Georg Schmidt-Rohr

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Georg Schmidt-Rohr (born July 24, 1890 in Frankfurt / Oder ; † lost near Meseritz at the end of February 1945 , declared dead on September 18, 1949 ) was a German specialist in German studies and sociologist. In National Socialist Germany he worked on laying the foundations for a national biological language sociology and was head of the language sociology department of the SS in the SS Ahnenerbe .

Career

After graduating from high school in Frankfurt / Oder, Georg Schmidt (who used the surname Schmidt-Rohr from 1931 and had this officially changed in 1937) studied German and modern languages ​​from 1910, first at the University of Berlin , then from 1911 at the University of Jena . He passed the state examination in 1913 and took part in the First World War as a volunteer from 1914 to 1918 . During the war he was in 1916 with a thesis on the tasks of the military youth care in educational lighting Dr. phil is doing his doctorate . From 1920 he worked as a teacher in Frankfurt / Oder. His teaching activity was interrupted by many study trips.

Schmidt was active in the Wandervogel movement from an early age , in which he also achieved supraregional leadership positions. He was a co-founder of the Kronach Association of Old Wandering Birds .

In 1926 his son Ulrich Schmidt-Rohr was born.

In 1932, his main work, Die Sprache als Bildnerin der Völker, appeared . The criticism of the concept of race presented in it led to a broad public discussion and to an exclusion procedure of the NSDAP , of which he had belonged since 1933. The proceedings were discontinued, but Schmidt-Rohr was still considered politically unreliable, although he was involved in several Nazi organizations, such as the NSKK and the Bund Deutscher Osten since 1934 . In 1937, he wrote in an article on Race and Language in the Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde : "The entirety of the many different racial talents represented in the German people is German blood."

In 1939 he was publicly rehabilitated, and from 1940 he worked for the Reichsführer SS security service. In his contribution The position of language in the national consciousness of Germans in the yearbook of the German language from 1941 there is the following racist statement: “It was only the threats on the blood level that aroused concern and research. The threat was essentially of three kinds: It showed itself as infiltration by foreign blood and thus foreign species, especially in the penetration of Judaism. "

In 1943 the German Ahnenerbe Research Foundation set up a sociological language department headed by Schmidt-Rohr. He worked on a National Socialist theory that was not based on race theory but on linguistic grounds.

Schmidt-Rohr died in 1945 as head of a Volkssturm unit.

Fonts (selection)

  • Our mother tongue as a weapon and tool of German thought , Jena: Diederichs, 1917.
  • Language as the creator of peoples. An essence and life of the folk domains , Jena: Diederichs, 1932. (Revised new edition published as: Mother Language. From the Office of Language at the People's Development . Jena: Diederichs, 1933)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 531.
  2. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 531, more complete quotation from Joseph Wulf: Literature and Poetry in the Third Reich . Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh 1963, p. 414
  3. ↑ Complete quote from Joseph Wulf: Literature and Poetry in the Third Reich . Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh 1963, p. 389.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt-Rohr, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stein, Fritz; Quassel, Jörgen; Light, A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Germanist and sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt / Oder
DATE OF DEATH February 1945
Place of death lost near Meseritz