Albrecht Haushofer

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Bust of Albrecht Haushofer by Josef Nálepa, Street of Remembrance in Berlin (2002)

Albrecht Georg Haushofer (born January 7, 1903 in Munich , † April 23, 1945 in Berlin ; pseudonyms: Jürgen Dax , Jörg Werdenfels ) was a German geographer , publicist , writer and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life and professional history

Albrecht Haushofer was the older of two sons of the royal Bavarian officer and geographer Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) and his wife Martha, née Mayer-Doss (1877-1946). The mother was mainly responsible for his upbringing. The nanny from England, who temporarily worked at home, taught him the English language at an early age. His upbringing was encouraging, demanding and strict, and weak wills were relentlessly fought. All in all, he grew up in a harmonious, educated, cultured and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Albrecht Haushofer attended school in Munich. Here he was considered a loner and eccentric. In addition to school, he received piano and composition lessons. He liked to play the piano, showed great interest in atlases and history. During the Munich revolution in 1918/1919 , his mother sent him to the country for several weeks. After graduating from the humanistic Theresien-Gymnasium in Munich, he studied history and geography . He began to orientate himself politically very early on and in 1919 joined the national liberal DVP together with his parents . Here he played an active role, becoming chairman of the student group at Munich University and chairman of the youth group for Bavaria. In the third year of his studies he expanded his subjects to include geology and economics. In 1924 he was with the dissertation pass States in the Alps doctorate . Doctoral supervisor was Erich von Drygalski (1865–1949). Haushofer was also interested in the topic because he was a passionate mountain hiker.

Albrecht Haushofer then went on a trip to Brazil for several months. In October 1924 he returned to Germany, applied for an assistant position to Albrecht Penck, the most famous geographer in Germany at the time, in Berlin, and took up this position on October 1, 1925. Berlin appealed to him above all because of its theater and concert program. When he left the assistant position in 1928, he became general secretary of the Society for Geography in Berlin until 1940 and editor of its magazine until 1938. In Berlin he gained quite a large circle of people, not least because of the fame of his father Karl Haushofer. This also included Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007), whom he later counted among his most important friends. On the advice of Albrecht Penck, he had chosen “The formation of dissolving layers , based on studies in the Pannonian Basin ” as the habilitation topic . Working on the topic had become increasingly torture for him. He is fed up with anger that he deals with things "which I do not believe, the recognizability of which I am doubtful, while the state and people's buildings are cracking in every joint." He was much more concerned with politics Increasing danger of a seizure of power by the extreme right and the resulting intensification of internal and European antagonisms. Albrecht Haushofer's concern about further radicalization of society increased, especially due to the outcome of the Reichstag election of September 14, 1930 with a landslide in favor of the NSDAP. From a political point of view, he believes, the right has already demagoged itself to such an extent that nothing can be hoped of from it. Therefore, he saw it as his task to counteract this development with his possibilities. To prepare for a political career he created networks of political ones Relationships and tried to influence public opinion, especially through Publication of articles in political magazines. In May 1931, he submitted his habilitation thesis, but withdrew it because it was feared that the faculty would reject it. A year later he wrote a comedy And So Panduria Is Ruled , a satire about parliamentary operations during the time of the grand coalition, which was performed on a provincial stage.

Developments in the time of National Socialism

From 1933 the political framework for Albrecht Haushofer changed dramatically. He had come to terms with the conditions of the Weimar Republic. A system with extreme ideological polarization and an absolute claim to totalitarianism was not acceptable to him. This also overturned his previous life plans. A political career was now out of the question, and an academic career hardly seemed possible under the new Civil Service Act. Because according to the Nazi criteria he was considered a “ quarter Jew ” and was thus discriminated against and potentially endangered. Due to an intervention by Rudolf Hess , who had been a close friend of his father since 1919 , he was able to take on a lectureship in geopolitics at the "harmonized" University of Politics in Berlin, which he decided in July 1933 after long hesitation because of his serious concerns about the new one Regime. He was guided by the hope of being able to influence foreign policy in this way. He saw his participation as a way of counteracting, especially in the event of a threat to European peace. In addition, from 1933 Albrecht Haushofer acted as his father's deputy in Berlin in the chairmanship of the “ Volksdeutsche Rat ”, an advisory body subordinate to Rudolf Hess. This gave him good relations with Joachim von Ribbentrop , who at the time was Adolf Hitler's personal advisor on foreign policy issues and who placed great value on Albrecht Haushofer's advice. From 1934 he worked as a freelancer for the Ribbentrop office and undertook trips on secret mission to Great Britain, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Southeast Europe and Japan. In 1936, an assignment from Ribbentrop led him to the Czech President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948). The aim here was to weaken the little entente between France and the Soviet Union through a treaty with Czechoslovakia. If the outcome is positive, according to the judgment of Albrecht Haushofer, it could be “a contribution to European peace”. In the summer of 1937 the Ribbentrop office financed a trip to Japan for him. This was primarily about gathering information from Japanese military circles and activating future interlocutors for politico-military alliances. Haushofer had hardly been to Japan when the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937 triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War . In a modification of his original travel program, he now had the opportunity to visit sites of the battle for Beijing-Tianjin and to learn about the effects of a “modern war” on site. Full of horror, he repeated his impressions in the poem Nankau Pass :

Nan Kau Pass near Beijing, alternative spelling Nankou or Nankow (see also Juyongguan )

“Black swarms circling around.
Search, wait, push down.
Chop eyes and bowels of the
dying. And circle again. "

He was able to avert another trip to Japan in order to appease political and military circles in which the German-Soviet non-aggression pact had caused great irritation in August 1939.

His repeated warnings in articles in the “Zeitschrift für Geopeopolitics” about the endangerment of peace, which he initially concealed but later expressed with astonishing frankness, culminated in a kind of memorandum in June 1938. With very clear words he warned Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had meanwhile been promoted to Reich Foreign Minister, of a war against Czechoslovakia. He only noted laconically in the margin of the document "Secret Service Propaganda". By autumn 1938 at the latest, Albrecht Haushofer had recognized that his efforts to influence the course of foreign policy were futile. With some of his foreign interlocutors, he had come into conflicts of interest through his attempts to counteract this, especially with his connections to England. At the end of January 1939 he learned of the German plans to occupy Bohemia. After the British-French declaration of guarantee for Poland of March 31, 1939, Albrecht Haushofer finally saw no way for himself to prevent a war which, as he wrote to his parents in October and December 1939 after the defeat of Poland , was the catastrophe of the German Reich , the “great destruction of Europe” will bring about the collapse of “our entire cultural world”.

In his literary work, which remained largely unknown, he tried covertly to critically interpret current political events. Of his historical dramas Scipio (1934), Sulla (1938) and Augustus (1939), the first and the last were performed before 1945. Until 1943 he wrote the dramas The Macedonians and Chinese Legends , which were only published posthumously .

With those who opposed the Nazi regime he was early in z. T. close connection, so from 1934 with the diplomat Albrecht von Kessel and the national politician Count Ulrich-Wilhelm von Schwerin. There is no evidence that he knew of the specific putsch plans before the Munich conference in September 1938. In March 1941 Ulrich von Hassell (1881–1944) came to the realization that Albrecht Haushofer “now” thinks “like us.” At the beginning of 1941 Albrecht Haushofer established connections with circles from the resistance against National Socialism . As a member of the Popitz circle, he deliberately made his contacts in England available and from that time on was involved in conspiratorial activities. He was one of the forces pushing for an imminent coup. Germany should not enter the negotiations for a mutual agreement weakly. He was one of the few who was willing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. His interlocutors within the resistance groups included Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke from the Kreisauer Kreis , Eduard Brücklmeier , diplomat at the English embassy, ​​as well as members of other Berlin resistance groups such as Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack , who worked at the Faculty of Foreign Studies taught or studied.

During the Second World War

After the beginning of the Second World War, Haushofer became a freelancer at Information Center I, a formally independent department of the Foreign Office . Most of the time he did the tasks assigned to him for his own protection, but in full hatred of the human unreasonableness that had spread among decision-makers in politics and the military. Since the attack on Poland he had developed into a “Nazi hater” who felt like he was on a “wrecked, already burning ship largely ruled and operated by fools and criminals”. From then on he had stopped the monthly reporting in the journal for geopolitics because he was not prepared to take on responsibility for war reporting. From then on he himself no longer published an article of his own in the magazine. At the beginning of 1940 the university was transferred to the new Faculty of Foreign Studies at Berlin University . Albrecht Haushofer received a professorship for political geography and geopolitics there. In August 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop summoned him to Vienna at short notice to work as an expert on the Second Vienna Arbitration Proceedings on the division of Transylvania between Hungary and Romania. When he arrived in Vienna, he was relieved to find that the decision had already been made by the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy. He wrote to his mother that I didn't want to "bear the slightest responsibility (for something like that) in front of history."

From the summer of 1940 he had been involved by Rudolf Hess in his preparations for a planned exploratory flight to Great Britain . He wrote letters to contact persons in England and made suggestions for a meeting in neutral Portugal, but they received no response. Five days before the flight on May 10, 1941, he had one last conversation with Hess. Whose action, on his own account, he felt as a folly. After Hess' flight to Scotland, Haushofer found himself in an extremely difficult position. Two days later he was ordered to the Obersalzberg and arrested. He was imprisoned in the Gestapo house prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse for 6 weeks. He was interrogated in part by Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) himself. Albrecht Haushofer found it particularly degrading that the Gestapo people were interested in his most personal matters. While in custody, he wrote the play The Macedonians about the collapse of an empire after the death of its founder. The SS guards carefully enclosed the manuscript pages every evening. After his release, he was immediately released from work at Observatory I. Even after that, he remained under the supervision of the Gestapo . From now on, he questioned the dates offered to him for a public appearance in advance in the party headquarters and was glad that he was denied the appearance.

One of the quotes from Albrecht Haushofer's Moabiter Sonnets
in the Former Cell Prison Moabit:
"Of all the suffering that fills this building, there is a breath of life under the masonry and iron bars, a secret tremor"

In December 1943, Albrecht Haushofer's institute and his apartment in Berlin were destroyed in a night of bombing. He was accepted in the north of Berlin in the parents' house of two students.

From 1942 Haushofer wrote General Political Geography and Geopolitics on the remaining work . It should also be a discussion of the misuse of geopolitics during the National Socialist era . Out of consideration for his father, he formulated some passages of criticism of geopolitics rather cautiously.

In the summer of 1944 he was of the opinion that shortly before the certain defeat it was too late to assassinate Hitler, since nothing could be achieved in terms of foreign policy and Hitler's responsibility for the catastrophe should not be confused. Presumably he was informed of the date of the attack. After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Albrecht Haushofer went into hiding in Bavaria. He found shelter on Anna Zahler's farm near his parents' property on the Partnachalm. During a house search on December 7, 1944, he was found there by chance: His hiding place in the hayloft was quite safe, but a bare cufflink gave him away. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Berlin-Moabit . It was here that his Moabite sonnets were written as a résumé of his life and an expression of his despair. In Moabit he also wrote an unfinished drama about Thomas More .

ULAP staircase 2010

From January 1945 Albrecht Haushofer received all kinds of easing of his imprisonment. Because he had received the order from Heinrich Himmler to write down his current opinion on the situation. After 80 sonnets were finished, he arranged them in a cycle and copied them in two copies - the original and a copy. He sent a copy to his brother Heinz, who was also imprisoned in Moabit, through a fellow inmate. Albrecht Haushofer kept the second copy himself. On March 2, 1945, his lawyer announced that his investigation had not yet been completed. On the night of April 23, 1945, shortly before the liberation of Berlin , he and fifteen other prisoners, including those sentenced to death Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher , were arrested by an SS under the pretext of being transferred by SS group leader Heinrich Müller Troop under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Stawizki led to the nearby ULAP site, which was destroyed by bombs , and shot there from behind. His former colleague Irmgard Schnuhr and his brother Heinz Haushofer , who had been released from prison in April, found him there on May 12th . Albrecht Haushofer carried five sheets of paper with his 80 sonnets in his coat pocket . His body was buried in the Wilsnacker Strasse cemetery near the Moabiter Johanniskirche .

Commemoration

When Irmgard Schnuhr was imprisoned by American troops for three months in July 1945, the copy of the sonnets made by Albrecht Haushofer in prison fell into the hands of the historian Friedrich Wilhelm Euler, who had known Albrecht Haushofer, who worked for the American office. His American superiors were so impressed that they arranged for a private print.

In 1946 the first printed edition of the Moabiter Sonnets appeared with an afterword by Albrecht Haushofer's former pupil, Rainer Hildebrandt .

Berlin war cemetery on Wilsnacker Strasse

Haushofer's grave in what is now the war grave cemetery on Wilsnacker Strasse has been included in the list of honorary graves in Berlin . A plaque at the entrance to the cemetery quotes verses from one of the Moabite sonnets ("Towards the End"):

“Madness alone was master in this country.
His proud run closes in the fields of corpses,
And misery, immeasurable, rises. "

The Albrecht Haushofer School in Berlin-Heiligensee is named after him, and there is also a memorial stele on it. In Hildesheim and Leverkusen there are “Albrecht-Haushofer-Strasse”. In 2016, the draft of a planned memorial stele for Haushofer was presented in Machtlfing . The ULAP site is still fallow today (2017). Only an overgrown outside staircase has survived from the development. Nothing reminds of the murders that took place there.

Memorial stele for Albrecht Haushofer, Berlin-Heiligensee

scientific publications

  • Pass states in the Alps . Vowinckel, Berlin-Grunewald 1928 (also dissertation, University of Munich 1924).
  • On the problem of the concept of space , in: Journal for Geopolitics , Volume 9. 1932, No. 12, pp. 723–734.
  • England's slump in China . Junker u. Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1940.
  • General political geography and geopolitics , Volume 1 (no longer published), Vowinckel, Heidelberg 1951.

Literary publications

  • Evening in Autumn , drama, private print 1927.
  • And so is the rule in Panduria , drama, stage manuscript 1932.
  • Scipio. A play in 5 acts , drama, Propylaeen-Verlag, Berlin 1934.
  • Sulla. A play in 5 acts , drama, Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1938.
  • Guest gift , poems, private print 1938.
  • Augustus. A play in 5 acts , drama, Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1939.
  • Chinese legend. A dramatic poem , Blanvalet, Berlin 1949. First performance on February 8, 1948 in Göttingen by Heinz Dietrich Kenter , Chinese legend . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1947 ( online ).
  • Thomas More. Unfinished tragic drama , ed. based on the author's manuscript by Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen, Paderborn a. a., Schöningh, 1985.
  • Moabite sonnets. Edited by Amelie von Graevenitz from the original manuscript. Biographical afterword by Ursula Laack . 6th edition Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-64166-4 (1st public edition at Blanvalet, Berlin 1946, see: User: Vsop.de/Moabiter Sonette ; on the very different from Haushofer's manuscript For the text of this issue, see discussion).
  • Hans-Edwin Friedrich, Wilhelm Haefs (Ed.): Albrecht Haushofer. Collected Works. Part I: Dramas I [Scipio, Sulla, Augustus] (=  contributions to literature and literary studies of the 20th and 21st centuries, volume 24 ). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2014, ISBN 3-631-64478-7 .

literature

  • Norbert Göttler : Dachau, Moabit and back. An encounter with Albrecht Haushofer. Literary collage . Allitera Verlag, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-96233-193-1 .
  • Ernst Haiger, Amelie Ihering [b. von Graevenitz], Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker : Albrecht Haushofer . 2nd Edition. Langewiesche-Brandt, Ebenhausen 2008, ISBN 3-7846-0179-0 .
  • Heinz Haushofer , Adolf Roth: The Haushof and the Haushofer (=  publications of the Bavarian State Association for Family Studies eV . Issue 8). Laßleben, Munich / Kallmünz 1939.
  • Henning Heske : Goethe and Grünbein, essays on literature . Bernstein, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-9808198-5-X , p. 29-33 .
  • Rainer Hildebrandt : We are the last. From the life of the resistance fighter Albrecht Haushofer and his friends . Michael-Verlag (owner and license holder: Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz ), Neuwied / Berlin 1949.
  • Herbert Kosney: The Other Front . In: Erich H. Boehm (Ed.): We Survived. Fourteen Histories of the Hidden and Hunted in Nazi Germany . Westview, 2005, pp. 36-51 .
  • Ursula Laack-Michel: Albrecht Haushofer and National Socialism. A contribution to contemporary history (=  Kiel historical studies . Volume 15 ). Klett, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-12-905250-X .
  • Ursula Michel:  Haushofer, Albrecht Georg. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 120 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Albrecht Haushofer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Albrecht H. expresses himself in two of his Moabit sonnets ( Acheron and Der Vater ) about his father and his relation to National Socialism. See Christoph Lindenberg: The technique of evil. On the prehistory and history of National Socialism. Free Spiritual Life, Stuttgart 1978, p. 10 f. Accordingly, the father was interested in the power that National Socialism gave him and his thoughts ( geopolitics ). There also a note that the father only agreed to obtain legal counsel for the arrested person “because of the family honor” at the insistence of outsiders; he himself considered Albrecht a "traitor". ibid. p. 12 with note 10.
  2. ↑ Wikisource: Journal of the Society for Geography in Berlin , .digizeitschriften.de
  3. ^ Haiger / Ihring / von Weizsäcker, Albrecht Haushofer . Ernst Freiberger Foundation , Berlin 2002, p. 25
  4. ^ Albrecht Haushofer - Rainer Hildebrandt (Hsgb), We are the last , 1946, p. 65.
  5. ↑ Record of Albrecht Haushofer from June 26, 1938, England June 1938, strictly confidential and at the personal disposal of the Reich Foreign Minister in: Ernst Haiger, Amelie Ihering, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Albrecht Haushofer , Ernst-Freiberger-Stiftung, Berlin 2002, p. 67f .
  6. ^ Letters from Albrecht Haushofer to the parents of October 13, 1939 and to his mother of December 13, 1939, in: Ernst Haiger, Amelie Ihering, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Albrecht Haushofer , Ernst-Freiberger-Stiftung, Berlin 2002, p. 70.
  7. ^ The Hassell Diaries 1938–1944. Ulrich von Hassell, Aufzüge vom Andern Deutschland, Siedler Verlag 1989, entry from March 16, 1941, p. 232 f .: Haushofer "thinks now (after some intellectual wanderings to Astheimer [Ribbentrop] etc.) like us and recognizes both the ' Qualities of the regime like the obstacle to any useful peace in the form of the unbelievable and unbearable Hitler's for the whole world. "
  8. ^ Letter to the mother dated August 29, 1940 in: Ernst Haiger, Amelie Ihering, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Albrecht Haushofer , Ernst-Freiberger-Stiftung, Berlin 2002, p. 72.
  9. ↑ Johannes Tuchel : "... the rope was waiting for them all": The cell prison Lehrter Strasse 3 after July 20, 1944 , Lukas Verlag Berlin 2014, pp. 185–347; Review by Rainer Blasius , faz.net July 14, 2014
  10. ↑ Haiger in Haiger / Ihering / Weizsäcker (see literature), p. 96 f.
  11. ↑ Reinhard Schmid, Friedrich Denk : Lack of National Socialist Weltanschauung . merkur-online.de April 23, 2005 ; Amelie Ihering in Haiger / Ihering / Weizsäcker (see literature), pp. 114–126; there pp. 128–150 text of the sonnets with facs. the manuscript and notes on individual sonnets.
  12. ↑ Leverkusen street directory leverkusen.com
  13. ↑ Ute Pröttel: Late honor. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 17, 2016.
  14. ↑ Das Historisch-Politische Buch , 50th year 2002, p. 509, 510 books.google .
personal data
SURNAME Haushofer, Albrecht
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haushofer, Albrecht Georg; Dax, Jürgen (pseudonym); Werdenfels, Jörg (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geographer, diplomat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1945
Place of death Berlin