Hexenkartothek

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The Hexenkartothek (also witches special order, H special order ) was a large state scientific enterprise at the time of National Socialism to research the persecution of witches .

The interest of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in the history of the early modern witch hunt led to an institutionalized research company soon after the National Socialist seizure of power , with which the topic should be scientifically processed.

Heinrich Himmler's interest in hunting witches

The history of the early modern witch trials was one of the favorite subjects of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers suspect a reason for the SS chief's weakness in a family legend of the Himmlers: A cousin named Wilhelm August Patin , SS-Obersturmbannführer and canon of the Munich court church, liked to spread that an ancestor of Heinrich Himmler by the name of Passaquay had once been burned as a witch . As part of the “research into witchcraft”, a supposed ancestor of Himmler by the name of Margareth Himbler from Markelsheim was found , who was burned as a witch on April 4, 1629 in Mergentheim . After the end of the war he wanted to have all previous execution sites researched in an interdisciplinary manner. The reason for this was provided by Hermann Göring , who once mentioned casually that he had noticed that the ravens still circling or settling there to a special extent at earlier execution sites .

It turns out that, given his interest in the witch hunt, Himmler did not want to learn as a persecutor from persecutors, as it seems at first sight; rather, he regarded the witch hunt as a crime of the Catholic Church and an attempt to destroy old Germanic heritage. Furthermore, he suspected a Jewish conspiracy behind it . What was collected in the H (exen) special order using questionable scientific methods should, according to Himmler's will, flow directly into the propaganda of Nazi popular education .

The witch cartoons

Heinrich Himmler's interest in the pursuit of witches led shortly after the "seizure of power" by the NSDAP to a project in which this should be scientifically processed. At Himmler's instigation, a research company was set up in 1935 that devoted itself to this topic in more detail until 1944. This company, also known as the “H (exen) special order”, was set up within the Security Service (SD) . From 1939 onwards, the order formed its own department in the Reich Security Main Office , Office II and from 1941 onwards in Office VII ("Weltanschauiche research and evaluation"). In 1935, another research center, “Das Ahnenerbe e. V. “founded. During the Second World War , “Das Ahnenerbe” increasingly turned to the natural sciences and war-related research assignments.

From 1935 onwards, in-house SS researchers, of whom only 14 were full-time employees, (including Rudolf Levin , Friedrich Murawski , Wilhelm August Patin , Wilhelm Spengler ) in the service of the project, which was abbreviated as an H special order, searched over 260 libraries and archives in search of traces of all of them Witch trials since the Middle Ages . They carried out their research mostly covertly and analyzed files and research literature. For example, they pretended to be students at the University of Berlin or Leipzig , researched under the pretext of family research and went to work from clandestine addresses. With the research they were helped by letters of recommendation with the letterhead of the seminar for historical auxiliary sciences at the historical institute of the University of Leipzig or letterheads of the Reichsstudentenführung . Since in 1935 local and regional studies predominated and there was a lack of comprehensive studies, the SD researchers had to find their way into the archives of the Reich. They documented cases of witch persecution and witch burning from all over Germany on 33,846 large-format index sheets, also known as witch sheets . Her research went as far as India and Mexico . The first completed questionnaire was dated August 12, 1935. The index sheets are A4 size index sheets with 37 preprinted fields on which, for example, the name, address, family relationships, arrest dates, the course of the process , confession , judgment and execution of the convicts were recorded in key points. The documentation of the Hexenkartothek is thus oriented towards the victims. The index sheets themselves were put together in 3621 folders by locality and sorted alphabetically by place name. Of the location maps, 3104 concern Germany , the rest went beyond Germany. In the 9 years of research, 3670 file attachments with over 30,000 questionnaires ("H [exen] sheets"), transcriptions , file copies, regionally structured thematic bibliographies , projected publications from Nordland Verlag and historical films were created .

Of the 30,000 cards in the card index, 6,153 (= 20.5%) are in what is now the state of Bavaria . The Hexenkartothek also includes a document , location, person, literature, archive and "problem files I-VIII". To date, it is not possible to answer what functions the problem file fulfilled. The "H (exen) sheets" also contain a collection of sources and images which, together with the service library of the H special mission and the service files, form the legacy of the SS witch researchers. The most modern means of propaganda for its part , the film , was also included in the witch theme by the Reichsführer SS. The Sudeten German writer Friedrich Norfolk , hired by Himmler to write folk literature for young people and historical novels on the subject of witches, also contributed to the "ordered H-film threads" at the time. Norfolk had the plan for a witch trilogy for which he planned two to three years . Heinrich Himmler had found this too costly. His goal was a whole lot of smaller witch stories with 60-100 pages that can be comfortably read through in the shortest possible time.

Rudolf Levin was in charge of the H special order . From 1941 onwards, Levin's group presumably not only pursued the approaches of victim research, but also sought proof of guilt against world Jewry . In 1938 Levin sketched the profile of his research group. The work of the group focused on the following problems:

  1. Research into the racial and demographic consequences of the witch trials
  2. the valuation of women in witch trials and
  3. an overview of the previous literature on the witch trials, as well as the preparation of a thematic bibliography .

From 1941 Levin headed Section C3 “Special Scientific Orders” in Office VII, also a “permanent auxiliary unit for H research”. In addition to his work in the Reichsführer SS Security Service, Rudolf Levin tried to establish himself in the academic world of science in order to follow in the footsteps of his head of office, Franz Alfred Six , but was overshadowed as an assistant. SS leaders working on the H special order were also Franz Alfred Six and Wilhelm Spengler .

Even after nine years of intensive work, not a single book was published on this subject, let alone one that was ready for printing. Rudolf Levin did not manage to be on the topic of his habilitation . In 1944, his habilitation thesis was even rejected by carefully selected professors at the University of Munich . Levin's scientific ambition was greater than his ability. The work plan of 1942 included more than a dozen elaborate treatises, including, for example, a study on the humanities foundations of the H-complex , the economic consequences of H-processes or a land register of H-research . War-related restrictions on the use of archives and libraries also hindered research, research into witch trial files was far less important than the war-important work.

On January 19, 1944, the Security Service (SD) stopped recording work due to the war, as Levin said "now other current political issues are very urgent". Relocated to the castle of the Counts Haugwitz near Glogau , the witch cartouche survived the collapse of the Third Reich and is now in the Poznań Voivodeship Archives (Poland); a copy can be viewed in the Federal Archives , Berlin-Lichterfelde.

Today it is thanks to Professor Gerhard Schormann that the material on the various witch trials was made known in the early 1980s . According to Schormann's remarks, today's science has two questions as its goal:

  1. to classify the H special order as an SS institution in the history of National Socialism ,
  2. the scientific benefit of the work for then and now research on the witch hunt.

conclusion

The researchers on the H special assignment did not get much beyond the material collection stage. The reason for this was not only lack of time, but perhaps also a lack of qualifications and knowledge of the researchers. The project was oversized and could not be realized in the short time. In addition, the “result” was already predetermined ideologically : the guilt of the church and the Judeo - Christian rebellion against Germanic culture . In 1945, however, the approaching end of the war made it impossible for the SS to evaluate the project. Today the records of the SS researchers should be viewed with caution, as the card index contains incompleteness and errors, especially in the details. A lack of regulations meant that the employees of the Reich Security Main Office did not apply uniform evaluation criteria when creating the card index.

The value of the card index for research into the persecution of witches in the early modern period can apparently not be determined across the board. In the meantime, this research helped to underpin the current ideology historically in the Third Reich . Gerhard Schormann, who was one of the first to research the card index, already mentioned its dual purpose: to find remnants of old Germanic beliefs and to use the material obtained from the witch trials for anti-Christian propaganda specifically directed against the Catholic Church . The card index receives its value from the fact that the SS used lost or very remote archival material for research.

Dates and numbers of accused witches emerged, which today are of value as statistical estimates.

literature

  • Sönke Lorenz , Dieter R. Bauer , Wolfgang Behringer , Jürgen Michael Schmidt (eds.): Himmlers Hexenkartothek. The interest of National Socialism in the persecution of witches (= witch research. 4). 2nd Edition. Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-89534-273-4 .
  • Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich? A biographical lexicon. Followers, followers, opponents from politics, economy, military, art and science (= Fischer. 4373). Revised and expanded by Hermann Weiß . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-24373-4 .
  • Hans Michael Kloth: Where the ravens circle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 2000, pp. 42 f . ( Online - Jan. 10, 2000 ).
  • Vicki Prause: Article "The Hexenkartothek: Himmler's Interest in the Persecution of Witches", University of Koblenz-Landau, Department Koblenz Institute for History, 2002.
  • DVD: Witches - Magic, Myths and the Truth. By Jan Peter and Yury Winterberg: published in 2004 by Icestorm Entertainment , the third part of the series deals with the SS special order H.

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