Following the release of his second book “Famous and (Infamous) Workplace and Community Training: A Social History of Training and Development,” Dr. David M. Kopp has donated his papers/research that informed chapter five, Training Forced Labor in Nazi Germany, to the Barry University library.
Much of this primary research included ephemera and declassified FBI files on the German-American Bund, an American Nazi movement that was active from roughly 1924 to 1941.
“While it's a cliché, I know, reading these Bund papers again reminded me that, especially now, if we do not learn from history we may, indeed, be doomed to repeat it,” Kopp said.
The book explores the social history of training and development and describes how ordinary training systems were linked to extraordinary events. Using instrumental case studies, Kopp explores the direct and indirect motives behind famous and infamous training systems of history, such as the methods used by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles, those used by the Third Reich in training forced labor, and in the social guidance films of the 1950s, among others.