Karl Schmiedel

Karl Schmiedel (born May 27, 1927 in Dresden ) is a German historian . After initially working on German-Russian trade relations in the 19th century, he and Helmut Otto worked at the Military History Institute of the GDR (MGI) in Potsdam to research the history of German military policy and the development of the armed forces before and during World War I. responsible. Schmiedel and Otto jointly published, among other things, on the connection between militarism and imperialism .

Life

After attending primary school, Schmiedel completed an apprenticeship as an electrical mechanic . From 1945 to 1947 he completed a new teacher training course and worked as a new teacher . From 1948 he attended the preparatory college or the workers and farmers faculty in Dresden . He then began studying history at the University of Leipzig in 1950 , which he completed in 1954.

From 1954 to 1960 Schmiedel was a research assistant at the Institute for the History of the Peoples of the USSR at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. From 1960 he worked as a research assistant or employee in the "Military History" department at the Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin . In August 1963 he was at Alfred Anderle and Felix-Heinrich Gentzen "(the Russian market for the German industrial capitalism with special reference to the role) German-Russian trade relations, 1856-1871" in Leipzig on his doctorate . In June 1977 he and Helmut Otto presented a dissertation B “On the military strategy of German imperialism before and during the first imperialist world war”.

plant

Schmiedel worked at the Military History Institute of the GDR in the 1st research department of the specialist group on military history, initially headed by Helmut Schnitter and later by Jürgen Lampe . In close cooperation with Helmut Otto, he dealt with the history of the First World War and its prehistory, the development of the German armed forces and the military policy of the German Empire since 1870/71. The focus was on questions of armaments , the relationship between economic war goals and the planning of the General Staff and military operations, as well as the analysis of the First World War as an imperialist war.

Together with Otto Schmiedel examined the connection between militarism and monopoly capital , the development of imperialist militarism as an international phenomenon and as a system of rule in the German Reich up to the First World War. In 1975 the two published an essay on the place of military technology in the image of war and in the strategy of the German General Staff. In 1977 they presented a volume of documents from Germany in World War I , for which they consulted files from archives of the former GDR as well as files from the Hungarian war archive in Budapest and the Austrian state archive in Vienna . Schmiedel was also involved in the development of the dictionary on German military history and worked in the collective of authors who wrote a volume on the military policy of the revolutionary German labor movement from 1830 to 1917 for the planned multi-volume work on German military history , which could still be published in 1990.

Fonts

• On the problem of the industrial revolution in Russia. Under consideration. recent Soviet work. In: Yearbook for the history of German-Slavic relations and the history of Eastern and Central Europe. 2 (1958) 1958, pp. 273-290.
• German-Russian trade relations 1856-1871. Under bes. Berücks. d. Role d. Russian market for German industrial capitalism. [1. 2]. [Sn], Leipzig 1963.
• with Helmut Otto and Helmut Schnitter : The First World War. Military historical outline. 1st edition. German Military Edition, Berlin 1964.
• with Helmut Schnitter: Civil War and Intervention 1918 to 1922. Military-historical outline of the civil war and foreign intervention in Soviet Russia. 1st edition. German Military Edition, Berlin 1970.
• On the development of the image of militarism in German social democracy in the last third of the 19th century. In: Evolution and Revolution in World History. 2 (1976) 1976, pp. 717-730.
• with Helmut Otto: The First World War. Documents. 1st edition. Military ext. of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1977.

literature

• Werner Knoll: Research on the prehistory and history of the First World War . In: Hans-Joachim Beth, Reinhard Brühl and Dieter Dreetz (eds.). Research on military history. Problems and research results of the Military History Institute of the GDR. Transformer publ. Weist, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89626-098-7 ( Society - History - Present . 11), pp. 73–86.
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X .