Felix-Heinrich Gentzen

Felix-Heinrich Gentzen (born May 19, 1914 in Rastenburg ; † August 2, 1969 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German historian.

Felix-Heinrich Gentzen

Family and military service

His father Felix Gentzen was an architect who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1929 . In 1932 he passed the Abitur exam and in the same year applied to the Reichswehr as an officer candidate . He had an internal break with the Nazi regime when he found out that his father was unable to provide evidence of Aryan status. Before 1801, his family had Jewish ancestors. His father, an unconditional supporter of the Nazi regime, received personal permission from Adolf Hitler on July 22, 1939 to retain his membership in the NSDAP.

Gentzen achieved the rank of captain in the Wehrmacht and commanded an observation department on the Eastern Front. In 1943 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. As stated in the 1969 obituary in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , Gentzen was only able to acquire a new political orientation “only after severe tests”. He worked on the National Committee for Free Germany and attended the central Antifa school in Krasnogorsk .

Homecoming and studying

In the second half of 1945 he came to what was then the Soviet occupation zone . From August 1945 to February 1946 he headed the public education office in the Saalkreis .

In 1946 he also worked as an editor for the people's newspaper in Halle . At the FDGB of the state board of Saxony-Anhalt , he took over the management of the cultural department. As a lecturer in Halle, he gave lectures on postgraduate studies in the subjects of history and contemporary studies within the framework of the workers and farmers faculty .

From 1946 to 1949 he began studying Russian, German and history at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg , which he completed with the state examination. He heard lectures on Eastern European history from the Austrian historian Eduard Winter . On November 24, 1948, Winter gave an assessment of Gentzen's abilities, in which he certified his hard work and an independent scientific judgment. Kaiser, who had the text of the original of this assessment, quotes a sentence which Winter has obviously crossed out, in which he made derogatory comments about Gentzen's achievements as a historian.

Teaching

Gentzen obtained his doctorate on February 16, 1950 under Walter Markov and Eduard Winter on the subject of Prussia and Poland in the shadow of the great bourgeois revolution . He worked in the State Secretariat for Higher Education in the GDR in Berlin from 1950 to 1952. He then lectured on the history of the Soviet Union at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena until 1956 . In 1956 he received on June 27 the habilitation with the issue of Greater Poland in January uprising. The Grand Duchy of Poznan 1958-1864 , which was also published as a publication in 1958.

In the same year he taught the subject of the history of Eastern Europe at the Karl Marx University Leipzig (KMU Leipzig). There he was appointed professor with a teaching position for the field of the history of Poland in 1960. At the Institute for the History of European People's Democracies in September 1965 he was given the teaching position and head of the People's Republic of Poland department . At the Institute for International and West German Issues, he was given the full teaching position in February 1969.

On August 2, 1969, he was killed in a traffic accident.

Historical work

Gentzen was one of the first Marxist-oriented historians in the GDR. At first he devoted himself to establishing the western border of Poland with the so-called Oder-Neisse line . On May 6, 1953, he gave the opening lecture at the conference on the law of the unconditional correspondence of the production relations with the character of the productive workers of the student body history of the University of Jena. The historian Wolfgang Schumann referred directly to the subject of Gentzen in his presentation.

After that, the history of Poland in modern times became the focus of his work. As a result of this work, he also became a member of the German-Polish Historical Commission. In recent years he has attacked representatives of Eastern research in publications . Because of its forerunners and roots in the Nazi regime, this line of research was suspected as a means of political revanchism , not recognizing the state conditions in Eastern Europe.

In his work on the Bromberger Blutsonntag , Gentzen dealt with the specified numbers of fatally injured ethnic Germans , which the Ministerialdirigent and head of the sub-division I East in the Reich Ministry of the Interior , Georg Hubrich , on February 7, 1940, to the upper presidents of Königsberg and Breslau as well as to several regional presidents in the German eastern provinces via telegrams. According to this, 12,587 ethnic Germans were killed by Poles in the first weeks of the war against Poland .

Gentzen referred in his information to a grave index which was kept by the German side and cited the date of February 25, 1942. This card index was in Poznań in the Instytut Zachodni . Gentzen cited the work of KM Pospieszalski Sprawa 58,000 , Documenta Occupationis, Vol. VII, Poznań 1959, as the source for the evaluation of the card index . In the balance sheet of this evaluation there were 3,479 dead and missing ethnic Germans, of whom around 600 died in fighting or underground activities in September 1939 or were sentenced to death by Polish field courts. In 185 cases, the causes of death were indicated on the index cards, which indicated fatal wounds due to the effects of weapons in air raids or other effects of war such as illness. Many of these cards also did not indicate any direct causes of death.

From 1959 to 1969 he worked as editor of the yearbook for the history of German-Slavic relations and the history of Eastern and Central Europe and the yearbook for the history of the USSR and the people's democratic countries in Europe .

Fonts

• The western Polish areas as historical areas of Poland. In: unity. Issue 4, Berlin 1952, pp. 367-380.
• Marx and Engels on the Polish crisis of 1863. In: Scientific journal of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. 2nd year, 1952/1953, us series No. 3, pp. 35–43.
• Karl Marx on Poland. In: Journal of History. Issue 3, Berlin 1953, pp. 310-344.
• Introductory lecture to the conference on the law of the unconditional correspondence of the relations of production with the character of the productive forces. In: Journal of History. Issue 4, Berlin 1953, pp. 620–627.
• Historical considerations on the Oder-Neisse peace border. In: unity. No. 9, Berlin 1955, pp. 893-900.
• The "Ostforschung" of West German historians - agitation against the Soviet Union and People's Poland. In: unity. No. 12, Berlin 1955, pp. 1214-1222.
• with Fritz Klein , Joachim Streisand : New Polish History - Essays and Studies. Berlin 1956.
• Germany and Poland - An Overview of German-Polish Relations. Leipzig, Jena 1956.
• The Poznan school strike in 1906/1907. In: Yearbook for the history of German-Slavic relations and the history of Eastern and Central Europe. Volume 2. Hall 1958.
• The "Ostforschung" - a raiding party of German imperialism. In: Journal of History. Issue 6, Berlin 1958, pp. 1181-1220.
• The historical significance of the Oder-Neisse border. In: German Institute for Contemporary History (Ed.): Poland, Germany and the Oder-Neisse border . Berlin 1959, pp. 17-26.
• Greater Poland in the January Uprising - The Grand Duchy of Poznan 1858–1864. Berlin 1958.
• with R. Goguel, G. Schilfert, K. Piwarski, G. Schilfert, E. Seeber, J. Kalisch: Poland, Germany and the Oder-Neisse border. Berlin 1959.
• with J. Kalisch: Das Vorspiel. In: Basil Spiru (Ed.): September 1939. Berlin 1959.
• Rola niemieckiego Zwiazku Marchii Wschodnich (Ostmarkenverein) w tworzeniu V kolumny niemieckiego imperializmu w Polsce i przygotowaniu II wojny swiatowej. (German: The role of the German Confederation of Ostmarken (Ostmarkenverein) in the formation of a fifth column of German imperialism in Poland and the preparation of the Second World War. ) Poznań 1959.
• Research on the East as a weapon of psychological war - remarks on the West German book "Fateful Questions of the Present". In: German foreign policy. No. 6, Berlin 1959, pp. 657-663.
• The Poland policy of the West German SPD leadership after 1945. In: Yearbook for the history of the USSR and the people's democratic countries in Europe. Volume 3. Berlin 1959, pp. 80-90.
• with E. Wolfgramm: Ostforscher - Ostforschung. Berlin 1960.
• On the history of German revanchism during the Weimar Republic. In: Yearbook for the history of the USSR and the people's democratic countries of Europe. Volume 4. Berlin 1960.
• The January uprising in 1863 and the two concepts of German policy towards Poland. In: Journal of History. Issue 11, Berlin 1963, p. 1129.
• with Adam Galos , Witold Jakobczyk: The Hakatists - Der Deutsche Ostmarkverein (1894–1934). Berlin 1966.
• Rola rzadu niemieckiego w dziels budowy niemieckich organizacji mniejszosciowych na terenach zwróconych Polsce 1919–1922. (German: The role of the German government in building German minority organizations in the areas returned to Poland 1919–1922. ) Warsaw 1966.
• The re-education of the population of the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and the GDR in the spirit of friendly relations with the new Poland (1945–1952). In: Yearbook for the history of the socialist countries. Volume 13/1, Berlin 1969, pp. 111-142.

literature

• Gentzen, Felix-Heinrich . In: Collegium Politicum at the University of Hamburg. Historiography Working Group (Ed.): Historians in Central Germany . Ferd. Dümmerls Verlag, Bonn, Hanover, Hamburg, Munich 1965, p. 32 f.
• The legend of the Bydgoszcz Blood Sunday and the German Fifth Column in Poland. In: Basil Spiru (Ed.): September 1939. Berlin 1959.
• Norbert Podewin (ed.): Braunbuch - war and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and in Berlin (West). Berlin 1968.
• HM: Felix-Heinrich Gentzen in memory. In: Journal of History. 1969, p. 1340.
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X .
• Tobias Kaiser: Karl Griewank (1900–1953) - a German historian in the "age of extremes". Stuttgart 2007.
• Michel Abeßer: Left alone on the “historical front”. On the special situation of Eastern European history in Jena from 1947 to 1991 between ideology and science. In: Uwe Hoßfeld , Tobias Kaiser, Heinz Mestrup (eds.): University in Socialism. Studies on the history of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (1945–1990). Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2007, pp. 1715–1748.

Web links

• Literature by and about Felix-Heinrich Gentzen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Felix-Heinrich Gentzen in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig