Otto Huth

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Otto Huth (born May 9, 1906 in Bonn ; † 1998 ) was a German religious scholar and member of the SS ancestral inheritance .

Life

Huth was the son of a neurologist in Bonn. From 1925 he studied Protestant theology in Bonn (as well as 1927 in Kiel and 1929 in Marburg for one summer semester each) and received his doctorate in general religious studies under Carl Clemen in Bonn in 1932 (Janus. A contribution to the ancient Roman religious history). He then received a scholarship from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft , with which he wanted to highlight the Dioscuri as Indo-European deities. He published a lot in the Germanien magazine and interpreted the Christmas tree in his most famous book as a primeval Germanic cult symbol (part of a tree cult) and suggested links between sporting events of the Nazi era and Indo-European cult games.

Since his youth he was influenced by the ideas of the publisher Eugen Diederichs , a friend of his father's, which resulted in a Germanic mythologization of Christianity. Other influences were Ludwig Klages and the Dutchman Herman Wirth , whom he first met in 1929 and whose assistant he was in the early 1930s. Even as a schoolboy he was active in right-wing extremist ethnic groups and, in his own words, was involved in the fight against separatists in the Rhineland as early as 1924. In 1924/25 he was in the German-Völkische Freedom Party , which was linked to the NSDAP, and from 1928 in the SA and in the National Socialist German Student Union.

In 1934 he supported Wirth in Berlin at the university in defending the authenticity of the Ura Linda Chronicle , which was generally considered a forgery and about which Wirth had published a book of the same name in 1933, and he was a member of Julius Deussen's working group for biocentric research , who propagated the philosophy of Klages. Because of his anti-Christian attitude, he had no chance to do his habilitation in Bonn with Clemen and his successor Gustav Mensching , and for a while toyed with the idea of trying Jakob Wilhelm Hauer in Tübingen. In 1937, however, he got a job at the Ahnenerbe. In 1938 he took over the department of Indo-European Faith History (officially, however, he was only to become department head after his habilitation). He and his colleagues did research there on the cult of fire and the tree of light among the Indo-Europeans, collected sources (including the Canary Islands by Otto Rössler and in Armenia, where remains of an Indo-European cult were suspected) and compiled bibliographies and received a well-paid research assignment from Reich forest master Hermann Göring for research of forest and tree in the Indo-European religion. In 1939 he completed his habilitation in Tübingen and was able to avert the threat of closure of his department in the Ahnenerbe by partially relocating it to the University of Tübingen (in collaboration with Hauer). In 1941 he became a lecturer and in 1942 an associate professor in Strasbourg. He also interfered in local church affairs in Alsace in cooperation with the SD. In November 1943 he became SS-Obersturmbannführer. He also participated in the Germanic Science Mission, in which volunteers were recruited for the Waffen SS in occupied “Germanic” countries . In 1944, when the Allies advanced from Strasbourg to Tübingen, he withdrew.

In 1953 he was quoted in Jürgen Spanuth's Atlantis book with a well-meaning assessment of the work ( convincing, .., bold, .., scientifically serious ). He continued to publish, for example, in the yearbook for symbol research and since 1961 worked as a specialist in the senior library service of the Tübingen University Library . In 1971 he retired. As early as 1965 he published about Wilhelm Raabe , which he continued into the 1980s.

Fonts

  • Janus: a contribution to the ancient Roman religious history, Bonn 1932
  • The felling of the tree of life. The conversion of the Teutons in a national perspective, Berlin, Widukind-Verlag 1936
  • The tree of lights. Germanic myth and popular custom, Berlin: Widukind-Verlag 1938
  • Legends, symbols, customs of the people, Berlin: A. Boss 1942
  • Vesta. Investigations on the Indo-European fire cult, archive for religious studies, supplements 2, Leipzig: BG Teubner 1943
  • Nature and origin of fairy tales: Märchen und Gnosis, Universitas, Volume 4, 1949, pp. 651–654
  • Fairy tales and megalithic religion, Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt am Main 1950
  • Raabe and Tieck. Essen: Verl. Die Blaue Eule 1985. (= Wilhelm Raabe studies; 1)

literature

  • Horst Junginger: From philological to national religious studies, Franz Steiner 1999, p. 248ff

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the Canary Islands they wanted to inspect Guanche mummies, but the outbreak of war in 1939 prevented the expedition. However, support was received through General Franco, who sent his friend, the archaeologist Julio Martinez Santa Olalla, to the Canary Islands. In 1944 Wolfram Sievers from the Ahnenerbe contacted Olalla to get copies of documents about the Canary Islands. Francisco Gracia Alonso, Relations between spanish archeologists and Nazi Germany (1939-1945). A preliminary examination of the influence of Das Ahnenerbe in Spain , Bulletin of the History of Archeology, Volume 18, 2008, pp. 4-24, online
  2. ↑ Bernd-A. Rusinek: "Forest and Tree in the Aryan-Germanic Spiritual and Cultural History" - a research project on the ancestral inheritance of the SS 1937-1945 , in: Albrecht Lehmann, Klaus Schriewer (ed.), The forest, a German myth?, Lebensformen, volume 16, Berlin, Hamburg 2000, pp. 267-363
  3. ↑ Michael Kater, Das Ahnenerbe, Oldenbourg 2006, p. 372
  4. ^ Bernard Mees, The Science of the Swastika, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2008, p. 261
personal data
SURNAME Huth, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German religious scholar
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH 1998