Jens Westemeier

Jens Westemeier (* 1966 in Bad Berleburg ) is a German officer and historian specializing in military history .

Westemeier attended the Johannes-Nepomuk-Gymnasium Rohr i.NB. until his Abitur in 1987. Then he was a temporary soldier in the Bundeswehr ; today he is lieutenant colonel in the reserve . He was an OSCE observer ; foreign missions took him to Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Afghanistan in the 1990s and 2000s.

He studied history and political science at the University of Regensburg (Magister Artium 1997). After that he was u. a. at the Bundeswehr Center for Military History and Social Sciences , where he revised his earlier uncritical assessments of Himmler's former adjutant, Joachim Peiper . In 2009 he was appointed to the chair for military history / cultural history of violence at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Potsdam with the historical dissertation Himmler's Warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period , which appeared in the series War in History , for Dr. phil. PhD. The reviewers were Bernhard R. Kroener (PhD supervisor) and Bernd Wegner . In 2012, Westermeier was awarded the Werner Hahlweg Prize (2nd prize) for this. Sven Felix Kellerhoff described the work as a "brilliant [] biographical [] study". According to Bastian Hein , this work will “in future be immunized against any myths about the Waffen SS ”.

In 2014 Westemeier became a lecturer at the Potsdam Historical Institute. In the same year, he was commissioned by the university management of the University of Konstanz (rectorate Ulrich Rüdiger ) to create a scientific documentation on the political past of the Romanist Hans Robert Jauß (Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System 2015). The later expanded book version, published by Konstanz University Press , was received positively by the professional world. Westemeier took part in a discussion with Didi Danquart , Ottmar Ette , Maurice Olender and Thomas Sparr in the Center Marc Bloch in Berlin.

Westemeier is currently working as a research assistant at the Institute for the History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine at RWTH Aachen University , where he is involved in the third-party funded project “Working on the role of dentists in National Socialism ”. His research focuses on the age of the world wars, National Socialism and the Cold War.

Westemeier is a member of the Military History Working Group . For this he organized the conference "So was the German soldier" - the popular scientific presentation of the Wehrmacht . He lectured a. a. at the following organizations: German Committee for the History of World War II , Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research , Berlin Colloquia on Contemporary History , Hamburg Institute for Social Research and Aachen Competence Center for the History of Science . He has published as a reviewer in journals such as military history magazine and magazine for historical science as well as at H-Soz-Kult .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs and Documentations

• Joachim Peiper (1915-1976). SS standard leader. A biography (= soldier fates of the 20th century as a historical source . Vol. 14). Biblio-Verlag, Osnabrück 1996, ISBN 3-7648-2499-9 . (2nd revised edition 2004; 2nd revised and revised edition 2006; English edition 2007 by Schiffer Military History)
• Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period (= War in History . Vol. 71). Edited with the support of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr , Schöningh, Paderborn a. a. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 .
• Youth, War and Internment. Hans Robert Jauß, 12.12.1921 Göppingen - 01.03.1997 Constance. Scientific documentation . Online resource, University of Konstanz library, Konstanz 2015 ( online ).
• Hans Robert Jauß. Youth, War and Internment . Konstanz University Press, Konstanz 2016, ISBN 978-3-86253-082-3 .
• "That was the German soldier". Wehrmacht pictures from 1945 to today , in: Jens Westemeier (ed.): "So was the German soldier ...". The popular image of the Wehrmacht , pp. 1–26, Paderborn (Ferdinand Schöningh) 2019. ISBN 3-506-78770-5

more comments

• Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, 1st SS Panzer Division . In: Jean-François Muracciole , Guillaume Piketty (ed.): Encyclopédie de la Seconde Guerre mondiale . Electronic Resource, Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-221-19175-0 .
• The junior school generation . In: Jan Erik Schulte , Peter Lieb , Bernd Wegner (eds.): The Waffen-SS. New research (= war in history . Vol. 74). Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77383-8 , pp. 269-285.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jens Westemeier in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Jens Westemeier at perlentaucher.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Guests: Jens Westemeier , berlinercolloquien.de, accessed on December 29, 2016.
2. ^ Gerhard Köbler : Westemeier, Jens, Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period , koeblergerhard.de, accessed on December 29, 2016; Niels Weise: A Nazi to the end . In: Insight 14 (2015), p. 67.
3. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : 80 GIs were murdered by the SS near Malmedy , Welt Online , December 17, 2014.
4. ^ Bastian Hein : Jens Westemeier, Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period . In: Historische Zeitschrift 299 (2014) 2, pp. 557–559, here: p. 559.
5. ↑ Bernd Rüthers : Enhanced stories - spared biographies. Socialization cohorts in Wendel literature. An essay . 2nd edition with an afterword, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-16-154116-2 , pp. 165 f., Footnote 4; A historical study of the career of Hans Robert Jauß during the Nazi era is available ( memento of the original from December 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Press Release No. 48, University of Konstanz, May 20, 2015. 
6. ↑ Ernst Köhler : From scandal to contemporary history . In: Südkurier , December 29, 2016, p. 32; Ahlrich Meyer : Forged documents, nicely colored biography . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , October 26, 2016, p. 37.
7. ↑ "The Jauss Case" / "Le cas Jauss", June 14, 2016 Berlin, in: H-Soz-Kult, May 30, 2016, <www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-31219>.
8. ↑ Westemeier, Jens, Dr. , portal-militaergeschichte.de, accessed on December 29, 2016.
9. ↑ "That was the German soldier". The popular and popular scientific presentation of the Wehrmacht, July 1st, 2016 - July 2nd, 2016 Munich, in: H-Soz-Kult, June 5th, 2016, <www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-31168>
10. ^ Conference report: Colloquium on the history of the Waffen-SS, May 6, 2011 - May 7, 2011 Würzburg, in: H-Soz-Kult, August 31, 2011, <www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-3790>.
11. ^ Conference report: Communityization and Exclusion. New research on the history of the Waffen-SS, December 2, 2010 - December 4, 2011 Dresden, in: H-Soz-Kult, March 11, 2011, <www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-3573>; Conference report: The SS after 1945. Narrative - Networks - Court proceedings, December 6th, 2012 - December 8th, 2012 Dresden, in: H-Soz-Kult, July 9th, 2013, <www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-4898>.
12. ↑ The political battlefield. Professional developments in the military: stations in the history of problems in Germany, July 2, 2014 - July 4, 2014 Hamburg, in: H-Soz-Kult, April 6, 2014, <www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-24646>.
13. ↑ Research between freedom and responsibility, December 16, 2016 - December 16, 2016 Aachen, in: H-Soz-Kult, November 30, 2016, <www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-32667>.