Bogdan Musiał

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bogdan Musiał (* 1960 in Wielopole near Dąbrowa Tarnowska in southern Poland) is a German-Polish historian . From 2010 to 2015 he was a professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw .

Life

Musiał was born on a small farm and worked in his Polish homeland as an underground miner in the Katowice coal mines Wieczorek (1978–1979) and Wujek (1979–1984). Because of his commitment to the Solidarność trade union , he was persecuted by the State Security Service Służba Bezpieczeństwa . In 1985 he fled and received political asylum in the Federal Republic of Germany .

Musiał initially worked as a mechanic and acquired the university entrance qualification in an evening course. He was naturalized in 1992 . He studied history , political science and sociology in Hanover and Manchester . From 1991 to 1998 he was a scholarship holder of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung . In 1998 he did his doctorate under Herbert Obenaus on the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland. The habilitation followed in 2005 at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Since 1999 he has been a research assistant at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and from 2007-2010 he was a member of the Institute for National Remembrance .

Criticism of photographs of the Wehrmacht exhibition

Musiał became known in Germany for his criticism of the first Wehrmacht exhibition . In 1999 he criticized nine of the hundreds of photographs shown there as incorrectly assigned; in another 24 he suspected this as well, without any evidence. With incorrectly assigned images, the exhibition turns "victims of the Soviets into victims of the Wehrmacht ". However, he also confirmed:

"That the Wehrmacht was heavily involved in crimes , especially in the area of ​​the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans, has now been adequately documented, even if it has not yet been extensively researched."

Jan Philipp Reemtsma denied an intentional reallocation of photographs and announced the review of the rejected images and the removal of images that could be proven to be incorrectly assigned. In 2000, an examination commission appointed by him confirmed a wrong assignment of two of the 33 photographs that Musiał had criticized. At the same time, it reaffirmed the historically secured core thesis of a German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.

Controversially discussed publications

Since 2000, Musiał has been publishing works, especially in Germany, that deal particularly with the politics and warfare of the Soviet Union during World War II . They were mostly praised on the one hand for new sources and the presentation of previously little-examined aspects of the war, on the other hand they were criticized and rejected for untenable and poorly substantiated theses.

Musiał's book “Counter-revolutionary elements are to be shot” (2000) describes, according to the subtitle, the “brutalization of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941”. In it, he compared the atrocities and massacres of German occupiers of Soviet territories from June 1941 with those of the NKVD in occupied eastern Poland from 1939. The military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller found the work well documented: It was “suitable, the often narrowed German view of the fate of the population in East Central Europe, which has suffered from two bloodthirsty dictatorships. ”The historian Johannes Hürter, on the other hand, judged that it remained“ in many ways too woodcut, ambiguous and contradictory ”, that a“ differentiated and sober presentation ”was“ not consistently successful ”. Wolfram Wette criticized the book as a whole as contradicting and unsuccessful: The title alone suggests “the twisting of the argument”. Musiał tries, contrary to better historical knowledge, not only to make a comparison, but also to establish a connection “between the Soviet occupation policy - which was accompanied by crimes - in eastern Poland on the one hand and the German warfare against the Soviet Union on the other”. By claiming that the Soviet terror in Poland from 1939 to 1941 was “comparable to the Nazi terror in German-occupied Poland, if not worse”, he shows his “attitude, which was shaped by a specifically Polish anti-Sovietism”. In the end, he “stalks” the “provocative thesis that the brutalization of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941 could be explained as a reaction to the concrete confrontation of German soldiers with the murder of prisoners by the NKVD”. In doing so, he disregards the historical sequence and creates the impression that perpetrators and victims are confused “in a frivolous manner”.

Based on Musial's book “Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalin's war plans against the West ”(2008), Stalin is said to have planned an ideologically justified war of aggression against Western Europe since the 1920s and to have upgraded the Red Army in 1941 to become the“ largest invasion army of all time ”. Since the Germans did not know about it, the German war of aggression against the Soviet Union in 1941 was not a preventive war.

The core thesis of the book met with opposition. According to Bert Hoppe , Musial could not prove it with his new archive sources either. He ignored more recent research literature such as Gabriel Gorodetsky's study The great Delusion (2001), pursued “selective literature and source reception” and ignored, for example, the fact that Stalin had rejected a coup attempt by the KPD in 1923 and the KPD had cut financial aid as a result. Musiał rejected this criticism. Also Jörg Ganzenmüller accused Musiał, he could Stalin's aggressive intentions occupy only with the reinterpretation of internally expressed fears of western attacks to pure propaganda, had ignored the Stalinism research the last twenty years largely and violated the basic rules of source criticism. He uses the technical term "war of annihilation", which is otherwise used for Adolf Hitler's company Barbarossa, without reflection and without explanation for Stalinist measures. His new archive sources should therefore be examined again without his preconceived thesis. Ganzenmüller's further allegation that Musiał ignored the latest research on Tukhachevsky was rejected by the latter in his reply. Hans-Erich Volkmann praised Musiał's book for “excellent statistical material”, which offered “an insight into Stalin's efforts and difficulties in modernizing and expanding industry and armaments production” as well as “extremely interesting information about Soviet economic development and Stalin's system of rule”.

In 2009 Musiał published the monograph “Soviet Partisans 1941–1944. Myth and Reality ”. For the Stalinism researcher Jörg Baberowski, this work “demystifies” the “myth of the heroic people's war” through self-reports from Russian and Belarusian archives.

Controversy over anti-Semitism and collaboration between Poles during the Nazi era

Since 2000, Musial has repeatedly commented on anti-Semitism in Poland during the Nazi era. He interpreted this as a reaction to a collaboration between Jews and the Soviet occupiers of eastern Poland . About 30 pogroms on an estimated tens of thousands of Eastern Polish Jews after the Wehrmacht attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Musial declared as a reaction to the Stalinist terror and made the Jews jointly responsible for it: "The anti-Jewish emotions resulted from the behavior that not a few Jews displayed" . According to Klaus Wiegrefe, he uncritically adopted the anti-Semitic cliché of equating Jews and communists (“ Jewish Bolshevism ”).

In 2000, with his book “Neighbors” in Poland , the historian Jan Tomasz Gross triggered a historians' dispute over the Jedwabne massacre (1941), in which Poles and ethnic Germans murdered between 500 and 1,600 Jews. The dispute also affected Poland's self-image as a victim nation. Musial participated in it from 2002. He accused Gross of excessive numbers of victims, false or out of context quotes from Jewish eyewitnesses and an ahistorical methodology. Furthermore, he interpreted the murders of Jews by Poles during the Nazi era to a large extent as revenge actions directed by the German occupiers for previous Soviet crimes against Poles in which Jews were involved. Thousands of Poles worked in the German occupation apparatus. Quite a few took part in the "raids on forced laborers, the fight against the resistance and in the persecution of the Jews". Denunciation did not differ from that of other occupied states; many would have "reluctantly" offered themselves to the occupiers in order to survive. He described the collaboration of Polish communists with the Soviet Union as far more extensive and consequential, as it prepared and established the decades-long rule of the PVAP . Their processing is still pending in Poland.

Dispute over Włodzimierz Borodziej

On May 2, 2008, an article by Musials appeared in the conservative Polish daily Rzeczpospolita . In it he accused the Warsaw contemporary historian Włodzimierz Borodziej of owing his scientific career largely to his father Wiktor Borodziej, who had been the chief officer of the Polish State Security Service SB in communist-ruled Poland . He sent his son to the German-Polish textbook commission , which was controlled by the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party and the SB. Musiał confirmed these allegations in other media articles.

It sparked a heated controversy. German and Polish scientists and journalists protested against his attacks. In an open letter ( Rzeczpospolita , May 2-4, 2008), 63 Polish historians described Musiał's article as an “emotionally charged attack, presumably for personal reasons.” The equation of people acting today with the biographies of their family members aroused the worst associations in them. The historian Katarzyna Stoklosa evaluates Musiał's attack as an example of how the Institute for National Remembrance, as Musiał's employer, is influencing Polish history politics with targeted blame. Musiał defended his attacks in July 2008 as being covered by the public task of the IPN.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • German civil administration and persecution of Jews in the Generalgouvernement. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 3-447-04208-7 .
  • "Counterrevolutionary elements are to be shot." The brutalization of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941. Propylaen, Berlin / Munich 2000, ISBN 3-549-07126-4 .
  • Battleground Germany. Stalin's plans for war against the West. Propylaea, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-549-07335-3 .
  • Soviet Partisans 1941–1944: Myth and Reality. Schöningh, Paderborn 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76687-8 .
  • Stalin's raid. The pillage of Germany and the rise of the Soviet Union to a world power. Propylaea, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-549-07370-4 .
  • with Wolfram Dornik , Georgiy Kasianov, Hannes Leidinger , Peter Lieb , Alekseij Miller, Vasyl Rasevyc: The Ukraine. Between self-determination and foreign rule 1917–1922 (= publications by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War , special volume 13). Leykam Buchverlag, Graz 2011, ISBN 978-3-7011-0209-9 .
  • Mengele's suitcase. A search for clues. Osburg Verlag, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-95510-200-5 .

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Short biography and reviews of works by Bogdan Musiał at perlentaucher.de
  2. ^ Symposium on the sponsorship of Lower Saxony and Silesia . In: Hannoversche Allgemeine from September 21, 2010.
  3. ↑ Christian Hartmann: Review of Musial, Bogdan: German civil administration and the persecution of Jews in the Generalgouvernement (PDF), in: FAZ of August 3, 2000.
  4. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Of pictures and legends . In: Die Zeit , No. 44/1999
  5. ↑ quoted from: Hamburg Institute for Social Research ends cooperation with the association for the promotion of the exhibition “War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 ”. ( Memento from February 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 150 kB) Press releases from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research on the exhibition “War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 "(October 1999 - December 2000) of December 20, 2000.
  6. ↑ Hamburg Institute for Social Research ends cooperation with the association for the promotion of the exhibition “War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 ”. ( Memento from February 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 150 kB) Press releases from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research on the exhibition “War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 ”(October 1999 - December 2000) of December 20, 2000; summarized in The Judgment of the 8 Wise Men. In: Die Zeit, No. 48/2000.
  7. ↑ Johannes Hürter : Buried and piled up. In: FAZ, August 16, 2000
  8. ↑ Wolfram Wette: Review by Bogdan Musial: "Counterrevolutionary elements are to be shot". Deutschlandfunk , September 4, 2000
  9. ^ Bert Hoppe: Bogdan Musial: Kampfplatz Deutschland. In: Sehepunkte, 9/2009, No. 1
  10. ↑ Bogdan Musial: Commentary on: Bert Hoppe: Review of: Bogdan Musial: Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalin's plans for war against the West. In: Sehepunkte 9/2009, No. 6.
  11. ↑ Jörg Ganzenmüller: Review of: Musial, Bogdan: “Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalin's plans for war against the West. ” In: H-Soz-u-Kult , April 17, 2009
  12. ↑ Jörg Ganzenmüller: Review of: Musial, Bogdan: “Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalin's plans for war against the West ”. Berlin 2008 . In: H-Soz-u-Kult, April 17, 2009
  13. ↑ To B. Musial's “Kampfplatz Deutschland” - A reply from B. Musial.
  14. ^ Hans-Erich Volkmann: Stalin's grip on Germany . In: FAZ, May 9, 2008
  15. ↑ Jörg Baberowski: Orgy of unrestrained violence. The partisans have their own say: Bogdan Musial demystifies the myth of the heroic Soviet people's war. In: FAZ, October 8, 2009, p. 7
  16. ↑ Bogdan Musial: Counterrevolutionary elements are to be shot. 2000; Lecture at Gerhard Paul: The perpetrators of the Shoah. Fanatic National Socialists or just normal Germans? Wallstein, 2002, ISBN 3-89244-503-6 , p. 59
  17. ^ Klaus Wiegrefe: From ambush . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 2000 ( online ).
  18. ^ Frank Grüner, Urs Heftrich, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe: "Destroyer of Silence": Forms of artistic memory of the National Socialist race and extermination policy. Böhlau, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-412-36105-4 , p. XIV, note 8
  19. ^ Bogdan Musial: Theses on the pogrom in Jedwabne. Critical comments on the depiction of "Neighbors" by Jan Tomasz Gross. In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe, 50/2002. Pp. 381-411 , archived from the original on April 16, 2013 ; accessed on July 26, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Bogdan Musial: Indigenous hatred of Jews and the German war machine: The north-eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. In: Journal of Contemporary Issues of the East, 53. Jg, Issue 12, December 2003. Bogdan Musial. German system, Polish revenge: The Massacre Jedwabne was not an isolated case. In: NZZ , February 5, 2003, p. 27.
    Dietrich Seybold : Historical culture and conflict: Historical-political controversies in contemporary societies. Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften 2005, ISBN 3-03910-622-8 , p. 112
  21. ↑ Bogdan Musial: Collaboration and Resistance: A Little Illuminated Chapter of Polish History 1939-1945 . In: NZZ, February 28, 2003
  22. ^ Andreas Mix: desert polemics, infamous attacks. In: Berliner Zeitung , June 12, 2008.
    From ambush. In: Die Zeit, No. 21/15. May 2008
  23. ↑ Andrea Genest: History Politics, Historical Research and Personal Vanity: The Debate about Bogdan Musiał's Article “The Innocent Stalin and the Evil Poles”. In: Contemporary history online . Retrieved on July 26, 2018 (documentation with German translations).
  24. ↑ Katarzyna Stoklosa: Historical Politics in the Process of Transformation in Poland. In: Gerhard Besier, Katarzyna Stokłosa (ed.): Historical images in the post-dictatorial countries of Europe: In search of historical-political identities. 2009, ISBN 3-643-10230-5 , p. 104 and note 48
  25. ^ Bogdan Musial: Poland's controversial secret service file . In: NZZ, July 29, 2008
personal data
SURNAME Musiał, Bogdan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Wielopole near Dąbrowa Tarnowska , Lesser Poland Voivodeship