Karl-Heinz Minuth

Karl-Heinz Minuth (born May 13, 1927 in Königsberg , East Prussia , † May 20, 1999 ) was a German historian .

Life

Family, school, wartime

Minuth was born in 1927 as the eldest of three children of the wood and coal merchant Emil Minuth and his wife Margarete, née. Helfrich born. From 1933 to 1944 he attended elementary school and high school in Königsberg.

From January to December 1944, Minuth and his school class were deployed as an air force helper in Königsberg and Klettwitz in Niederlausitz . He then had to work for a few weeks as part of the Reich Labor Service in Bismarckhügel (East Prussia) and Bremen . On March 3, 1945, he was drafted into the 65th Infantry Regiment. After suffering two lung wounds on April 17, 1945, he was taken prisoner of war in the Vechta Reserve Hospital , from which he was released on December 20, 1945 as cured.

In Miltenberg and Amorbach in the Odenwald , Minuth attended secondary school after the war and passed his Abitur.

Activity for the US Army

He then worked in a gravel works in Miltenberg; in December 1948 he joined the American Army as a civilian employee . During this time he loaded u. a. American planes ( raisin bombers ) with sacks of coal and food that were supplied by air to the people of West Berlin during their blockade by the Soviet Union in 1948 and 1949.

Education

In the winter semester of 1954, Minuth was able to matriculate at Kiel University to study history and English . During his studies Minuth worked on the Prussian dictionary of West and East Prussian dialects founded by Erhard Riemann , which was published by the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz . Since his student days, Minuth has published history in science and education in the journal . He achieved a coup in an essay from 1964 in which he dealt with the history of the term Iron Curtain . In this he showed that it was not Winston Churchill who was the first to use this image in 1946 to close off Eastern Europe from the west of the continent, but that the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had already coined this word at the end of the war.

In January 1967, a doctorate Minuth with one of Karl Dietrich Erdmann supervised dissertation on the western Allied military and political strategy in Southeast Europe between 1942 and 1945. Dr. phil .

Work as a historian

In the 1970s and 1980s, Minuth was best known as one of the main editors (together with Erdmann) of the source edition of the files of the Reich Chancellery for the time of the Weimar Republic , published as a joint project by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Federal Archives . This is a series of file publications that compile all of the cabinet minutes of the governments from 1919 to 1934 as well as numerous other internal documents of the governments concerned received in the Federal Archives and elsewhere in one or two volumes for each of the cabinets of those years make available to the public. The relevant publications whose organization (arrangement and visual presentation of the documents) and commentary (in the form of footnotes) Minuth in two volumes for the governments of Hans Luther , Adolf Hitler (for the years 1933 and 1934) and Franz von Papen got , are now regarded as the standard work for historical research on the politics of the governments of these years, especially since they have made it considerably easier to access the relevant documents, since they have since been accessible to the general public in practically every major research library - and no longer only in the reading room of the Federal Archives . The first of these volumes was published in 1977. Minuth moved his residence to Koblenz to take care of this project .

Politically turned Minuth in the 1970s against the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt , which he called conservative refused Ostpreuße. As a pensioner, he changed his attitude and made numerous trips to Eastern Europe. Among other things, he initiated a German-Russian House in Kaliningrad and gave lectures in front of the Russian officers' school in the city and at meetings of the East Prussian Landsmannschaft and the German-Russian Society in Koblenz.

After his death, Minuth was buried in the main cemetery in Koblenz .

literature

• Tilman-G. Kroops: "Preface to Dr. Karl-Heinz Minuth", in: Karl.Heinz Minuth (editor): The diaries of the Schutztruppe officer Victor Franke: Diary entries from May 26, 1896 to May 27, 1904 , Vol. I, 2002, p. XIII-XV.