Ronald Smelser

Together with fellow historian Edward J. Davies of the University of Utah, Smelser is the author of the 2008 book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. It discusses perceptions of the Eastern Front of World War II in the United States in the context of historical revisionism. The book traces the foundation of the post-war myth of the "clean Wehrmacht", its support by U.S. military officials, and the impact of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS mythology on American popular culture, including in the present time. The book garnered largely positive reviews for its thorough analysis of the myth's creation by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture. Several reviews noted some limitations of the book: in its discussion of the myth's role in contemporary culture and the extent of its impact on widely held popular perceptions of the Eastern Front, outside of a few select groups.

In 1993 Smelser published The Brown Elite II, which contained twenty additional sketches of the same type, co-edited with Enrico Syring [de]. The 1995 volume was a collection of essays on the military elite of Nazi Germany, which included twenty-seven sketches specifically about military leaders of the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht during the 1930s and 1940s. The 2000 volume, Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf: 30 Lebensläufe (Elite under the Skull) contains biographical sketches of thirty leading members of the SS.

Smelser is the co-editor of four prosopographic anthologies in which he and his co-editors compiled biographical essays on leading figures of the Nazi movement and the Nazi state, authored by various historians. The first in the series was the 1989 work The Brown Elite I, co-edited with Rainer Zitelmann, with twenty-two biographical sketches of leaders of the Nazi Party and of functionaries of the military and the Nazi regime of World War II.

Smelser has also studied the cultural impact of the Holocaust – from the marginal topic that it was in the 1950s and 60s to the event, in Smelser's words, that has "practically absorb[ed] the war". His research has focused on how several counterbalancing narratives of World War II and the Holocaust can co-exist, with the goal of demystifying and explaining their impact on popular culture.

Ronald Smelser (born 1942) is an American historian, author, and former professor of history at the University of Utah. He specializes in modern European history, including the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and has written several books on these topics. Smelser is the author, together with fellow historian Edward J. Davies, of the 2008 book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture.

Smelser was born in 1942 in Pennsylvania, United States. He obtained his Ph.D. in history in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin and was appointed as an assistant professor at Alma College (Michigan). In 1978, Smelser joined the history department at the University of Utah; he became a full professor in 1983. He also taught classes at the Free University of Berlin during the summer. He retired from the University of Utah in the 2010s, and, as of 2016, is Professor Emeritus at the school.

Smelser is a historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is the author of several books, including The Sudeten Problem 1933–1938: Volkstumspolitik and the Formulation of Nazi Foreign Policy and Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader. Both books have been translated into German. He has also published seven edited or co-edited books and numerous articles. Smelser is the former president of the German Studies Association and the Conference Group for the journal Central European History, as well as a former member of the American Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. In 2001 Smelser brought the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Nazi Olympics exhibit to the University of Utah as part of the Cultural Olympiad.