Ludwig Bittner

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Ludwig Bittner (born February 19, 1877 in Vienna ; † April 2, 1945 there ) was an Austrian archivist and historian .

Life

Ludwig Bittner was the son of a judge at the Vienna Regional Court. His brother Julius Bittner was one of the most famous composers in Austria during the First Republic . From the summer semester of 1895, Bittner studied history as a major and geography as a minor in Vienna. After completing the preparatory year, Bittner was appointed a full member of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (IÖG) on July 17, 1897 . Bittner chose the topic “The iron trade and the iron industry of the city of Steyr in the Middle Ages” as the topic of the housework, and the expert opinion on this was excellent. Bittner completed the institute's training course with excellent results. In 1898 he received his doctorate in philosophy under Max Büdinger with a thesis on "The Founding of Normandy".

After passing the state examination and doctorate, Bittner worked on the IÖG edition project “Regesta Habsburgica”. In 1900 Bittner entered the house, court and state archives . After a year of probation, he took his oath of service there. Bittner was one of the driving forces behind the re-inventory of the archive, which resulted in the five-volume edition of the complete inventory of the house, court and state archives that he edited. In addition, he completed his habilitation in 1904 at the University of Vienna with a thesis on the history of direct state taxes in the ore monastery of Salzburg up to the abolition of the landscape under Wolf Dietrich for middle and modern history. His further career in the house, court and state archives was as follows: In 1912 he was appointed house, court and state archivist, in 1918 he was given the title and character of a section council, in 1919 he became a section council and on June 6, 1919 he became a Appointed Deputy Head of Archives. At the same time, from 1919 on, he was deputy to Oswald Redlich, the archivist and next to him the most important person on the Austrian side in the archival negotiations between Austria and the successor states of the monarchy. In 1926 he finally became director of the house, court and state archives. At the same time he became a professor at the University of Vienna in 1928.

In 1929, Bittner's daughter Hertha was the first woman to be admitted to the institute's advanced archive service.

Bittner was active in several German national associations, including the German Club , the Pan-German Association , the German National Association for Austria and the German Radical District Association in Währing . Politically, he belonged to the Greater German People's Party and saw himself as a member of the NSDAP on May 15, 1933 ( membership number 6.226.927) from their "combat agreement" with the Austrian NSDAP .

During Austrofascism, Bittner employed six illegal Austrian NSDAP members whose job was in the Chancellery. They received their salaries from Berlin. They put on collections on the history of the 'new German Reich' and on Jews. This material was also used for the Munich and Vienna exhibition Der Ewige Jude . In 1937 he wanted to give a lecture at the Munich exhibition, which he was forbidden after protests. In 1938 he received an honorary doctorate from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin for his work on the war guilt issue .

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich , Bittner tried to defend the position of the Vienna Central Archives, especially against the President of the Reichsarchiv Potsdam, Ernst Zipfel . Bittner himself was appointed director of the Vienna Reich Archives in 1941. In his function as Reich Archives Director, the staunch National Socialist carried out active research into the question of war guilt during the Second World War and had the archives of the Belgrade Foreign Ministry transported to Vienna for this purpose. Publications of files in the Vienna Reichsarchiv were supposed to prove the guilt of the Serbian kingdom for the outbreak of the First World War. The edition project called "Serbian files" within the archive could no longer appear before the end of the Second World War. Even before Austria was annexed to the German Reich, Bittner was an employee of the Reich Institute for the History of New Germany and sponsored the anti-Semitic research financed by the Munich Institute in the archive. In 1941 he was elected a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . From 1943 he was a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

During the reign of National Socialism, Bittner was considered an old fighter and was awarded the medal in memory of March 13, 1938 , the Loyalty Service Medal and the War Merit Cross, Second Class . In 1942 the Völkischer Beobachter praised Bittner's work on the question of war guilt. In 1944 Bittner himself published in the Völkischer Beobachter on archival material.

On April 2, 1945, Bittner and his wife committed suicide.

Fonts

  • Chronological list of the Austrian State Treaties 1: The Austrian State Treaties from 1526 to 1763 (Vienna 1903)
  • Chronological list of the Austrian State Treaties 2: The Austrian State Treaties from 1763 to 1847 (Vienna 1909)
  • Chronological list of the Austrian State Treaties 3: The State Treaties of the Austrian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy from 1848 to 1911 (Vienna 1914)
  • Chronological index of the Austrian State Treaties 4: Register with supplements (1526 to 1914) (Vienna 1917)
  • The doctrine of international treaty documents (Berlin / Leipzig 1924; ND 2005)
  • The interstate negotiations on the fate of the Austrian archives after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, in: Archive for Politics and History 3 (Berlin 1925), pp. 58–96
  • Austria-Hungary and Serbia, in: Historische Zeitschrift 144 (1931), pp. 78-104
  • "The black hand". Material from the Vienna press archive, in: Berliner Monatshefte 10 (1932), pp. 55–64
  • The ownership of the state in its archival material according to the Austrian General Civil Code, in: FS Hans Nabholz (Zurich 1934), pp. 299–328
  • Graf Johann Forgach, in: Berliner Monatshefte 13 (1935), pp. 950–959
  • Count Friedrich Szápáry, in: Berliner Monatshefte 14 (1936), pp. 958–962
  • The Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its history and its organization, in: Berliner Monatshefte 15 (1937) pp. 819–843
  • The German broadcast of Austria, in: Berliner Monatshefte 16 (1938)
  • New contributions to the position of Kaiser Wilhelm II on the fascoda question, in: HZ 160 (1942), pp. 540-550.
  • Austria-Hungary's foreign policy from the Bosnian crisis in 1908 to the outbreak of war in 1914. Diplomatic files of the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vol. 1–9, ed. v. Ludwig Bittner, Alfred Francis Přibram , Heinrich von Srbik , Hans Uebersberger (Vienna 1930)
  • Repertory of the diplomatic representatives of all countries since the Peace of Westphalia 1: 1648–1715, ed. v. Ludwig Bittner, Lothar Gross (Oldenburg 1936)
  • Ludwig Bittner (Ed.): Complete inventory of the Vienna House, Court and State Archives. 5 vols. Vienna 1936–1940 (inventories of Austrian state archives V / 4–8)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive of the month for July 1, 2013: The first women in the senior archive service. (PDF; 21.4 MB) In: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Ed.): Archives of the Month - 2006 to 2018. p. 265.
  2. ↑ Illegals work in the Federal Chancellery. In:  Workers' Storm. Kampfblatt der National Socialist Arbeiters Deutschösterreich , May 18, 1938, p. 6 (online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / abs.
  3. ↑ Honorary doctorate from Berlin. In:  Deutscher Telegraf , May 16, 1938, p. 3 (online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nst.
  4. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 40.
  5. ↑ Prof. Uebersberger 65 years old. In:  Völkischer Beobachter. Combat sheet of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany. Vienna edition , June 25, 1942, p. 3 (online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / vob.
  6. ↑ files. In:  Völkischer Beobachter. Combat sheet of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany. Vienna edition , May 17, 1942, p. 4 (online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / vob.
personal data
SURNAME Bittner, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian archivist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 1945
Place of death Vienna