William S. Heckscher
From 1918 to 1921, the family lived in the Netherlands while Heckscher's father served as the Weimar Republic's ambassador to The Hague; there, Heckscher enrolled at the Nederlandsch Lyceum. Heckscher pursued his interests in history and Flemish art by spending his off hours studying at the Dutch Royal Library, the Mauritshuis and the Kröller-Müller Museum, but was dismissed from the Lyceum in 1920 for "lack of scholarly potential". After the family returned to Hamburg, Heckscher attended the city's Kunstgewerbeschule, now the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, but failed a class in ceramics.
Eric W. Gritsch
Gritsch was raised in a Lutheran pastor's family in Bernstein im Burgenland in Austria. His family was deeply affected by the "Anschluss" and the Second World War. His father died on a death march as a Russian prisoner of war, but Gritsch himself, who had been drafted into a Werwolf group, escaped capture by posing as a gypsy boy. He returned to Bernstein and graduated with Matura in 1950. The same year, he matriculated at the University of Vienna to study Protestant theology. In 1954 he received a Fulbright scholarship and came to Yale University for the academic year 1954/55. After going back to Austria to complete his ministerial training, he immigrated to the United States in 1957, initially for doctoral studies with Roland H. Bainton. His thesis was on Thomas Müntzer, the radical reformer.