Adam Heydel

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Adam Heydel

Adam Zdzisław Heydel (born December 6, 1893 in Radom , Russian Empire ; † March 14, 1941 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a Polish economist . He was a representative of the Cracow School of Economics , as which he campaigned for economic liberalism and against statism and state interventionism .

life and work

Heydel went to school in Krakow , where he successfully graduated from high school. He then began to study law in Moscow , Kiev and Krakow, which he completed in 1919. He then worked for a few months as an economic advisor in the press department of the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw . In 1921 he worked as an assistant at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where he received his doctorate and taught a year later. At the same time he worked at the Cracow Commercial Academy. In 1925 he completed his habilitation in political economics with the essay Fundamental Methodological Questions of Economics , which dealt with questions of the causality of economic studies and an analysis of the arguments of the theorists who rejected the concept of causality in favor of functionalism in economics. Due to his liberal views and his connection to Krakow, he is seen as a representative of the Krakow School of Economics, whose mentor at the time was Adam Krzyżanowski . Shortly after the May coup in 1927, he worked for a short time in the Ministry of Religion and Public Education, only to become director of a private business school for women a little later.

At the Jagiellonian University he taught again from 1929, although the political situation for liberal-minded people was increasingly problematic at that time. When Heydel wrote an open letter in 1933 in which he criticized the Brest trial , Janusz Jędrzejewicz withdrew his teaching license. He then went to the United States of America as a Rockefeller Fellow . After his return home, he headed an economic institute. At that time he was mainly active as a publicist, when he wrote mainly against statism and state interventionism. He also wrote his theory of public income in 1935 , which was only published because the censors were not concerned with scientific works at the time. In addition, the pressure of the Sanacja eased , so that Heydel was allowed to teach in Krakow again from 1937. For the academic year 1939/1940 he was elected dean of the Faculty of Law and Administration, but could not take this position due to the war, as he was shortly after the beginning of the German occupation of Poland on November 6, 1939 as part of the special campaign Krakow , which targeted against the Polish intelligentsia , was imprisoned. Then he and many other professors were deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . He was released on February 8, 1940. He returned to the old family residence in Brzóza . There he was involved in conspiratorial action against the Nazi regime . However, one of his comrades-in-arms was provoked by the National Socialists, which had dire consequences for the conspiratorial network: Adam Heydel and his brother Wojciech were imprisoned, this time in Skarżysko-Kamienna . The commandant there came from the same family as Heydel, which encouraged him to persuade Heydel, of German descent, to sign the people's list, which would have brought Heydel freedom. Heydel only said: I can't do something like that because I have nothing in common with the German people. In the end he did not sign the people's list, so that he was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp with other prisoners and his brother and shot on March 14, 1941 as part of a mass execution.

Reception after death

In post-war Poland his work was frowned upon by the Real Socialists. Even Oskar Lange , who developed the model of competitive socialism ( Third Way ) together with Abba P. Lerner , spoke out in favor of removing Heydel's work from the university libraries.

Nevertheless, the memory of his work has remained to this day. The Jagiellonian University honored him with the Merentibus medal in 1980 . In 2012 his collected writings were published.

literature

  • Jochen August (Ed.): "Special Campaign Krakau". The arrest of the Krakow scientists on November 6, 1939. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930908-28-X , p. 293

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Witold Kwaśnicki: Obrona wolności, pokoju, kultury i Postępu - Adam Heydel . University of Wrocław, Wrocław 2011, p. 25.
personal data
SURNAME Heydel, Adam
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heydel, Adam Zdzisław (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish economist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH at Radom
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1941
Place of death Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp