Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 22:27, 3 December 2009

The Schieder commission was a post-World War II German commission of the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, headed by Theodor Schieder, which in the early 1960s published a five volume work on the population transfer of Germans from central and Eastern Europe. The head of the commission, Theodor Schieder, had previously been closely associated with the Nazi settlement policy in occupied countries in Eastern Europe. Schieder in turn was supervised by Theodor Oberländer (who also wrote the introduction to the published works of the commission), the head of the Ministry, who had been Scheider's collegue in the Nazi Ostforschung. Oberländer is considered by some historians (for example, Götz Aly) to be one of the academics who laid the intellectual foundation for the Final Solution.

Creation of the commission

The commission was created in 1951 by Hans Lukaschek the Minister for the Expelled who before Second World War served as German propaganda chief against Poles during the Silesian Uprisings

Schieder chose as members of the commission individuals, such as Werner Conze, who had previously advocated "dejewification" of territory occupied by Nazi Germany. During the Nazi era in Germany, both Conze and Schieder had devoted their attention to the issue of Nazi settlement policies, including the matter of "depopulating" Poland of its Jewish population. Schieder was also one of the primary authors of a document entitled Generalplan Ost which called for creating "Lebensraum" (living-space) for Germans in Eastern Europe by enslaving or starving to death the Slavs and killing all the Jews who lived there.

Another person chosen was Hans Rothfels, a German nationalist who in the interwar period advocated German domination of Eastern Europe and the enserfment of its population. The members of the commission were "consciously committed to ... propagandistic activity in their government's service". The propagandist aims of the German government at the time were to utilize the commission's work to keep the question of the territories lost by Germany as a result of World War II open. Adolf Diestelkamp, another member of the commission, expressed the hope that the work of the commission could be a "decisive factor in our fight to win back the German east", that is, territories which Germany ceded to Poland after World War II. The commission relied heavily on interest groups, including expellee organizations, to collect their sources.

Rothfels was the person who had originally proposed Schieder as head of the editorial staff, having been his teacher, and a key intellectual influence on him in the Nazi period. Younger historians, such as Martin Broszat (who researched Yugoslavia) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (who helped research Romania), who were later to break with the tradition of Scheider and Conze, served as research assistants.

Notable members of the commission

Theodor Schieder

Theodor Schieder had lived in Konigsberg (Królewiec) in East Prussia since 1934. In the interwar period Schieder was known as one of a group of nationalist historians who opposed the Weimar republic Once the Nazis seized power, Scheider directed a regional center devoted to the study of East Prussia and World War I. According to Robert Moeller, after 1945 Schieder merely transferred his ideas about one German defeat to the study of another. In 1937 he joined the Nazi party himself. Scheider enthusiastically supported Hitler's invasion of Poland and wrote academic papers on Germany's role as a "force of order" and a "bearer of a unique cultural mission", in Eastern Europe. During World War II he advocated the "dejudaization" of territories occupied by Germany. As one of the prominent proponents of German racism, he advocated maintaining German "race purity" by not mixing with other, "inferior" nationals. The primary purpose of Schieder's research was to justify alleged German supremacy over other peoples. He fled Konigsberg when the Red Army approached it December of 1944.

After World War II Schieder was "deNazified" and kept publicly quiet about his past. As a result, despite his Nazi membership, and his enthusiastic support for Nazi policies in Eastern Europe, Schieder's career took off in post War Germany. He was apponited to a chair in modern history at the University of Cologne in 1947, and in the 1950's edited one of the most known historical journals in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, personal correspondence with Werner Conze from this time, revealed that they still held old antisemitic prejudices.

Werner Conze

Werner Conze was a doctoral student of Rothfels in Konigsberg under the Nazis, where he claimed in his research that Germans had a positive role in development of eastern Europe. With the Nazis taking power, Conze, together with Schieder and Rothfels helped to institutionalize racial ethnic research in the Third Reich. According to German historian Ingo Haar, "the Nazis made use of (this) racist scholarship, which lent itself gladly". While working for German espionage, in 1936, Conze prepared a document which portrayed Poland as backward and in need of German order and which recommended the exclusion of Jews from the legal system as Conze considered them outside the law. In further work issued in 1938 Conze continued in similar vein, blaming lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination"

During the war Conze fought at the eastern front. In the meantime his family fled west. At the end of the war Conze ended up in a Soviet POW camp. After the war, Conze moved to Munster, then to Heidelberg..

Goals and work of the Commission

Presenting expulsions as greatest tragedy in German history

Part of Schieder's purpose was to make sure that the expulsions would be established as "one of the most momentous events in all of European history and one of the greatest catastrophes in the development of the German people". He sought to make sure that the publishing of "selected documents" would bring to light events which he felt had so far been "hushed up"

Supporting revision of post-war settlements

Schieder and other members of the commission were interested in more than just sympathy for the expellees.. They also hoped that the propaganda work of the commission would help to convince the victorious Western allies to revise their position with regard to Germany's post war eastern borders with Poland. In doing so he endorsed the ties between work of his historians and the Federal Republic's desire to for revision of post-war boundary settlement, being fully convinced such result would outweigh the problem of responses from Eastern Europe.

Countering information about atrocities committed by Nazi Germany

Another goal of the commission, as stated by Ministry of Expellees, was to counter the "false impression, produced by the propaganda of the opponent" that Nazi German forces of occupation in Eastern Europe "had raped robbed, terrorized, and butchered the population as long as Hitler was in power", which the ministry claimed was presented in "perverted" documents of the Polish government

Methodology

While the commissioned gathered and used a large number of primary sources, Schieder also wanted the the volumes produced by it to also include supposed political context of the events. However, only the volumes about Romania, prepared by Wehler, and the one on Yugoslavia prepared by Broszat, included some form of analysis of collaboration by the local Germans during the war, Nazi plans and the atrocities of German occupation. At the center of the project were documents prepared by expellee organizations, German government, testimonies dictated in response to questions from officials of regional expellee interest groups, and personal diaries initially written as retrospective for the author or family. Together the volumes contained 4,300 densely printed pages.

References

1. Haar, Ingo (2007). ""Bevölkerungsbilanzen" und "Vertreibungsverluste"". In Ehmer, Josef (ed.). Herausforderung Bevölkerung: zu Entwicklungen des modernen Denkens über die Bevölkerung vor, im und nach dem "Dritten Reich" (in German). VS Verlag. p. 271. ISBN 3531155563.
2. Fred Kautz, "The German historians: Hitler's willing executioners and Daniel Goldhagen", Black Rose Books, 2003, pg. 92
3. ^ Alan E. Steinweis, "Studying the Jew: scholarly antisemitism in Nazi Germany", Harvard University Press, 2006, pg. 121,
4. ^ R. Gerald Hughes, "Britain, Germany and the Cold War: the search for a European Détente, 1949-1967", Routledge, page 74
5. Wulf Kansteiner, "In pursuit of German memory: history, television, and politics after Auschwitz", Ohio University Press, 2006, pages 222-224
6. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, Wojciech Wrzesiński, Bożena Szaynok, Jakub Tyszkiewicz "Studia z historii najnowszej", 1999, pg 136
7. T. Hunt Tooley, "National identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the eastern border, 1918-1922", U of Nebraska Press, 1997, pg. 176,
8. Steven P. Remy, "The Heidelberg myth: the Nazification and denazification of a German university", Harvard University Press, 2002, page 228, 233,
9. Wolfgang Bialas, Anson Rabinbach, "Nazi Germany and the humanities", Oneworld, 2007, pg. 41,
10. Doris L. Bergen, "War & genocide: a concise history of the Holocaust", Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pg. 162,
11. ^ Robert G. Moeller, "War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany", University of California Press, 2003, pages 56-84,
12. ^ European Association for Jewish Studies. Congress, Judit Targarona Borrás, Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, "Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Judaism from the Renaissance to modern times", BRILL, 1999, pg. 317,
13. Stackelberg, Roderick (2007). The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany. Routledge. p. 92. ISBN 0415308607.
14. ^ Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, "German scholars and ethnic cleansing, 1919-1945", Berghahn Books, 2005, pg. xi, 10-12,
15. Michael Thad Allen, "The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps", UNC Press, 2005, pg. 137,

• 1951 establishments
• Commissions
• Contemporary German history