Thomas Weber was born in 1974 in Hagen, near Dortmund, in the Southwest corner of the Ruhr valley of North Rhine-Westphalia in what was still West Germany.
This term is traditionally used very similarly to how the acronym REMF (meaning "Rear Echelon Mother Fucker")[4] was used by United States military personnel during the Vietnam War.
In response to what he considered the anti-German and overly simplistic efforts of other historians to claim that anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology were always at the core of German culture, Weber's use of primary sources made him able to demonstrate that German Jewish frontline soldiers, unlike Private Hitler, were actually very well-liked within the List Regiment and remained friends with their fellow veterans for decades after the Armistice.
[5] Weber also argued that the movement towards a more democratic government that began under Imperial Germany and continued under the Weimar Republic was never pre-determined in 1919 to fail as catastrophically as became the case in 1933.
This testimony refutes some of the key tenets of Nazi propaganda and casts further doubt what was long considered the official history about the origins of Hitler's hatred of Jews.
Since 2010, Weber has been director of the Centre for Global Security and Governance at the University of Aberdeen, and since 2013 Professor of History and International Affairs.