Hans Roessner

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Hans Rößner (born July 5, 1910 in Dresden , † June 22, 1997 in Munich ) was a German German philologist, SS-Obersturmbannführer in the " Third Reich " and head of Section III C 3 ( folk culture and art) in the Reich Security Main Office ; After the war he worked as a lecturer at the Gerhard Stalling Oldenburg publishing house , lecturer at Insel-Verlag and from 1958 until the 1980s as head of Piper-Verlag in Munich.

Life

School and study

Hans Rößner was born on July 5, 1910 as the son of a primary school teacher in Dresden. After attending the German High School in Dresden and graduating from high school, he studied German and history at the University of Leipzig . Like many of his fellow students, whom he would later meet again in the Reich Security Main Office ( Wilhelm Spengler , Heinz Gräfe and others), he was involved in the Leipzig student union and the academic self-help. At that time he was already publishing in the journal Volk im Werden , edited by Ernst Krieck , the leading interpreter of National Socialist pedagogy .

At the security service of the SS

He joined the SA in November 1933 and the SS in May 1934 . He initially worked on a voluntary basis in the SS Security Service (SD), quit this position in 1936 and followed Karl Justus Obenauer as an assistant at the University of Bonn , where Obenauer had taken on a professorship for modern literary history a year earlier . Rößner preferred a university career and the foreseeable doctorate to his previous, higher-endowed SD position. Professor Obenauer, who himself had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 and had close ties to the SD, certified Roessner in a letter of April 4, 1938 to the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education that he was “one of our most deserving offspring, like us must absolutely keep him for the future of our universities, especially since his old office in Berlin SS main office would hire him full-time again at any time if he was not received through a modest grant from our university ”.

As Obenauer's assistant, he was instrumental in the revocation of Thomas Mann's honorary doctorate by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn. In a letter dated December 19, 1936, Thomas Mann was informed by Obenauer, as dean of the Philosophical Faculty, that after Mann's expatriation it felt compelled to delete him from the list of honorary doctors.

Due to a suspension of admission, Rößner could only become a member of the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 with the number 4,583,219.

In 1938 Rößner received his doctorate with his dissertation “ George Circle and Literary Studies”, which was assessed as “excellent”. phil. This work was taken up and continued by Max Nitzsche in his doctorate with Hans Grunsky . As early as 1936, Rößner had turned against the “spiritual Judaization” of the circle around the poet Stefan George through publications such as “ Third Humanism in the Third Reich” in the magazine for German education . The “racial lack of instinct” led to the “influx of distinguished urban educated Jewry” into this group. This, like the "aesthetic-humanistic educational tradition", has increasingly proven to be incompatible with a folk - racial literary study . Ultimately, all that remains is the uncompromising fight and eradication of this infected educational tradition. Rößner also worked on this line through his essays “The end of the George circle” in the journal Volk im Werden and “George and Ahasver or from the spiritual realm” in Die Weltliteratur 1941. A memorandum from 1938 on the “Situation and Task of German Studies in the German literary studies ”is also attributed to Rößner. It contains u. a. a negative list with the names of 50 scientists who were classified as opposing, as well as of 18 people who were viewed as ideologically and politically impeccable. Based on Heydrich's slogan of the "fighting administration", Rößner propagated a "fighting science".

In the Reich Security Main Office

From 1938 Rößner worked as a consultant in Department II / 2 ( regional evaluation) of the SD Main Office under Dr. Franz Six . With the establishment of the RSHA on September 27, 1939 and the associated merging of the Security Police (= Kripo , Gestapo ) and SD under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich , Department II / 2 was incorporated into the RSHA as Office Group III C ("Culture") integrated under the direction of Wilhelm Spengler . Rößner took over Section III C 3 (“Folk Culture and Art”). Here he worked to the full satisfaction of his office group leader Spengler, who wrote in an assessment of February 28, 1944 about Rößner's proposal for promotion to SS-Obersturmbannführer that he was “undoubtedly one of the most capable and talented officers in Office III (...). He is a creative person in the sense that for his presentations he succeeded in working out the National Socialist basic principles so sharply and clearly that this productive SD work helped to bring about a number of decisions during the war in the cultural work in the leadership positions have been".

Plans to get Rößner a professorship for German studies at the newly founded University of Strasbourg remained unrealized.

Rößner belonged to the group of RSHA members who left for Schleswig-Holstein in mid-April 1945 . In Flensburg he worked in the news office of the " Managing Reich Government " of Admiral Karl Dönitz , which was set up on May 13, 1945 , until the latter and all of its members were arrested on May 23, 1945.

After the war

Rößner was interned from his arrest on May 23, 1945 to 1948. During this time he appeared as a defense witness for the SD. In an interrogation on August 2, 1946, Roessner tried to paint a harmless picture of the SD, according to which it had only carried out intelligence tasks, but was not involved in the execution of executive measures to implement the ideological program of National Socialism - a transparent one It was a nonsensical undertaking, as the official designation " Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD " for the mobile killing squads indicated that the SD as a "fighting administration" played a central role and played a key role in the largest crime of National Socialism alongside the extermination camps .

Because of his membership in the SS and SD, Rößner was finally sentenced by the judgment of the Bergedorf Court of 19 August 1948 to a fine of 2,000 DM , whose alternative imprisonment, however, was deemed to have been served due to his internment.

Rößner succeeded in gaining a foothold again in line with his training and found a job at the Gerhard Stalling Oldenburg publishing house as a volunteer and later as a lecturer. His former office group leader Wilhelm Spengler published a series of books in this publishing house together with Hans Ernst Schneider , the former editor of the magazine Weltliteratur and speaker in the SS “ Ahnenerbe eV”, who was now called Schwerte, and Rößner was in charge of the three volumes Thinkers and Deuters in Today's Europe (1954) as well as Researchers and Scientists in Today's Europe (1955) show in two parts the old way of thinking of most of the authors, which was shaped by National Socialism. Occasional professional Nazi victims like Rudolf Nissen or Arnold Bergstraesser were allowed to work as authors in these ranks as alibi , probably without being aware of their co-authors.

After an interim position as a lecturer at Insel-Verlag , Rößner rose to the position of publishing director at Piper-Verlag in Munich in 1958 , where he oversaw Hannah Arendt's works , including her report on the Eichmann trial : Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964). Eichmann was also a leading RSHA man. On January 12, 1976, a few weeks after Arendt's death, Roessner suggested that a new edition of this title should be abandoned because of the low demand. However, the publisher decided on a new edition. Until her death, Arendt learned nothing about the true identity of her editor. He also exchanged learned letters with Arendt as to whether the word “Jew” should appear in the subtitle of her book about Rahel Varnhagen or better not.

Another noticeable feature during Rößner's time with Piper concerns a translation of Romain Gary's La Danse de Gengis Cohn , a satire of the Holocaust . As a black humoresque she uses soap production from concentration camp corpses. These two longer passages are missing in the German version; the authors can only be determined if Piper should open the archive for it.

Hans Rößner died on June 22, 1997 in Munich.

Publications

  • Hans Rößner: George circle and literary studies . On the appreciation and criticism of the intellectual movement Stefan Georges . Diesterweg, Frankfurt 1938 (also Diss. Phil. University of Bonn ).
  • (as editor): Looking back into the future: Contributions to the situation in the eighties [for Dr. Peter von Siemens on the occasion of his 70th birthday on January 29, 1981], Berlin: Severin and Siedler 1981, ISBN 3-88680-013-X .

literature

research

In 2011 the Fritz Bauer Institute conducts a research project National Socialism as a Cultural and Moral Project: The Germanist Hans Rössner .

Remarks

  1. ↑ 1936 No. 12
  2. ↑ 1938 No. 6
  3. ↑ The editor was Hans Ernst Schneider , whom Rößner was to meet again after the war under the name Schwerte in the right-wing Stalling-Verlag and who became rector of the Technical University of Aachen before his true identity became known.
  4. ↑ Joachim Lerchenmueller: The history of science in the planning of the security service of the SS, Bonn 2001, p. 116 f.
  5. ^ German by Herbert Schlueter, Piper 1969, again dtv 1970, 1978. In addition to the 2 passages that explicitly cite soap production, other related sentences were also manipulated accordingly. Nevertheless, the dtv editions claim to be "unabridged" in the imprint. Gary used this topos in several works, including later. Literature: see Art. Romain Gary .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rößner, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philologist, SS-Obersturmbannführer, later editor and publishing director
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH June 22, 1997
Place of death Munich