Max Rolfes

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Max Rolfes (born December 31, 1894 in London , † February 3, 1981 in Kassel ) was a German agricultural economist who worked as a political advisor to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in the Third Reich . Before and after the Second World War he taught as a professor of agricultural management at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen .

Life

Rolfes was a British citizen and became a German citizen during the First World War . He did military service in the German Army from 1915 and retired from the army in 1918 with the rank of NCO. He then completed an agricultural degree at the universities of Hohenheim and Bonn-Poppelsdorf, which he graduated with a diploma in 1921. He then worked as an estate administrator in Silesia and Saxony until 1929 . He then worked as an assistant lecturer at the agricultural college in Berlin, where he was awarded a Dr. agr. PhD . After that he stayed there until 1938 and was habilitated in 1935 with the thesis "Land use in rural businesses" .

Rolfes belonged to the paramilitary organization Stahlhelm from 1926 and, after its transfer to the Sturmabteilung after the transfer of power to the National Socialists, from March 1934 to the SA. In May 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 4,575,983). In 1939 he became an associate professor at the University of Giessen. From 1941 he worked for the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum , headed by Heinrich Himmler, and in this function worked out proposals for an agrarian reform in occupied Alsace-Lorraine . He was also co-author of the “General Settlement Plan ”, which continued work on the General Plan East .

Since 1936, Rolfes has worked in the "History of Work" project at the Labor Science Institute of the DAF , on the technical development of agriculture since the 18th century. From 1938/1939 he headed an interdisciplinary group at DAF, in which Hans Barth and Adolf Bauer continued to work as experts in operational rationalization. Their memoranda in 1940/1941 led to a major plan on "The Reorganization of Agriculture in Greater Germany", on which the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum , Konrad Meyer , also worked. The plan was primarily about a spatial planning restructuring of the conquered Alsace-Lorraine with the aim of its Germanization . In his speech at the 335th annual celebration of the University of Giessen in 1942, he postulated:

" All branches of agricultural science, economics and social sciences, geography, etc. will have to work in each other's hands. When it comes to gaining truly alien landscapes as living space for German people, the young science of landscape design also has a major task. "

After the end of the Second World War, he made an affidavit for the defendant Wolfram Sievers in the course of the Nuremberg trials . In the Federal Republic of Germany he was able to continue his teaching activities as a professor almost seamlessly, from 1948 he returned to his chair as a full professor of soil culture and veterinary medicine and continued to head the Institute for Farm Management in Giessen as director. From November 1950 he took over the scientific management of the "Darmstadt Study" together with Theodor W. Adorno . Carsten Klingemann comes to the assessment: "Rolfes, NSDAP member since 1937 and Heinrich Himmler's political advisor, was immunized through the cooperation with Adorno and confirmed as a scientist." He was a member of several agricultural science societies.

literature

  • Rudolf Vierhaus : German Biographical Encyclopedia . 2nd edition. Volume 8: Poethes - Schlueter . Saur, Munich 2007, p. 509
  • Klaus Dörner (ed.): The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Index tape for the microfiche edition . On behalf of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century. German edition, microfiche edition. Saur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-32028-0 .
  • Karl Heinz Roth : Intelligence and Social Policy in the “Third Reich”. A methodological-historical study using the example of the Ergonomic Institute of the German Labor Front . KG Saur, Munich 1993, p. 220f .; again de Gruyter, Berlin 2011

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Index tape for the microfiche edition . On behalf of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century. German edition, microfiche edition, Munich 2000, p. 136
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 506
  3. ^ Carsten Klingemann: Sociology and Politics. Social science expert knowledge in the Third Reich and in the early West German post-war period . VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 3-531-15064-2 . P. 21.
  4. ^ Basic research for the General Plan East , documentation of the German Research Foundation
  5. ↑ Roth, Intelligence, p. 220
  6. ↑ Max Rolfes: The tasks of the economics of agriculture in the construction of Europe. Speech at the 335th annual celebration of the Ludwig University of Giessen . In: Der Forschungsdienst, Volume 14, 1942, p. 96.
  7. ^ Rudolf Vierhaus: German Biographical Encyclopedia . 2nd edition. Volume 8: Poethen - Schlüter , Munich 2007, p. 509.
  8. ↑ Alexia Arnold: Reorientation through science transfer. A reconstruction of the history of science of the Darmstadt study (1948 to 1954) from a sociological perspective , Nomos, Baden-Baden 2010, ISBN 978-3-8329-4936-5 , p. 12.
  9. ^ Carsten Klingemann: Sociology and Politics. Social science expert knowledge in the Third Reich and in the early West German post-war period . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 3-531-15064-2 . P. 22.
personal data
SURNAME Rolfes, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agricultural scientist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 3rd February 1981
Place of death kassel