Jürgen von Hehn

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Jürgen von Hehn (born May 24 . Jul / 6. June  1912 greg. In Riga ; † 13. February 1983 in Hamburg ) was a Baltic German historian from what is now Latvia, during the Second World War, largely on cultural robbery in the German occupied territories Eastern Europe was involved.

Life

In 1930 Hehn began studying history at the University of Dorpat , which he continued from 1932 to 1935 with Hans Rothfels at the Albertus University of Königsberg in Königsberg. After his forced retirement , Hehn did his doctorate in 1935 under Friedrich Baethgen on "The Latvian Literary Society and Latvia". phil.

Back in Latvia, Hehn did his military service in the Latvian Army and from 1936 worked as a historian in the “Archive for German Cultural Work” at the cultural office of the German National Community in Latvia. From autumn 1937 he also worked in the historical research center at the Herder Institute in Riga .

During the resettlement of the Baltic Germans in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Hehn was involved in the “Volkstumskampf” and in the evacuation of the German population of Riga. In May 1940 in German-occupied Poland, together with Gerhard Masing, he became the head of the Poznan "book collection point" of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle set up by Gauleiter Arthur Greiser . There, the confiscated Polish books and documents were to be recorded in several churches. The valuable copies were handed over to the newly founded Imperial University of Posen , and the rest, especially Polish fiction, were destroyed. By 1941, 1.3 million books had passed through the book collection point, 400,000 of which were placed in the Reich University's own lock library.

In October 1940, Hehn was released from his position in Posen. In November 1940, he and Masing had been recruited by Johannes Papritz as academic staff at the Berlin-Dahlem Publications Office to evaluate the Latvian press and to set up a Latvian department. Hehn was already a member of the Northeast German Research Foundation and in 1939 was one of the representatives of the Volksdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaften , which were supposed to prepare a conference for the main training office of the NSDAP on the topic of German international status - German achievements in foreign ethnic environments and their usufruct by other peoples .

After the attack on the Soviet Union , from July 1941 Hehn was assigned to the Geographical Institute of the Foreign Office as a special leader under Hellmut Haubold at the special command in Hamburg of the Künsberg special command , with the task of securing relevant Latvian and Russian map material, especially in archives, libraries and museums. He was supported by State Archives Councilor Wolfgang A. Mommsen . The target of the task force was the Geographical Institute in Leningrad and the Hermitage . On the way, the Einsatzkommando Unter Hehn plundered the holdings of the Geographical Institute in Dorpat and the libraries of various tsarist castles. Hehn had the stolen books and maps transported to the German Reich by train . In mid-October 1941 he was also active as a national political adviser for the Vorommando Leningrad of Einsatzgruppe A , which dealt with the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the area around Leningrad to the German Reich. Since Jews and "Gypsies" were also selected and shot in the process, Michael Fahlbusch sees evidence that Hehn was directly involved in the murders of Einsatzgruppe A. After his work at the Leningrad advance command, Hehn headed the Severskaya office .

Although Papritz applied for the indispensable position for his colleague Hehn, Hehn refused this request on the grounds that he was better deployed on the Eastern Front as a “fighting scientist” of the ethnic German research community . His brother Victor von Hehn (1907-1945), deputy head of the State Office of the German National Community in Latvia in 1939, had already joined the Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C under Erhard Kroeger .

“You will remember that since things began to come to a head in the East, I have been striving to get out of the publication position and that I in no way wanted to acknowledge your reasons for preventing me from going with an SD command. It then happened that I came out as a representative of the research community or was made available to the Foreign Office. I've done a lot of positive work over the course of that time that needs to be [done] and that I feel a lot more suited to than the work in the publications facility. [...] Now that the East is open again, especially the Baltic States, I can only be held in Berlin or the Old Reich by force. As long as the war lasts, I would like to stay with the troops or the command, but then to the east. "

- Jürgen von Hehn : Letter to Johannes Papritz, Riga in July 1941

After the “Sonderkommando Künsberg” was handed over to the Waffen-SS by the Foreign Office at the end of 1942 , Hehn rose to become SS-Untersturmführer in this organization .

In the course of the dissolution of the Sonderkommando Künsberg in July 1943, Hehn moved with most of the former members of the Sonderkommando Künsberg to Group VI G (Scientific Enlightenment) of the Foreign SD in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) at the latest in late summer 1943 . At Group VI G, Hehn was deputy head of Wilfried Krallert . In this function, Hehn headed various special commandos in 1943 and 1944 that were deployed in Kiev , Minsk , Odessa , Lemberg , Budapest and Krakow . These task forces consisted of up to 25 Waffen-SS specialists who arrived at their deployment sites abroad within a day to secure books and maps, question prisoners and obtain political and military information. In Kiev, in November 1943, while still under Soviet fire, Hehn managed to remove the library of the Kiev Polytechnic and that of the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences. The looted institute was then blown up to cover up the traces. Together with Wilfried Krallert, Viktor Paulsen and Alfred Karasek , he set up an international information service and an international reporting service.

After the war, Hehn first lived in Melle . There he got by with research assignments that he received from the Foreign Office in collaboration with the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council through the mediation of Kurt von Maydell , who was head of the Baltic section of the Berlin-Dahlem Publications Office during the Nazi era. Via Reinhard Wittram as chairman of the Baltic Historical Commission , of which Hehn was one of the founding members, Hehn kept in touch with scientific research on the East . The expert on Latvian-language publications gave several lectures at conferences of the Baltic Historical Commission and devoted himself to scientific research on Eastern Europe. Hehn was the author of many writings, a. a. for the resettlement of the Balts in the German Empire. He also dealt with the documentation and commentary on the sovietization of the Baltic countries, where he mainly maintained contacts with exiled Latvians. At times he was also on the payroll of the Federal Intelligence Service . Hehn finally started a civil service career in Hamburg in 1958, where he was promoted to government director in 1970. From 1979 to 1983 Hehn was a member of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council.

Cultural property stolen by Hehn can still be found in German libraries, for example in the archive of the Herder Institute in the 1990s.

Fonts (selection)

  • The resettlement of the Baltic Germans - the last chapter in Baltic German history. Johann Gottfried Herder Institute, Marburg 1982, ISBN 3-87969-169-X .
  • Reval and the Baltic countries: Festschr. for Hellmuth Weiss on his 80th birthday. (Eds.): Jürgen von Hehn, Csaba János Kenéz, Marburg 1980.
  • From the Baltic provinces to the Baltic states: Contribution z. History of origin d. Republics of Estonia and Latvia 1917-1918. Marburg 1971 (Ed.)
  • Latvia between democracy and dictatorship: the history of d. Latvian coup on May 15, 1934. Munich 1957.
  • The Baltic question at the time of Alexander III. in statements made by the German public. Marburg 1953.
  • The Latvian Literary Society and Latvia. Königsberg 1938. (Dissertation)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Heike Anke Berger: German historians 1920–1970. History between science and politics. Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2007, p. 172.
  2. ^ Hans-Christian Harten: De-Kulturation und Germanisierung. The National Socialist Race and Education Policy in Poland 1939–1945. Frankfurt / M. 1996, p. 201.
  3. ↑ Jan M. Piskorski: The Imperial University of Posen (1941–1945). In: Hartmut Lehmann, Otto Gerhard Oexle (Hrsg.): National Socialism in the Cultural Studies. Volume 1 (subjects, milieus, careers), Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-35198-4 , p. 260.
  4. ↑ a b c d Gerd Simon and countless employees: Buchfieber. On the history of the book in the 3rd Reich. Tübingen 2008, p. 227f.
  5. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Science in the Service of National Socialist Politics? The Volksdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaften from 1931–1945. Baden-Baden 1999, p. 133.
  6. ↑ a b c Kai Arne Linnemann: The legacy of research on the East. On the role of Göttingen in the history of the post-war period. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8397-4 , p. 70.
  7. ^ Fahlbusch: Science. 1999, p. 490.
  8. ^ Fahlbusch: Science. 1999, p. 491.
  9. ^ Wilhelm Lenz: Baltic Germans in the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD. In: Michael Garleff (Ed.): Baltic Germans, Weimar Republic and German Empire . Vol. 2. Cologne 2008, p. 307.
  10. ↑ Heike Anke Berger: German historians 1920–1970. History between science and politics. Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2007, p. 173f.
  11. ↑ Gerd Simon and countless collaborators: Buchfieber. On the history of the book in the 3rd Reich. Tübingen 2008, p. 167.
  12. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 237.
  13. ↑ Heike Anke Berger: German historians 1920–1970. History between science and politics. Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2007, p. 174f.
  14. ^ Fahlbusch: Science. 1999, pp. 493-495.
  15. ↑ Heike Anke Berger: German historians 1920–1970. History between science and politics. Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2007, p. 301.
  16. ↑ Hans Michael Kloth: How the BND hunted down its own Nazis . In: Der Spiegel . March 18, 2010
  17. ↑ Norbert Machheit, Dietmar Willoweit: Bibliography of the members of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council from 1985 to 2000. (PDF; 2.7 MB) Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council, Marburg / Munich 2003, p. 13.
personal data
SURNAME Hehn, Jürgen von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Baltic German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1983
Place of death Hamburg