Eberhard Jackel

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Eberhard Jäckel (2009)

Eberhard Jäckel (born June 29, 1929 in Wesermünde ; † August 15, 2017 in Bühlerhöhe ) was a German historian who researched and published primarily on National Socialism . From 1967 to 1997 he taught as a full professor for modern history at the University of Stuttgart .

Live and act

Jäckel attended grammar schools in Dortmund and Fulda as well as the Laurentianum Arnsberg grammar school . He studied history at the Georg-August University of Göttingen , the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen , the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg , the University of Florida and the Sorbonne . In 1955 he was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD . He switched to the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel as a research assistant and completed his habilitation in 1961 on Adolf Hitler's policy on France. As a private lecturer, he stayed with Kiel University until 1966. From 1967 until his retirement in 1997 he worked as a full professor for modern history at the University of Stuttgart . From 1970 to 1971 he was Dean of the Faculty of History, Social and Economic Sciences.

Member of the SPD since 1967 , Jäckel became involved in the voter initiative for Willy Brandt in 1968 . Since 1974 he has been a member of the PEN Center Germany .

Jäckel became known to a broad public primarily through his contributions to research on Adolf Hitler . His book Hitler's Weltanschauung , published in 1969, is considered groundbreaking . His book France in Hitler's Europe. The German policy on France in World War II is still the standard work on German policy on France in World War II .

In the Hitler source collection edited by Jäckel and Axel Kuhn . All records from 1905–1924 from 1980 contain 76 (approx. Ten percent) forgeries from Konrad Kujau , out of a total of 694 documents , which Jäckel had acquired. However, since they often only contain a few lines, the forged documents make up less than four percent of the total document size. Some of them were accompanied by forged letters from the Reich leadership of the NSDAP. The foreword of the collection speaks of “particularly valuable documents” and fifty “partly particularly informative” documents from private collections. These include war poems that Hitler should either have written himself or copied from templates. One of the poems appeared suspicious because it was believed to have been written in 1936. Jäckel then published a warning that individual documents were forged or at least dubious. After the affair surrounding the Hitler diaries , which Jäckel had also been offered and which he initially believed to be authentic, Jäckel appeared as a witness. In a subsequent publication that examined the facts of the forgeries, Jäckel and Axel Kuhn described the forged documents contained in the source collection as largely trivial and without any new scientific knowledge.

Jäckel belonged to the so-called intentionalists , that is, he was convinced that the crimes under National Socialism were based on decisions and orders of Hitler and resulted from conscious action.

The book Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland , created by Jäckel together with the publicist Lea Rosh on the basis of their joint documentary of the same name , was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize in 1990. With Rosh, he suggested the construction of a central German Holocaust memorial in 1988, which was finally opened in Berlin in 2005 as a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe .

In 2001 he was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany “because of his great merits in redesigning the content of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial ”. From 1994 to 1999 he was chairman of the scientific board of trustees of the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau Memorials Foundation . Since 1995 he was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and he was an external member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

In the historians' dispute of 1986, Jäckel was an advocate of the unprecedented Shoah (Jäckel avoided the term "Holocaust"). He saw comparisons with the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 or the Indian wars as a relativization of the Shoah. Regarding the differences between the "murder of European Jews" and the massacres of Armenians, he stated that the latter were "evacuations that were more likely to be accompanied by murders" and that they only happened "in their own country" - by which he meant the Ottoman Empire . In connection with the discussion about a Federal Republic memorial for the European Roma murdered in the Holocaust, Jäckel stated that although there had been a “terrible persecution of the Gypsies ” both in Germany and in the areas occupied by Germany, it was “forbidden” to equate them this persecution with the genocide of the Jewish minority.

Jäckel spoke out against a blanket condemnation of GDR citizens in functions, including former employees of the MfS , and instead demanded, similar to the denazification after 1945, to ask “what someone did in this position”.

Jäckel died on August 15, 2017 at the age of 88 in the Max Grundig Clinic Bühlerhöhe and was buried on August 23, 2017 in the Birkach cemetery.

In the British television series Hitler For Sale , based on the nonfiction book Selling Hitler by Robert Harris , Jackel is portrayed by British actor John Golightly .

Fonts (selection)

  • Experimentum rationis: Christianity and paganism in the Utopia of Thomas More (dissertation, Philosophical University Freiburg im Breisgau, June 21, 1955), 116 drawn sheets, 4 ( typescript reproduced), DNB 480577277 .
  • France in Hitler's Europe. The German policy on France in World War II (= sources and representations on contemporary history , Volume 14), DVA, Stuttgart 1966, DNB 457085479 , ISSN  0481-3545 (habilitation thesis 1966, 396 pages).
  • Hitler's worldview. Draft of a rule. Wunderlich, Tübingen 1969. Frequent new editions, most recently DVA, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-421-06083-5 .
  • with Jürgen Rohwer (ed.): The murder of the Jews in the Second World War. Decision making and realization. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-421-06255-2 .
  • Hitler's rule. Implementation of a worldview. 4th edition, DVA, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-06254-4 (first edition Stuttgart 1986).
  • with Lea Rosh : Death is a master from Germany . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-455-08358-7 .
  • The German Century. A historical record. DVA, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-421-05036-8 ; Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13944-9 .
  • The table of thirteen. A story . Steinkopf, Stuttgart 2009, DNB 992052572 (no ISBN).

literature

Web links

Texts by Jäckel

Secondary

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dissertation: Experimentum rationis - Christianity and Paganism in the "Utopia" of Thomas More .
  2. ^ Habilitation thesis: The German policy on France in the Second World War. From armistice to total occupation (June 1940 - November 1942) .
  3. ↑ Der Spiegel of August 11, 1969 (No. 33).
  4. ↑ Eberhard Jäckel, Axel Kuhn: New findings on forging Hitler documents. In VfZ 32 (1) 1984, p. 163 f. ( PDF ).
  5. ^ Enterprise Green Vault - Forgers, tracks and the consequences: Before the trial against Hitler-Kujau and star reporter Heidemann , article in Zeit online from June 1, 1984, updated on November 22, 2012; accessed on August 23, 2017.
  6. ^ Karl-Heinz Janßen : Three witnesses in need . In: Die Zeit , No. 49/1984.
  7. ↑ Eberhard Jäckel, Axel Kuhn: New findings on forging Hitler documents. In VfZ 32 (1) 1984, p. 163 f. ( PDF ).
  8. ↑ Bernd Sösemann : How “Mein Kampf” should be edited . In: Die Welt , May 20, 2008.
  9. ↑ On the uniqueness of the murder of the European Jews ( PDF ).
  10. ^ Against the equation , in: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , August 22, 2002.
  11. ↑ Karlen Vesper: Streitbar: An obituary for Eberhard Jäckel .
  12. ↑ stuttgart-gedenken.de obituaries , accessed on August 21, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Jackel, Eberhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German contemporary historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Wesermünde
DATE OF DEATH 15th August 2017
Place of death Birkach (Stuttgart)