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Since the early 1970s the communist regime in the German Democratic Republic classified thousands of doctoral dissertations as confidential, thus blocking the dissemination of research in the various disciplines of science. More than 6,800 titles of dissertations have not been listed in the national bibliographies. This article seeks to give a first overview of the different fields of restricted research and the topics which have been treated as state secrets. The study also shows the involvement of universities and colleges in the classification and segregation of theses into special depots and non‐public reading rooms.

Since the early 1970s the Communist regime in the German Democratic Republic classified thousands of doctoral dissertations as confidential, thus blocking the dissemination of research in the various disciplines of science. More than 6,800 titles of dissertations have not been listed in the national bibliographies. This article seeks to give a first overview of the different fields of restricted research and the topics which have been treated as state secrets. The study also aims to show the involvement of universities and colleges in the classification and segregation of theses into special depots and non‐public reading rooms.

The author of this article analysed which theses were classified by the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling Communist party in the GDR, and a full bibliography giving all the information of the titles and the names of the authors involved was published in 1994.

Despite the centralist directives from the Ministry for University and Technical College Education regarding the classification of dissertations, actual classification of doctoral theses has been handled very differently by the various institutions.

Dealing with this legacy, that is, returning the secret dissertations into the general stocks and listing them in the bibliographies and general catalogues, took several years. This article was able to highlight those events through its original source.

Part of the “JDoc at 60” series, this paper aims to discuss, evaluate and compare writings on the state of libraries in Continental Europe in the 1940s and the 1990s.

Four papers published in Journal of Documentation, three from 1945 and one from 1994, are analysed and compared, and their significance discussed.

Finds that there are similarities and differences between the situation facing European libraries at the end of the 1939‐1945 war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Both historical and current policy perspectives are included.

The article aims at examining the ethical limits and risks of servant leadership. During the Second World War, the German army officer Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is a loyal servant to his nation and homeland. But when he learns about the Nazis’ mass murders and crimes, he begins to have doubts about whom he should serve. Being confronted with numerous moral dilemmas, he finally decides to join a resistance group. Of course, Stauffenberg's situation as colonel and leader was an extreme case. Time and again, however, managers and leaders are faced with similar dilemmas. Indeed, the current COVID-19-crisis shows that even today’s leaders are repeatedly faced with almost insoluble dilemmas. The recent literature about ethics and leadership suggests a philosophy which is almost portrayed as a panacea to any ethical issues: servant leadership (SL). This study, however, questions the commonly held view that SL is always ethical. The purpose of our historical case study is twofold. First, this study explores the ethical challenges Stauffenberg (and other officers) faced and how they dealt with them. Second, this study elaborates on what responses (if any) SL would provide to these challenges.

The applied method is a historical case study, in which the authors draw on a plethora of secondary literature, including books, reports, and articles.

By analyzing the historical case of “Operation Valkyrie,” this study elaborated and identified risks and limitations of SL and pointed out ways to address these risks. In particular, SL poses risks in the case of a too narrow understanding of the term “service.”

While other leadership styles, e.g. transformational leadership or charismatic leadership, have been extensively studied with regard to ethical risks, in the case of SL possible risks and limitations are still largely unexplored.