Geoffrey Giles

Geoffrey Giles earned his B.A. in German Language and Literature at University College London, with a year abroad at the University of Tübingen. He transferred to St. Edmund’s, Cambridge University, for graduate work, and a research fellowship took him for two years to Hamburg University to study how the citadels of academic freedom clashed with the totalitarian leadership of the Third Reich. There in the 1970s, he was still able to track down and interview both elderly national leaders of the Nazi Students’ Association and a surviving member of the White Rose Resistance Group against Hitler. His Cambridge Ph.D. thesis was revised as a book for Princeton University Press, Students and National Socialism in Germany.

Further research beckoned at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, where he was recruited to study university governance in several European countries, focusing principally on Eastern Europe. In 1978, he was invited to become a professor in the History Department of the University of Florida, remaining there for the rest of his career for the next 35 years. He served as the Department’s Undergraduate Coordinator for most of the 1980s and 1990s.

Professor Giles created and led UF study abroad programs for six weeks in the summer at Cambridge University, and a Thanksgiving program in Munich. Amongst several teaching awards, he was twice recognized as a CLAS International Teacher of the Year. He inaugurated teaching on the Holocaust at UF with a class that eventually catered for 180 students each Spring Semester. On behalf of the Holocaust Educational Foundation, he led several traveling study seminars for US faculty to the death camps and other sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Germany. For the academic year 2000-2001, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC appointed him as the Senior Scholar-in-Residence, with the task of expanding coverage of the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis.

Other research leave was facilitated by a fellowship from the German Marshall Fund, to study the social history of alcohol in Germany, France and Britain; and two fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Freiburg University, and the Ludwig Maximilian’s University of Munich for further investigation on Nazi Germany. In the late 1990s, he was one of the two expert witnesses at the Old Bailey in London for the first and only two British war crimes trials on the Second World War, for which SS auxiliary village policemen in what is now Belarus were prosecuted.

Geoffrey Giles performed service for the profession as Secretary-Treasurer of the German Studies Association; as Editor and then President of the Alcohol and Temperance History Group; as Chair of the International Standing Working Group on Gender and the History of Education, within the International Standing Conference for the History of Education; as a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America: as President of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC: and as a member of the State of Florida Education Commissioner’s Task Force on Holocaust Education. He also served on the editorial boards of the scholarly journals German History, the German Studies Review, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

One of his essays about homosexuality in Heinrich Himmler’s SS and police was translated recently into French, appearing as:
“Déni d’homosexualité? Les relations entre hommes devant les tribunaux de la Wehrmacht et de la SS,” in Patrick Farges & Elissa Mailänder (Eds.), Marcher au pas et trébucher: Masculinités allemandes à l’épreuve du nazisme et de la guerre (Villeneuve d’Asqu: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2022), pp. 123-155.

Two recent publications to appear in 2025 were:
“Homosexuals,” in Marion Kaplan & Natalia Aleksiun (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Volume 3: The Victims and Their Worlds 1939-1945 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025), pp. 399-413; and

“ ‘Skipped the Parade!’ A Deficit of Fanaticism in the SA Guards Regiment,” in Martin Göllnitz & Yves Müller (Hrsg.), Die SA in der Region: Akteure, Narrative und Praktiken einer nationalsozialistischen Gewaltorganisation. Landesgeschichtliche Beiträge 4 (Halle/Saale: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt—Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, 2025), pp. 157-182.

Formally retiring in 2013, he remains active with speaking engagements, teaching workshops, and continuing research.