Matthias Schmidt (historian)

Matthias Schmidt (* 1952 ) is a German historian who, in his dissertation, uncovered, among other things, the veilings of Albert Speer about his role in the time of National Socialism .

Schmidt did his doctorate at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute for Historical Research at the Free University in West Berlin under Hans-Dietrich Loock . In 1980 he was able to look into original documents from the environment of the General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital (GBI) at Rudolf Wolters .

Wolters had been a long-time friend and colleague of the Hitler architect and later Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer, had been writing the chronicle of the Speer offices since 1941 and had kept Speer's receipts from the Spandau prison . The chronicle documented Speer's participation in the so-called renting of Jews in Berlin. Speer himself had pointed out Wolters to Schmidt. Wolters, who fell out with Speer after his release from prison in 1966, made available to the doctoral student Schmidt an unadjusted version of the chronicle of the Speer departments, which Speer had sent in 1969 in the version "cleaned up" by Wolters in 1964 to the Federal Archives in Koblenz .

Schmidt included these sources in his debunking dissertation, which was published as a book in 1982, shortly after Speer's death. Schmidt thus sparked a discussion that continues to this day about Speer's role in the Third Reich and the image Speer had drawn of himself in his memoirs. The allegations include a systematic policy of expelling Berlin Jews from their homes and the city in September 1938, even before the Reichspogromnacht , by Albert Speer in the course of the Germania planning. He must also have known the full truth about concentration camps like Mittelbau-Dora .

In Heinrich Breloer's documentary series Speer und he (2005), the work of the historians Matthias Schmidt, Susanne Willems , Eckart Dietzfelbinger and Jens-Christian Wagner is retold in the episode “Nachspiel - Die Dezeptung” . Schmidt now runs a business and investment consulting company.

Fonts

• Albert Speer. The End of a Myth - Speer's Real Role in the Third Reich. Scherz, Munich a. a. 1982, ISBN 3-50216668-4 . (At the same time dissertation). (Other editions, among others, as a paperback by Goldmann under the title Das Ende einer Mythos. Uncovering a historical falsification. Munich 1985 and under a similar title by Verlag Netzeitung 2005)

Web links

• Literature by and about Matthias Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Holger Dohmen: Speer and Er. , Hamburger Abendblatt , May 7, 2005.