German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945

Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781845450489
• eBook ISBN: 9780857457059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Recently, there has been a major shift in the focus of historical research on World War II towards the study of the involvements of scholars and academic institutions in the crimes of the Third Reich. The roots of this involvement go back to the 1920s. At that time right-wing scholars participated in the movement to revise the Versailles Treaty and to create a new German national identity. The contribution of geopolitics to this development is notorious. But there were also the disciplines of history, geography, ethnography, art history, archeology, sociology, and demography that devised a new nationalist ideology and propaganda. Its scholars established an extensive network of personal and institutional contacts. This volume deals with these scholars and their agendas. They provided the Nazi regime with ideas of territorial expansion, colonial exploitation and racist exclusion culminating in the Holocaust. Apart from developing ideas and concepts, scholars also actively worked in the SS and Wehrmacht when Hitler began to implement its criminal policies in World War II.

This collection of original essays, written by the foremost European scholars in this field, describes key figures and key programs supporting the expansion and exploitation of the Third Reich. In particular, they analyze the historical, geographic, ethnographical and ethno-political ideas behind the ethnic cleansing and looting of cultural treasures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Georg G. Iggers
• Preface by Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter: 1. German Ostforschung and Anti-Semitism
• Chapter: 2. The Role and Impact of German Ethnopolitical Experts in the SS Reich Security Main Office
• Chapter: 3. The Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp in Ukraine, and Its North American Legacy
• Chapter: 4. Volk, Bevölkerung, Rasse, and Raum: Erich Keyser’s Ambiguous Concept of a German History of Population, ca. 1918-1955
• Chapter: 5. Ethnic Politics and Scholarly Legitimation: The German Institut für Heimatforschung in Slovakia, 1941-1944
• Chapter: 6. The Sword of Science: German Scholars and National Socialist Annexation Policy in Slovenia and Northern Italy
• Chapter: 7. Romanian-German Collaboration in Ethnopolitics: The Case of Sabin Manuila
• Chapter: 8. Palatines All Over the World: Fritz Braun, a German Emigration Researcher in National Socialist Population Policy
• Chapter: 9. German Westforschung, 1918 to the Present: The Case of Franz Petri, 1903-1993
• Chapter: 10. Otto Scheel: National Liberal, Nordic Prophet
• Chapter: 11. The “Third Front”: German Cultural Policy in Occupied Europe, 1940-1945
• Chapter: 12. “Richtung halten”: Hans Rothfels and Neoconservative Historiography on Both Sides of the Atlantic
• Chapter: 13. Polish myśl zachodnia and German Ostforschung: An Attempt at a Comparison
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Subject Index
• Names Index