Rainer Eisfeld (born 4 April 1941, in Berlin) is a German political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Osnabrück.
First appointed in 1994, he also continues to serve on the Board of Trustees of Concentration Camp Memorials Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora[3] (State of Thuringia, Germany).
Displaying a strong historical interest, Eisfeld has also, rather uncommonly for a political scientist, written about the persisting ideology of the American frontier ("progress through violence"), the projection of earthly hopes and fears on another world (the planet Mars), and teenagers' dreams in the 1950s.
Eisfeld won a Faculty Dissertation Award[14] from Frankfurt University in 1971 and a Volkswagen Foundation Research Grant (Akademie-Stipendium) in 1989.
His work Mondsüchtig on Wernher von Braun's involvement in the infamous Nazi slave labor program was selected by the journal Bild der Wissenschaft as one of the 'Year's Outstanding Books on Science' in 1997.