scholar and a Distinguished Professor of History at City University of New York (CUNY). He had a reputation among the students as a formidable scholar, a keen intellect, and a riveting lecturer. Even after having written or contributed to over twenty books, Hans Trefousse continued daily archival research, teaching class, writing history, and mentoring.

While many knew Hans Trefousse through his lectures, his books, and his roundtable discussions, his students and close friends were privy to knowledge that his professional career had been shaped by his involvement in some of the most the pivotal events of the twentieth century. During one of many after-class chats, the topic for discussion turned to the works of Ernest Hemmingway. Trefousse, who had been rooting around in his filing cabinet for his next set of lecture notes, suddenly stopped, turned, and, giggling asked, “Didn’t I ever tell you I knew him? I met him when I served as an interrogator during the Second World War.”

Like his class lectures, the stories Hans Trefousse told us over the next two decades served as entertaining and educational lessons, instructing his students to pay attention to the details. After graduating from New York City College with a Bachelor’s in 1942, Trefousse enlisted in the United States Army and eventually fell into the world of American military intelligence as one of Camp Ritchie’s combat interrogators due to his fluency in German, French, English, and Latin. Landing in Europe with the 1944 Allied invasion, he used several tricks to extract information from unwilling prisoners, including putting a sign on prisoners that said “Russia” and saying “‘Well, there are prison camps in Florida and in Siberia. You're going to be sent to Siberia, if you don't talk.’ And then they usually came around to talking.” At another point, he received a surprise advanced notice of the atomic bomb in the summer of 1945 by questioning a Nazi air intelligence officer. When the officer told him how the Germans were trying to get atomic bomb secrets from Niels Bohr, Trefousse had thought he was hearing another “one of those silly stories of Hitler's wonder weapons.” A few days later, when news was released about the devastation of Hiroshima by an American nuclear bomb, he realized: “Oh my God! This guy really knows what he’s talking about.”

In his postwar pursuit of a career in history, Trefousse found an outlet for his wartime experiences in his historical work. In 1950, he wrote German and American Neutrality, 1939-1941, and in 1955 he wrote “Failure of German Intelligence in the United States, 1933-1945” for the MississippiValley Historical Review. His war years also influenced several later nineteenth century works, including his pivotal biography of Union general and notorious politician Ben Butler in Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast!, and his 1982 nationalist evaluation of America’s entry into the Second World War, Pearl Harbor: The Continuing Controversy. Moreover, his major work on Radical Republican policies towards slavery and Reconstruction were a direct result of personal conflict with his superiors’ orders to repatriate prisoners from the areas newly occupied by Russia. “Finally, I decided this was really the slave-trade,” he later mentioned in an oral history, “and I stopped it. I am very sorry I did that even for a few days.”

His great career achievement was in helping to reshape the narrative of Reconstruction history. While Dunning School historians had long claimed that Reconstruction was simply an attempt by Northern carpetbaggers to take financial advantage of the defeated South, Trefousse was among the leading scholars of the 1960s to argue that Reconstruction was actually a failed attempt at bringing a measure of racial justice to the South. With his biographies of key Civil War and Reconstruction figures, such as Ben Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, and in his works such as The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice and Reconstruction: America's First Effort at Racial Democracy, Trefousse also helped establish the new view of nineteenth century America. In the 1980s, Hans Trefousse also tied his Civil War scholarship with his roots when wrote on noted German-American Civil War general and post-war politician Carl Schurz, a topic that let him explore the nature and growth of German immigrants, like himself, in American culture.

Mindful of the impact of history on current events, Trefousse provided historical context and commentary on the first presidential impeachment, the 1868 case against Andrew Johnson which he had previously written about in depth, to CNN and C-SPAN viewers during the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. In the twenty-first century, at a time when the executive institution appeared to be under siege, he analyzed the perceived character of the most well-regarded wartime president in American history in First Among Equals: Abraham Lincoln’s Reputation During His Administration.

Though greatly affected by the death of his wife, Rashelle, in 1999, Hans Trefousse continued to take an active interest in his craft and the academic community. Until he fell ill a few months ago, Trefousse regularly taught class, offered advice, and produced quality monograph length scholarship.

As a scholar, Hans Trefousse was a welcome voice in any debate, a robust presence at every table and a great role model for his students and friends. As a mentor and friend, he served as living example for how personal events can sharpen one’s perspective on the study of history.

(Hans Trefousse’s time as a combat interrogator is featured in “Through an Interrogator’s Eyes,” April 2002, Military History Magazine, by Paul Thomsen and Joshua Spivak, and will be the subject of a forthcoming volume on combat intelligence).