Arno Joseph Mayer (born June 19, 1926), is an American historian who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Early life and academic career Mayer was born into a middle-class family in Luxembourg on 19 June 1926. His father was a wholesaler who had studied at the University of Heidelberg and had strong social democratic and Zionist beliefs. Mayer described his family as "fully emancipated and largely acculturated Luxembourgian Jews". The family fled into France amid the German invasion on 10 May 1940 and reached the France–Spain border by Autumn 1940 but were turned back by Spanish border guards and were in the Vichy-controlled "Free Zone" after the Fall of France. The family succeeded in boarding a ship to Oran in French Algeria on 18 October 1940 but were prevented from entering Morocco because they lacked a visa and were house arrested for several weeks in Oudja. They secured visas for the United States on 22 November 1940 and arrived in New York during January 1941. His maternal grandparents who had refused to leave Luxembourg were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto where his grandfather died in December 1943. Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and enlisted in the United States Army. During his time in the Army, he was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland and is recognized as one of the Ritchie Boys. He served as an intelligence officer and eventually became a morale officer for high-ranking German prisoners of war. He was discharged in 1946. He received his education at the City College of New York, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and Yale University. He has been professor at Wesleyan University (1952–53), Brandeis University (1954–58) and Harvard University (1958–61). He has taught at Princeton University since 1961. Views A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theory and what he terms "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. Mayer posits that Europe was characterized during the 19th century by a rapid economic modernization by industrialization and retardation of political change. He has argued that what he refers to as "The Thirty Years' Crisis" was caused by the problems of a dynamic new society produced by industrialization coexisting with a rigid political order. He feels that the aristocracy of all of the European countries