Hans Ehrenberg (mineralogist)

Hans Ehrenberg (born June 16, 1894 in Höntrop , † April 2, 1977 in Bad Godesberg ) was a German professor of mineralogy and deposit theory and rector of RWTH Aachen University .

Live and act

Grave site of the Hans Ehrenberg family in Bonn - Poppelsdorf

After graduating from high school in 1913, Ehrenberg studied mining and mineralogy in Freiburg, Bonn, Aachen and Berlin. In the First World War he participated as a war volunteer, since 1917 as a lieutenant in the reserve. In 1919 he was in the Corps Rhenania Freiburg recipiert . He passed the mountain traineeship exam in 1920 and was awarded a Dr.-Ing. PhD. After working as an assistant for many years , he completed his habilitation in 1930 at the TH Aachen. From 1934 until his release in 1945, he taught as a full professor for mineralogy and deposit theory in Aachen. In 1939 Ehrenberg was drafted into military service; During this time, Doris Schachner, the previous private lecturer, took over the management of the institute . Two years later Ehrenberg was released from military service. From 1941 to 1945 he was the successor of Alfred Buntru and headed the TH Aachen as rector. At the same time, he had research and teaching at the Institute for Mineralogy and Deposit Science discontinued due to a lack of personnel and organizational possibilities. In 1945 Ehrenberg was dismissed for political reasons and in 1958 he was officially retired.

Hans Ehrenberg found his final resting place in the family grave at the Poppelsdorf cemetery . His son of the same name was director of the Institute for Nuclear Physics at the University of Mainz .

Ehrenberg's role in the National Socialist state

The appointment of Hans Ehrenberg senior as rector of the Technical University of Aachen was a logical development, on the one hand, of his consistent and convinced advocacy as a Lecturer League Leader for National Socialism and his membership in the NSDAP and in the rank of Hauptsturmführer of the Schutzstaffel (since 1933) and, on the other hand, due to the increasingly numerous Replacement of previous university lecturers who were still appointed in the Weimar Republic by a new generation of politically trained and specially selected staff. With this election he also took on the duties of a defense officer and was thus authorized, among other things, to sift through all publications before they were published. He also expanded the secret organization “Mittelstelle für Heimatschutz” founded by Otto Gruber , which supported the Nazi agitations in Belgium and the Netherlands. With this group he wanted to link his polemics against the Peace Treaty of Versailles and expand the responsibilities of the Aachen University for the western and now occupied neighboring countries belonging to the German Reich.

But as the Second World War lasted, Ehrenberg was forced by the Allied air raids, which became more and more violent from 1943 and later also due to the approach of Allied troops on Aachen, to repeatedly interrupt teaching, to encourage his staff to take fire protection and repair measures and ultimately to outsource various institutes to less endangered areas. After almost 70% of the TH had been destroyed, the final evacuation to Dillenburg took place on September 11, 1944 by order of the district leader Rudolf Schmeer and the Reich Defense Commissioner Josef Grohé . Several colleagues, such as Walter Rogowski , who opposed these orders and preferred to move to neighboring Belgium, had Ehrenberg arrested before they escaped.

In Dillenburg, Ehrenberg remained an incorrigible rector loyal to the regime until the American troops marched in, but finally fled to Wachenhausen near Hanover on March 23, 1945 . Four weeks after the end of the war, Ehrenberg reappeared in Dillenburg, described himself as no longer in office and confirmed the election of his successor and interim rector Gustav Plessow. In contrast to Buntru, Gruber and others, Ehrenberg did not receive any exonerating letters for his denazification proceedings and was also made jointly responsible for the politicization of the university by former "followers". As a scientist, he no longer played a significant role.

As part of its current appraisal of the activities of its university members during National Socialism, the Historical Institute of RWTH Aachen University deals intensively with the work of Hans Ehrenberg in several writings.

See also

• List of corps student rectors

literature

• Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , pp. 42-43.
• Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933–1945) . Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 , ( Aachener Studies on Technology and Society 4), (At the same time: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2003), p. 110 ff. And more often, [ 1] .
• Burkhard Dietz, Helmut Gabel, Ulrich Tiedau (eds.): Reach to the west. The "West Research" of the ethnic-national sciences on the north-western European area (1919–1960) . Waxmann-Verlag, Münster et al. 2003, ISBN 3-8309-1144-0 , ( studies on the history and culture of north-western Europe 6).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 129/885
2. ↑ Dissertation: Sediment petrographic investigations on secondary rocks of the Aachen hard coal deposits , published in: Yearbook of the Prussian Geological State Institute in Berlin 49 (1927)