Hans Joachim Beyer

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Hans Joachim Beyer , also Hans Beyer , pseudonym Joachim Kühl (born June 14, 1908 in Geesthacht / Hamburg , † August 25, 1971 in Hamburg ), was a German historian , National Socialist ethnologist and SS - Hauptsturmführer . In the 1950s he was responsible for the academic training of history teachers at the Flensburg University of Education .

Life

School, studies, first career

Hans Joachim Beyer, son of a secondary school teacher, grew up in a German national Protestant family. After graduating from high school in Hamburg in 1926, he worked for a year and a half in an export business. He then studied history, law and anthropology in Graz , Königsberg and Hamburg and received his doctorate in history at the University of Hamburg in 1931 with a thesis on Edward VII's foreign policy . He then worked as a freelance journalist and only got a job in the Prussian Ministry of Culture in 1933 as a consultant for the newly established area of ​​responsibility "Landjahr" and as a clerk for library issues.

Beyer did not take his middle name - Joachim - until 1934 and put it down again after 1945. In addition, during the Nazi era, he used the pseudonym Joachim and Jochen Kühl in accordance with this middle name and his mother's maiden name.

time of the nationalsocialism

Beyer joined the SA in July 1933 and the NSDAP in 1936 . In 1934 he became a lecturer at the College of Teacher Training in Gdansk . A year after his appointment, he complained in his book Structure and Development of the East German People's Area the "mixing" of German settlers in the east with Slavs, so that the perspective is about liberating Bohemia as a traditional German settlement area from its predominantly Czech settlement. From May 1936, Beyer worked at the “Mittelstelle für Auslandsdeutsche Volksforschung”, from 1937 he acted as editor of the journal Volksdeutsche Volksdeutsche Volksforschung and in September 1939 became a full-time employee in the security service of the Reichsführer SS . At the Reich Security Main Office , under the direction of Franz Alfred Six, he worked as a library officer in the area of ​​“research on opponents” and collected material for the closure of unpopular institutions critical of the Nazi regime; For example, based on Beyer's collection of materials, the dual institute for foreign and folklore in Münster , headed by Georg Schreiber , was liquidated. With the help of Franz Alfred Six, Beyer completed his habilitation in Munich in 1939 . Oswald Kroh was involved in Beyer's habilitation through his favorable opinion on the habilitation thesis "Umvolkungsvorgänge, especially in East Central Europe". The text is "an expression of a welcomed national political responsibility" and a "contribution to the conquest of significant new territory for German research". In 1997, Karl-Heinz Roth characterized Beyer's habilitation thesis as a “psychopathological construct of a scientifically based resentment”.

On April 20, 1940 he was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer and on April 20, 1941 to SS-Obersturmführer. It is remarkable that Beyer was promoted on the “ Führer birthday ”.

When Beyer became a professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin in 1940 at the age of 32 , he “continued to work for Heydrich's Reich Security Main Office”. He held the chair for “People's Research with special focus on Eastern Europe” at the newly founded “German Institute for International Studies”, which was formed from the German University of Politics and whose director was Franz Alfred Six. In this position, Beyer held lectures on the subjects of “Race, People, Space” and “Eastern Judaism” as well as seminars on the subjects of “The Occupied Eastern Territories” and the “Historical Development of German, English and French Eastern Ideology”. He also wrote articles on developments in Slovakia , in the General Government and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia for the "Yearbook of World Politics" published by Franz Alfred Six . In various publications he called for the elimination of Jews from all European peoples who were supposedly only adapted to deceit, an admission of mixed marriages only for “related” peoples, the recovery of the “German performance inheritance” and the hierarchization of the Eastern European “tribes” according to their “German influence “, Placing the Poles behind the Ukrainians and these behind the Czechs.

In June 1941, Beyer was on leave so that after the start of Operation Barbarossa "as volkstumspolitischer consultant" with the in July 1941 SS - Einsatzgruppe C in Lviv invade. Their Einsatzkommando 4a murdered many Polish intellectuals "whose names were on a wanted list compiled by Beyer". At the end of September 1941, Beyer received a call to the University of Poznan for the chair of “Folk Teaching, including Frontier and German Abroad”. At the same time he became Heydrich's chief advisor on population issues and, on April 1, 1942, at his instigation, director of the "Institute for European Anthropology and People's Psychology", later the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation for population policy research in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Also in 1942 he advanced to SS-Hauptsturmführer. After Heydrich's death in 1943 Beyer received the professorship for “Folk Studies and Nationality Studies of Eastern Europe” at the German Charles University in Prague . As a result of this activity, his main work Umvolkung was printed in Brno during the last days of the war .

post war period

After Beyer had been declared "smoothly denazified ", the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Schleswig-Holstein made him its press spokesman in 1947. In 1951 Beyer became professor of history and its didactics at the Flensburg University of Education , where he trained the next generation of teachers until he left the university in 1961. According to the Flensburg historian Gerhard Paul , the then school clerk of the EKD and later Minister of Education, Edo Osterloh, had advocated Beyer's academic career. Although newspaper reports had drawn attention to Beyer's SS past as early as 1953, “Minister of Education Osterloh only took him out of the line of fire in 1961 and released him with full remuneration 'for research work'."

Beyer also worked as a church historian, conducted regional historical studies in the context of the Schleswig State Archives and belonged to the "Southeast German Historical Commission", the former Munich and now in Regensburg " Eastern Europe or Southeast Institute " and the "East German Cultural Council" under its vice-president Wilhelm Weizsäcker on.

In the mid-1950s, Beyer edited textbooks for history lessons for the Moritz Diesterweg publishing house , which presented the students with sources on European politics since 1919 . In 1971 Hans Joachim Beyer died in Hamburg at the age of 63.

Fonts (selection)

Until 1945

  • Structure and development of the East German people area. Danzig Publishing Company, Danzig 1935
  • with Erwin Hölzle , Walther Peter Fuchs Hgg .: The development of our people. A picture hall of German history. Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft , Stuttgart 1938.
  • Reich, neutrality, Judaism and ethnic groups outside Germany - remarks on the work of Christoph Steding and some writings on the East Central European Jewish problem . Enke, Stuttgart 1939
  • The fate of the Poles. Race - national character - tribal type. Teubner, Leipzig 1942
  • The German unity of greater Central Europe and its decline in the 19th century. Kluge & Ströhm, Posen 1943 (= lectures and essays at the Reichsuniversität Posen, issue 6).
  • Population change . Studies on the question of assimilation and amalgamation in East Central Europe and overseas. Rohrer, Brünn 1945 (= Prague studies and documents on the history of ideas and opinions in East Central Europe 2).

After the end of National Socialism

  • The Central Powers and the Ukraine 1918. Isar, Munich 1956 (= yearbooks for the history of Eastern Europe, Eastern European Institute, Munich, supplements, booklet 2).
  • The rural people movement of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony 1928–1932 (= yearbook of the home community of the Eckernförde district. Vol. 15), home community Eckernförde 1957. (As Hans Beyer)

literature

  • Robert Gerwarth : Reinhard Heydrich. Biography. Siedler, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-88680-894-6 .
  • Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2006
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
  • Karl Heinz Roth : Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer. In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-28933-0 , pp. 262-342.
  • Andreas Wiedemann: Hans Joachim Beyer. In: Ingo Haar , Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations. Saur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-11778-7 , pp. 65-68.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 262–342, here p. 271.
  2. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 262-342, here pp. 272 ​​f.
  3. ↑ a b Hans Joachim Beyer - "Ideological whip, planner and executor" ( Memento from February 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Nazi racial ideologist as a Flensburg professor. Hans Joachim Beyer . History workshop Flensburg 2011.
  4. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 262–342, here p. 324, note 48.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Robert Gerwarth: Reinhard Heydrich. Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, p. 305 f.
  6. ↑ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation in Prague (1942–1945) (= Reports and Studies No. 48) Ed. By the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism , Dresden 2000, ISBN 3-931648-31-1 , p. 55. ( online ; PDF; 943 kB)
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Ernst Klee: The personal dictionary for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 46 f.
  8. ^ A b Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 281.
  9. ↑ Ota Konrad: The humanities at the Prague University (1938 / 39-1945) . In: Karen Bayer / Frank Sparing / Wolfgang Woelk (eds.): Universities and colleges during National Socialism and in the early post-war period . Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08175-5 , pp. 219–248, here p. 237.
  10. ^ A b Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 284.
  11. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 285.
  12. ^ A b Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 287.
  13. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: Hans Joachim Beyer. In: Ingo Haar / Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations . Saur, Munich 2008, p. 66. In his testimony, Wiedemann refers to the following publications by Beyer: Auslese und Assimilation , in: Deutsche Monatshefte 7 (1940), p. 418 as well as American or Bolshevik “Volkstum”? , in: Deutsche Volksforschung in Böhmen und Moravia 2 (1943), p. 204 ff.
  14. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 289.
  15. ^ Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 299.
  16. ^ A b Karl Heinz Roth: Heydrichs Professor. Historiography of “Volkstum” and mass extermination: the case of Hans Joachim Beyer . In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945 . Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 315.
  17. ^ Gerhard Paul: Flensburg comrades . In: Zeit Online , February 1, 2001.
  18. ^ Gerhard Paul: Flensburg comrades . In: Zeit Online , February 1, 2001.
  19. ↑ Fritz Seelig, Hans Joachim Beyer (arr.): 1919 to 1955. Sources on European politics . Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1955 ( Paths of the Nations . Edition E, Issue 11: Europe in Transition ). Fritz Seelig, Hans Joachim Beyer (arr.): Contemporary history. Part 1. Sources on European politics since 1919 . Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1958 ( historical source booklets , booklet 11A).
personal data
SURNAME Beyer, Hans Joachim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cool, Joachim; Beyer, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian, ethnologist and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Geesthacht / Lauenburg
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1971
Place of death Hamburg