Konrad Repgen

Konrad Repgen (5 May 1923 – 2 April 2017) was a German historian and a professor emeritus (retired) at the University of Bonn. He was revered for his work on contemporary church history.

Life Konrad Repgen was born in 1923 at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Hütte, part of the conurbation of Troisdorf, a short distance to the south-east of Cologne. His father was a teacher and an active member of the Catholic Centre Party. In January 1933, a régime change heralded a rapid switch to single-party government, and Repgen's father, identified as an activist member of one of the "wrong" parties, lost his teaching job the same year. Release came in time to enable him to enroll for the winter semester at Bonn University, where over the next five years he studied History, Germanistics, Philosophy and Latin. He received his doctorate in 1950 for a dissertation on the March Movement and the May Elections which were features of the political turmoil of 1848 in the Rhineland. The work, which was supervised by , was adapted as a book and found a publisher a few years later.

Between 1952 and 1955, Repgen undertook an extended period of research at the German Historical Institute in Rome. A significant landmark followed in 1958 when he received his habilitation for a piece of work entitled "The Roman Curia and the Peace of Westphalia. Pope, emperor and state." (" Die römische Kurie und der Westfälische Friede. Papst, Kaiser und Reich"). He has also published standard works on national and church history, among them "Dreißigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede", for which in 1998 he won the History prize of the City of Münster. (The city was much impacted by the war and involved in the treaties that concluded it.) In addition, between 1976 and 1997, he was in charge of the Archive Section at the Reich Chancellery covering the twelve years of the Hitler government. He was a member of the British Academy, of the (German) Commission for Contemporary History, the Commission for Parliamentary History and of Political Parties, the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy, and of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

In 1989, Repgen was appointed a Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Culture Faculty of the newly established University of Bayreuth. In 1998, he was honoured with the Ring of Honour from the Görres Society, and in 2000 with the Prize of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation. He was an advisory council member with the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History since 1972 and with the Italian-German Historical Institute since 1973.