MAYER, ARNO JOSEPH

MAYER, ARNO JOSEPH (1926– ), U.S. historian. Born in Luxembourg, Mayer fled the Hitler menace and found refuge in the U.S. (1940). He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, during which time he was assigned the duty of tending to Wernher von Braun after the German rocket scientist was taken into custody by the American forces. Following his military service, Mayer studied at the Geneva Institut des Hautes Études Internationales and received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. After teaching at Brandeis and Harvard, he was a professor of history at Princeton from 1961 to 1999. Upon his retirement, Mayer became professor emeritus of history at Princeton. His research was in the field of 20th-century diplomacy. His major works include Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (1959), which deals with the impact of the military stalemate; Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967), a study of Wilson's war aims and the effect of Communism upon them; Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956 (1971); The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981); Why Did the Heaven Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (1988); and The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (2000). (Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)