Kleo Pleyer

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Kleophas Franz Pleyer (born November 19, 1898 in Eisenhammer near Hluboka , Austria-Hungary , † March 26, 1942 with Staraja Russa in Russia ) was a Sudeten German National Socialist politician and historian .

life and work

Kleophas Franz Pleyer, who later always called himself Kleo Pleyer, was born as the ninth child of a hammer smith. The tenth was the writer Wilhelm Pleyer . Barbara Rotraut Pleyer is a daughter.

As a seventeen year old volunteer in World War I , Kleo Pleyer was wounded and awarded the Silver Medal of Bravery. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy , which he experienced in a Hungarian garrison, he took part in the unrest in the German areas of Czechoslovakia as a youth functionary in 1919 . He attended the Egerland Adult Education Center in Dölitz , where he joined the youth movement. From 1920 he worked as a youth leader, party speaker, founder of the Sudeten German daily newspaper and propaganda poet in the German National Socialist Workers' Party in Czechoslovakia , for which he wrote the song "We are the army of the swastika", with the first stanza of which the NSDAP party program, printed in 1927, closed .

In Prague , Pleyer made up his Abitur and in 1922 began studying German , Slavic and philosophy at Karl Ferdinand University . National Socialist activities earned him pre-trial detention and high treason charges. He headed the German student body in Prague and was expelled from the university in 1923 after organizing a student strike against the Jewish university rector Samuel Steinherz and attacking other university professors in an anti-Semitic manner. In October 1923 he came to Munich, where he took part in the Hitler putsch . He was a leader in the volkischen Hochschulring Deutscher Art , for which he edited the German Academic Voices , among other things .

On December 21, 1923, State Commissioner General Gustav von Kahr ordered Pleyer's expulsion from Bavaria . Pleyer went to Tübingen, where he received his doctorate in 1925 under Johannes Haller on the politics of Nikolaus' V. (1927). In the same year he was arrested at a National Socialist demonstration against the mathematician and pacifist Emil Julius Gumbel , which developed into a street battle with members of the Reich Banner, and charged with breaking the peace . In 1926 he went to work as an assistant at the Berlin Institute for Border and Foreign Studies , headed by Max Hildebert Boehm . Within the Association for Germanness Abroad , he founded an "Economic Working Group". In 1928 Pleyer became Martin Spahn's assistant . From 1930 to 1933 he taught as a lecturer at the Berlin School of Politics and then at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University Berlin , where he completed his habilitation in 1934 with Hermann Oncken .

In August 1930, Pleyer gave a lecture to the Deutscher Kreis youth association on the “Bundischen idea” in German history and prompted the association to become politically active. To this end, the Bündische Reichsschaft , an umbrella organization with ethnic and neo-nationalist goals, was founded on August 17, 1930 . Pleyer, who himself did not belong to a youth association, took over the leadership. The magazine of the German circle , the Bündische Welt , appeared from December 1930 with the subtitle monthly of the Bündische Reichsschaft . At that time and until 1934 there was a close and coordinated collaboration with August Georg Kenstler and his magazine Blut und Boden .

From 1935 Pleyer belonged to the advisory board of the "Research Department Jewish Question" at the Reich Institute for the History of New Germany . In 1937 he was appointed professor for middle and modern history at the University of Königsberg . There he took over the chair of Professor Hans Rothfels, who had been expelled as Jews by the Nazis . In 1939 he moved to the University of Innsbruck as a professor . After he had been a member of the DNSAP since 1925, he joined the NSDAP in 1940. According to the historian Ulrich Pfeil , Pleyer is one of the most radical "Nazi historians who undisputedly served the regime, were anti-Semitic and justified the policy of genocide," alongside Walter Frank and Adolf Helbok .

When the Second World War broke out , he again volunteered for active military service. Awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, he fell as a first lieutenant and company commander during the Demyansk Kessel Battle .

During his last leave from the front at the turn of 1941/42, Pleyer wrote the book Volk im Feld , which justified the brutal treatment of prisoners of war and the civilian population in the East, propagated the "extermination of Judaism" and was printed and distributed in large numbers during the war.

In 1944 Pleyer was awarded the Kant Prize posthumously in Königsberg .

Pleyer's writings include Die Forces des Grenzkampf in Ostmitteleuropa (Hanseatische Verlags-Anstalt, Hamburg 1937), Tides of German History ( Langen / Müller , Munich 1939) and People in the Field (Hanseat. Verl. Anst., Hamburg 1943) after the war placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

Fonts (selection)

  • Morning light. Poems. Aurora, Dresden-Weinböhla 1920.
  • Winter solstice. A Zeitwerk in 4 Aufz. 1st edition. M. Ahnert, Cassel 1922.
  • Politics Nikolaus V. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1927. (Dissertation with Johannes Haller )
  • (Ed.): Youth and Empire. Commissioned by and published by the Federal Young Germany , Berlin 1928.
  • The Landscape in New France: Tribal and Ethnic Group Movement in 19th and 20th Century France. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1935. (Habilitation thesis)
  • The forces of the border fighting in East Central Europe. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1937. Writings of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany.
  • Stone and stadium. In: All-German past: Festgabe for Heinrich Ritter von Srbik on his 60th birthday on November 10, 1938. Bruckmann, Munich 1938, pp. 222–235.
  • The tides of German history. Langen / Müller, Munich 1939.
  • The struggle for the German living space - a spatial policy atlas with explanations; From the political end of the Roman Empire of the German Nation to the Germanic Empire of the German Nation . Edited by the publishing house of the magazines "Die Zivilversorgung" and "Staats- und Selbstverwaltung". Kameradschaft Verlagsgesellschaft Gersbach and Co, Berlin 1938
  • France as a nation state. In: Germany's renewal: monthly bulletin. for d. dt. people. 25 (1941) 1941, pp. 130-135.
  • Greater German history. In: Reich and Reichsfeinde. 3 (1943) 1943, pp. 125-142.
  • People in the field. Hanseatische Verl.-Anst, Hamburg 1943. (Several editions)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tobias Weger : “Volkstumskampf” without end? Sudeten German Organizations, 1945–1955. Lang, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57104-0 , p. 337.
  2. ^ Ulrich Pfeil: The German Historical Institute Paris and its founding fathers: A personal history approach . Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58519-3 , p. 17. Online here ; similar to Peter Schöttler : The historical "West research" between "defensive struggle" and territorial offensive . In Peter Schöttler, ed .: Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918-1945 , Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1997, ISBN 3-518-28933-0 , p. 223.
  3. ^ German Administration for National Education in the Soviet Occupation Zone, List of Literature to be Separated, pp. 306–321
personal data
SURNAME Pleyer, Kleo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pleyer, Kleophas Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sudeten German historian and National Socialist politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Iron hammer
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1942
Place of death at Staraja Russa