Professional Background
Jason Lantzer serves as the assistant director of the Butler University Honors Program. A three-time graduate of Indiana University (BA 1997, MA 1999, PhD 2005), his research spans American political, religious, military, and legal history, alongside specialized interests in Indiana and Disney history. At Butler, he has developed honors courses that focus on various aspects of World War II and has co-led an annual study abroad trip to Germany since 2018.
Dr. Lantzer is the author of nine books, including Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust: A History (DeGruyter, 2023), the first scholarly work to consider how Eisenhower’s visit to Ohrdruf in April 1945 changed how he, and the United States, viewed the war and influenced American policy from the Nuremberg trials to his presidency and beyond. Dr. Lantzer has spoken on the topic internationally and across the country, including at the Eisenhower Presidential Library. He has also written numerous articles and book chapters, most notably “The Indiana Way of Eugenics” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Paul Lombardo (Indiana University Press, 2011), which contributed to a historic marker being placed near the Indiana Statehouse.
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Lantzer will be conducting research for his book project titled “The Abyss of a New Dark Age: The History and Legacy of Nordhausen and Flossenbürg.” These two sites showcase different facets of the Nazi camp system in their creation and operation, including the V-2 rocket program. Both liberated by American forces in April 1945, they later served as the basis for postwar war crimes trials and became sites of commemoration — one in East Germany, the other in West Germany — before and after reunification. Together, the two camps offer a complicated legacy that stretches from the rise of the Third Reich to the Cold War and beyond. Dr. Lantzer will utilize contemporary and later oral histories to center the voices of prisoners, perpetrators, and liberators in an effort to give a long view of the camps that includes not just their wartime history but also their legacy in the twenty-first century.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027