Andreas Hillgruber

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Andreas Fritz Hillgruber (born January 18, 1925 in Angerburg , East Prussia ; † May 8, 1989 in Cologne ) was a German historian and specialist in German military, political and diplomatic history between 1871 and 1945.

Life

Andreas Gruber Hill, son of a school teacher, grew up in East Prussia and laid at the State hooves School - School for Boys in Königsberg the High School from. From 1943 to 1945 he served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht . As a non-commissioned officer , he was first taken prisoner in America in 1945 and then into French captivity until 1948 .

After his release, he studied history, German and pedagogy from 1948 to 1952 with Percy Ernst Schramm at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . There he received his doctorate under Schramm in 1952 with a thesis on German- Romanian relations in the Second World War . From 1954 to 1964 he worked in higher education, including at the Justus-Liebig-Gymnasium in Darmstadt . From 1962 to 1964 he was senior director of studies at the Elisabeth School in Marburg . After a teaching position at the Philipps University of Marburg , he completed his habilitation there with a study of Hitler's strategy. Politics and warfare 1940/1941 (Supervisors: Peter Scheibert and Wolfgang Abendroth ). In 1967 he became a scientific adviser and professor at the University of Marburg. From 1968 to 1972 he was full professor for recent and recent history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and at the same time from 1968 to 1970 chief historian of the Military History Research Office (MGFA) in Freiburg im Breisgau. From 1972 until his death in 1989 he was full professor for middle and modern history at the University of Cologne .

According to a commemorative publication published in his honor, Hillgruber supervised 55 doctoral students and 4 post-doctoral students a. a. Jürgen Arne Bach , Rainer Blasius , Gotthard Breit , Jost Dülffer , Jürgen Förster , Friedrich Forstmeier , Günther W. Gellermann , Michael Geyer , Emily Haber , Christian Hartmann , Hans-Georg Kraume , Frank-Lothar Kroll , Bernd Martin , Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut , Horst Mühleisen , Manfred Nebelin , Karl-Volker Neugebauer , Klaus Olshausen , Reiner Pommerin , Klaus Reinhardt , Ralf Georg Reuth , Klaus-Jörg Ruhl , Marion Thielenhaus , Jochen Thies , Vera Torunsky and Günter Wollstein . He also had a major influence on Klaus Hildebrand , who heard from him in Marburg, and on Reiner Marcowitz , who began his dissertation in Cologne; at Rolf Elble he was the second reviewer.

Grave in Melaten cemetery

Hillgruber was a longtime reviewer of historical publications for the historical journal (HZ) . Between 1965 and 1977 Hillgruber wrote 197 reviews in the HZ under the then editor Theodor Schieder .

In 1969 Hillgruber became a member of the CDU .

Since 1960 Hillgruber, a Protestant, was married to Karin Zierau, with whom he had three children, two sons and a daughter. The Halle Graecist Michael Hillgruber is the older, the Bonn constitutional lawyer Christian Hillgruber the younger son of Andreas Hillgruber.

His grave is in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (hall 12 (G)).

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Positions

Hillgruber's specialty was German history between 1871 and 1945, in particular the political, diplomatic and military aspects, whereby he did not pursue military history for its own sake, but looked at it in the interplay with political history. The latter ignores Hillgruber's sometimes disparaging designation as a military historian . For Hillgruber there were many elements of continuity in German foreign policy between 1871 and 1945, especially in relation to Eastern Europe.

In the context of the Fischer controversy , Hillgruber partially agreed with Fritz Fischer's thesis that Germany was primarily responsible for the First World War . However, Hillgruber rejected Fischer's thesis that the First World War was triggered by the imperialist world power aspirations of the German Reich .

Hillgruber took the view that the differences between the foreign policy of the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist foreign policy were only minor. He argued that foreign policy in the Third Reich was an extremely radicalized version of traditional German foreign policy. What was a goal of foreign policy during the Weimar Republic, namely the annexation of Austria to the German Reich and the re-militarization of the Rhineland, was only the beginning of their efforts to rule all of Europe for the National Socialists .

In early 1950, Hillgruber viewed World War II as a conventional war. This attitude changed over the years, and in 1965 Hillgruber argued that for Adolf Hitler the war was a ruthless, ideological war in which the opponent should not be shown mercy.

Hillgruber believed that Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust . This theory contradicts what is known as the "functionalist school" and advocated by historians such as Hans Mommsen . Already in his habilitation thesis Hillgruber expressed the thesis that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 was based on racial ideology , since Hitler wanted to win land for what he believed to be the "higher race" of the Aryans under the influence of Social Darwinism . The decision to exploit or exterminate people of “inferior race” as slave peoples was also closely linked.

Hillgruber was of the opinion that Hitler was a fanatical ideologue who followed a step-by-step plan, the objectives of which were: (1.) The extermination of the supposedly "Jewish-Bolshevik" leadership class and the Jews in East Central Europe , (2.) The acquisition of colonial and “living space” for the Third Reich as well as (3.) the decimation and submission of the Slavic population to German rule in newly established so-called “Reichskommissariaten”. Furthermore, it was planned (4.) the establishment of a self-sufficient , blockade-proof "greater area" of continental Europe under Hitler's rule, whereby the conquered Soviet areas should form the economic supplementary areas and guarantee continental supremacy in order to be able to achieve the long-term goal of a "world power". As early as 1985 Hillgruber criticized German military history research for describing the Second World War in isolation from the extermination of the Jews. The Holocaust must be seen as a genuine part of the world war.

Hillgruber saw the Second World War in Europe as two different wars, namely, first, a normal war between the Western powers and National Socialist Germany , which Hitler caused but did not intend, and second, Germany's war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, which was merciless and brutal was led with the aim of racial and ideological extermination. This war was Hitler's real goal.

Hillgruber Committee

When Hillgruber moved to the University of Cologne in 1972, the Marxist Student Union Spartakus formed a so-called Hillgruber Committee, which set itself the task of disrupting its lectures. The justification for the actions was that Hillgruber represented “a great danger” and that his vocation was “in connection with the attempts of the ministerial bureaucracy and West German monopoly capital” to “militarize university teaching through military customer decrees and to allow students to be used in the capitalist social system through sham reforms increase".

Hillgruber and the Hitler Diaries

When Stern went public in April 1983 with the claim that it had found the “lost” diaries of Adolf Hitler through middlemen and announced their publication, Hillgruber declared that it could only be forgeries. Together with other historians, he ensured that the notebooks were subjected to a chemical-physical examination by forensic laboratories at the Federal Archives in Koblenz , the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Institute for Materials Testing, in order to clarify the actual time the documents were created. Thereupon Hillgruber was named in an editorial by Stern as "Archivayatollah", who for the sheer dust no longer has an eye for the truth. On April 23, 1983, the chief editor of the "Stern" even announced that the history of the Third Reich would now have to be rewritten. But shortly after the publication of the first excerpts, which were accompanied by a background story bordering on the absurd, the results of the technical investigations were published and the alleged diaries turned out to be a not very clever forgery.

Criticism and appreciation

Rudolf Augstein , editor of the magazine Der Spiegel , named Hillgruber 1986 in the context of the historians' dispute - and alluding to the title and blurb of his book Zweiierlei Untergang: The smashing of the German Reich and the end of European Jewry - a "constitutional Nazi".

The blurb criticized by Augstein turns against "the popular opinion that the smashing of the German Reich was an answer to the crimes of the Nazi regime". The historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler wrote in 1988 that this “dangerous nonsense in a few sentences” could not “come from Hillgruber [...]”. Hillgruber's essay, entitled The End of European Judaism , is actually his final lecture The historical site of the extermination of the Jews at a 1984 Stuttgart congress on the murder of European Jews in World War II , which was published in the anthology of the conference papers of the same name. In 1988, Wehler wrote that Hillgruber had - perhaps due to his “hardened theory aversion” - written both essays equally using his narrative method of “identification” and that he had fallen into the trap of a “labyrinthine maze of identification problems” when presenting non-comparable topics.

The historian Eberhard Jäckel paid tribute to Hillgruber in a foreword to his commemorative pamphlet with the words: “The fact that German research rejoined international research after the Second World War is probably [...] thanks to [...] those conservative historians who oppose their judgment enforced their prejudice and thus helped the initially reluctant public opinion to have an undisguised view of reality. [...] The first and most important of them was Andreas Hillgruber, and that will remain his honor. "

Der Spiegel paid tribute to Hillgruber in 1989 "With his sober, technically sound work on the Second World War, he was one of the first set of German historians; his habilitation thesis on Hitler's politics and warfare (" Hitler's strategy ") became an internationally recognized standard work." In their research report on the German-Soviet war , the military historians Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär rated Hillgruber's habilitation thesis in 2000 as a “significant step” in research towards a better understanding of Hitler's “race-ideological expansion policy”. His study is a "still today essentially valid standard work".

Hillgruber was a full member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (from 1982) and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts .

Shortly before his death, Hillgruber received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class .

Publications

  • Hitler, King Carol and Marshal Antonescu. German-Romanian relations, 1938–1944 , Steiner, Wiesbaden 1954 (dissertation).
  • Hitler's decision to attack Russia (one reply). In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Vol. 2 (1954), pp. 240-254.
  • Hitler's strategy. Politics and Warfare, 1940–1941. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main 1965 (habilitation thesis); 1993, ISBN 978-3-7637-5923-1 .
  • Germany's role in the prehistory of the two world wars. Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967.
  • Continuity and discontinuity in German foreign policy from Bismarck to Hitler. Droste, Düsseldorf 1969.
  • Bismarck's foreign policy. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1972; 3rd edition 1993, ISBN 3-7930-9096-5 .
  • "The Final Solution" and the German Eastern Empire as the core of the racial ideological program of National Socialism. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Vol. 20 (1972), pp. 133–153.
  • German history, 1945–1972. The "German question" in world politics. 1974; 2., ext. Ed., Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • German great power and world politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Droste, Düsseldorf 1977.
  • Otto von Bismarck. Founder of the great European power German Empire. Musterschmidt, Zurich / Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • Europe in world politics in the post-war period (= Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte . Vol. 19). Oldenbourg, Munich 1979.
  • The failed great power. A sketch of the German Empire, 1871–1945. Droste, Düsseldorf 1980.
  • The Second World War, 1939–1945. War aims and strategy of the great powers. 1982; 6., verb. and exp. Ed. by Bernd Martin, Kohhammer, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-17-013924-X .
  • The burden of the nation. Five articles about Germany and the Germans. Droste, Düsseldorf 1984.
  • The Extermination of the European Jews in Its Historical Context. In: Yad Vashem Studies , Vol. 17 (1986).
  • Two kinds of downfall. The smashing of the German Empire and the end of European Jewry. 1986, Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3-88680-187-9 .
  • The destruction of Europe. Contributions to the world war era 1914 to 1945. 1988, Propylaen, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-549-05770-4 .

literature

  • Rudolf Augstein (Ed.): "Historikerstreit". Documentation of the controversy about the uniqueness of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews. 9th edition. Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-10816-4 .
  • Jost Dülffer , Bernd Martin , Günter Wollstein (Eds.): Germany in Europe. Continuity and break. Commemorative letter for Andreas Hillgruber. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-549-07654-1 .
  • Jost Dülffer: Andreas Hillgruber - German great power, Nazi crimes and the state system . In: Hans Ehlert (Hrsg.): German military historians from Hans Delbrück to Andreas Hillgruber . Potsdam 2010, ISBN 978-3-941571-06-8 , pp. 69-84.
  • Jost Dülffer: Genocide and the German Empire. What remains of Hillgruber's role in the "historians' dispute". In: 50 classics from contemporary history . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-525-36024-X , pp. 187-191.
  • Jost Dülffer: On the death of Andreas Hillgruber. In: History in Cologne . Vol. 25, 1989, pp. 5-10.
  • Klaus-Peter Friedrich: The young Andreas Hillgruber and the burden of the (very) recent German past. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft, vol. 67, 2019, issue 9, pp. 697–719.
  • Klaus Hildebrand : Andreas Hillgruber 1925–1989. In: Historical magazine . Vol. 250, 1990, pp. 190-197.
  • Eberhard Jäckel: On the struggle of judgment against prejudice. In honor of Andreas Hillgruber. In: Jost Dülffer, Bernd Martin , Günter Wollstein (Hrsg.): Germany in Europe. Commemorative letter for Andreas Hillgruber. 1990, pp. 11-17.
  • Reiner Pommerin : The MGFA's first senior historian. In memory of Andreas Hillgruber . In: Military History Journal . Vol. 64, 2005, pp. 210-216.
  • Hans-Ulrich Wehler : Disposal of the German Past? Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33027-4 , pp. 46-68.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The headmasters of the Elisabeth School .
  2. ^ Reiner Marcowitz : Directory of the dissertations and habilitations supervised by Andreas Hillgruber . In: Jost Dülffer , Bernd Martin , Günter Wollstein (eds.): Germany in Europe: Continuity and break. Commemorative letter for Andreas Hillgruber. Propylaeen, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-549-07654-1 , pp. 416-425.
  3. ↑ Andreas Hillgruber: The historical place of the annihilation of the Jews. A summary , in: Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Rohwer (Hrsg.): The murder of the Jews in World War II , Frankfurt / M. 1987, pp. 213-224.
  4. ↑ Klaus Große Kracht: The quarreling guild. Historical controversies in Germany after 1945 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-525-36280-3 , p. 73.
  5. ↑ The New Auschwitz Lie . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1986 ( online ).
  6. ^ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Disposal of the German Past? Munich 1988, pp. 46-68, here p. 68.
  7. ^ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Disposal of the German Past? Munich 1988, p. 47; Hillgruber's essay with the correct title The historical site of the extermination of the Jews is printed in: Eberhard Jäckel u. Jürgen Rohwer (Ed.): The murder of the European Jews in the Second World War . Stuttgart 1985, pp. 213-224.
  8. ^ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Disposal of the German Past? Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1988, p. 53.
  9. ^ A b Andreas Hillgruber in the East German biography (Kulturportal West-Ost).
  10. ↑ DIED: Andreas Hillgruber - DER SPIEGEL 20/1989. Retrieved May 23, 2020 .
  11. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller / Gerd R. Ueberschär: Hitler's War in the East, 1941–1945. A research report . Extended and completely revised new edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000, ISBN 3-534-14768-5 ., P. 10f.
  12. ^ Foreign Affairs (1956): Review .
personal data
SURNAME Hillgruber, Andreas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hillgruber, Andreas Fritz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Angerburg , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1989
Place of death Cologne