Friedrich Wilhelm Euler (genealogist)

Friedrich Wilhelm Euler (born May 19, 1908 in Bensheim ; † February 14, 1995 there ) was a German archivist, National Socialist and anti-Semitic genealogist. The collections of Friedrich Wilhelm Euler and the Institute for Research into Historical Leadership Classes he founded in Bensheim have been transferred to the collections of the Institute for the History of People in Bensheim. Especially in the time of National Socialism he also wrote under the pseudonym Wilfried Euler (abbreviation and recomposition of the baptismal names).

Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Euler was a son of Karl Euler († 1933) and a grandson of the Bensheim paper manufacturer Wilhelm Euler . His brother was the opera singer Horst Euler .

He studied law at the Technical University of Munich and at the Ludwig Maximilians University . On May 10, 1928 he became a fox in the Corps Vitruvia. On March 2, 1929 reciprocated , he fought eight games , four with Rheinpfälz and four with cisars . As an inactive he moved to the Hessian Ludwig University in 1930 . There he was with the Corps Hassia Giessen . In 1931 he returned to Munich, where he passed the trainee exam.

Race research at the time of National Socialism

In 1932 Euler worked on an ancestral register in the Brown House . He began his career as an archivist in 1933 in the Reich Ministry of the Interior . Under Achim Gercke he was busy genealogically and statistically recording data on mixed marriages and Jewish mixed race . His “mixed race numbers” were also the database for the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935 . He estimated the number of Jews and "Jewish mixed race" in Germany at 1.5 million. In doing so, he went back to the 17th century in his research on Jewish ancestors . His main focus was the detection of "racial mixes" between "Aryans" and Jews. After Gercke was relieved of all his offices in January 1935 and Kurt Mayer , who later became head of the Reich Department for Family Research , became his successor, Euler first switched to the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda , where he worked with Wilhelm Ziegler at the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question . For the publication Die Juden in Deutschland , Euler supplied the data on Jewish supervisory boards and bankers who allegedly ruled the Weimar Republic.

Discharged from ministerial service in 1935, Euler soon afterwards became research officer and archivist in Munich at the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany under Walter Frank . There he became an employee of Wilhelm Grau . In 1936 he compiled statistics on baptisms and mixed marriages in Germany. This work was of direct identification significance. Reich archivist since 1944, he was assigned to the cultural department of the Foreign Office . He was indispensable in World War II , but was called up several times for the army (Wehrmacht) (Upper Silesia). Towards the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans.

Euler devoted further work to the "backcrossing of mixed Jews". With the backcrossing , Euler wanted to “prove that the blood was stronger than the serious will to racial assimilation”. He went into detail about the descendants of the Mendelssohn family . In order to work on this work, Euler had a call published on the Allgemeine Suchblatt für Kippenforscher , in which members of historical societies were supposed to help record the conversion of Jews to a Christian denomination. The marriages and descendants of these people, as well as all mixed marriages of baptized Jews, should also be recorded. In 1939 this call was reprinted. With his research Euler wanted to prove the "penetration of Jewish blood" into the upper class. In his backcross publications he put forward the thesis that "the racial characteristics of Jewish ancestors only rarely disappeared from their descendants, since the blood was stronger than the even serious will to racial assimilation".

After 1940 Euler extended his research to Italy, France and England. In 1941 he published a paper on the "Judgment of the English upper class". In magazines observers to a series published from January to April in 1942 with the headline "Who controls England? A look into the rulers of the Empire ”. He later worked on the Diplomatic Yearbook on World Jewish Politics , which was published in 1944 without naming the authors.

Personal research after 1945

From 1946 Euler was a permanent employee of the New German Biography at the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Through his institute in Bensheim, he obtained the five-volume work German Leadership Layers in Modern Times , for which he bound historians such as Günther Franz , Hellmuth Rössler and Herbert Helbig from the Ranke Society as editor. In July 1946, Euler confirmed in an affidavit to the historian Karl Alexander von Müller at his request "his distance from research on Jews". 1993, founded the Friedrich Wilhelm Euler Foundation , which since 2008 under the new name Foundation for People History now the Institute of personal history bears that the genealogical approach Euler - pursued - without the ideological origin.

Genealogical contributions

• Meyer's Encyclopedia , in the Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim
• Biographical dictionary on German history, edited by Karl Bosl, Günther Franz and Hanns Hubert Hofmann, A. Francke Verlag , Munich 1973 ff.
• Main editor of the Merck'schen Familienzeitschrift (MFZ) Volume 20, 1960 to Volume 25, 1975 ( Darmstadt )
• Main processor of ancestors and grandchildren , Vol. 1, 1955 to Vol. 5, 1971 ( Limburg an der Lahn )
• Genealogical handbook of the nobility enrolled in Bavaria , published by the Association of the Nobility in Bavaria, Verlag Degener, Neustadt, since 1950
• Genealogical handbook of the nobility , from volume 1 (1950)
• German Gender Book , from Volume 120 (1955)
• German Management Classes in Modern Times , from Volume 1 (1963–1993)

Publications

• Wilhelm Koch [1866–1957, genealogist]. Once and Now, Yearbook of the Association for Corporate Student History Research, Vol. 3 (1958), pp. 153–155.
• Fritz Groos [1889–1971, ENT doctor in Darmstadt, confidante of the Merck family]. Einst und Jetzt, Vol. 17 (1972), pp. 214-217.
• Genealogical research - a way to systematically develop genealogical sources . Genealogy 44 (1995), pp. 456-461.

Honors

• Johann Christoph Gatterer Medal in silver

Biobibliography

• B. Ph. Schroeder: Biobibliography FW Euler. In: Archives for kin research. 44th year 1978 a. 49th volume, 1983, 2-3.

literature

• Lupold von Lehsten : Epilogue to “Genealogical Research” by Friedrich Wilhelm Euler. In: Genealogy 44, issue 3/4, March – April 1995. Here: p. 471.
• Lupold v. Lehsten: Friedrich Wilhelm Euler [obituary]. In: Genealogy 44, Issue 3/4, March – April 1995. Here: pp. 473–475.
• Voices on the death of Friedrich Wilhelm Euler and Ruth Hoevel. In: Genealogy 44, Issue 3/4, March – April 1995. Here: pp. 475–476.

Web links

• Institute for the history of persons
• Sebastian Pella: The war contribution of the "Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany." - "Research on Jews" in the service of "fighting science". Photographs and documents from the estate of FW Euler. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , Vol. 58, H. 11, 2010, pp. 900–923 (especially photos of Jewish gravestones from ancient times to prove early "Versippungen" for the purpose of further persecution of Jews )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christine Will: History of the Euler Family . In: Bergstrasse Anzeiger . February 13, 2015, accessed April 30, 2016.
2. ↑ ^{a b List of} Members of the Corps Vitruvia, No. 475.
3. ^ Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (Ed.): The Jews in Germany. Franz Eher Central Publishing House of the NSDAP, 1935.
4. ^ ^{A b c} Annegret Ehmann: From Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy: The Role of the So-called Mischlinge. In: Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Eds.): The Holocaust and history: the known, the unknown, the disputed, and the reexamined United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 125–126. ISBN 0-253-21529-3 , limited preview in Google Book Search
5. ^ ^{A b c} Patricia von Papen : Schützenhilfe National Socialist Judenpolitik. In: Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): "Elimination of Jewish Influence ..." ": Anti-Semitic Research, Elites and Careers in National Socialism. Campus Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36098-5 , pp. 17–42. limited preview in Google Book search
6. ↑ Ingo Haar : Handbook of the Volkish Sciences. Verlag Saur, 2008, ISBN 3-598-11778-7 , p. 174.
7. ↑ Dirk Rupnow : Research on Jews in the Third Reich: Science between Politics, Propaganda and Ideology. Nomos Verlag 2011, ISBN 3-832-96421-5 , p. 309.
8. ^ W. Euler: The racial backcrossing of the mixed Jews. Communications on the Jewish Question, No. 2, Vol. 1, 1937, pp. 5-7.
9. ↑ Werner Meiners : Jewish community archives after the November pogrom 1938.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Oldenburg Yearbook. Volume 109, 2009, p. 111.  
10. ^ W. Euler: The penetration of Jewish blood into the English upper class. In: Research on the Jewish question. Volume 6, 1941, pp. 104-252.
11. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch , Ingo Haar : Völkische Wissenschaften and political advice in the 20th century. Verlag Schöningh, 2010 ISBN 3-506-77046-2 , p. 82.