Della dissimulazione onesta : Richard Delbrueck, an "image" of Late Antiquity at the dawn of national socialism

Classical archaeology, like most disciplines, was not left untouched by the totalitarian regime instituted in 1933 by Germany's Nazis. Through the figure of Richard Delbrueck (1875–1957), this article examines the position a scholar could adopt in face of the regime and how that could affect his work from the years between the wars to the end of World War ii. Taking into account Delbrueck's gradual shift in focus from Antiquity to Late Antiquity, the paper analyses the role that this "fraught period" played in the regime's and scholars' use of history through the concepts of leader-figures and physiognomy.