Otto Rössler (Africanist)

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Otto Rössler , also Otto Rößler (born February 6, 1907 in Eisenstadt , then Kingdom of Hungary , † July 9, 1991 in Marburg ) was an Austrian Semitist and Africanist .

Life

Otto Rössler grew up in Vienna and, after attending school, studied ancient oriental studies and Egyptology in particular at the universities of Vienna and Berlin . From 1924 he belonged to the Austrian NSDAP ; In 1933 he was imprisoned for two months for his work as a speaker in the NSDAP. After the “ July Putsch ” in 1934, he fled to the German Reich . In Berlin, he was charged with a dissertation on the trilingual inscriptions of ancient Persian kings doctorate . In 1938 he married the sister of his college friend Otto Huth . Until the end of the war he mostly worked for the " SS-Ahnenerbe ", the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD). In 1940 he came to the University of Tübingen as an assistant to Jakob Wilhelm Hauer . In 1941 he received his habilitation and was given a teaching position for two semesters. At the same time he was listed in 1941/42 in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Office VII B 1b under Franz Six , in which the "Jewish research" had to support the " executive solution of the Jewish question through in-depth knowledge". Matthäus therefore judges Rössler's work that it was “both organizationally and conceptually directly related to the National Socialist extermination policy”.

In January 1943 he became the head of a "teaching and research facility for North African cultural studies" in the SS Ahnenerbe. In the SS he last had the rank of SS-Untersturmführer .

In 1944 he played a leading role in the propaganda activities of the RSHA, Office VI C, together with Walter Lorch, in order to pull Arab countries to the side of the Nazis, together with the Berlin collaborators Raschid Ali al-Gailani and Mohammed Amin al- Husseini . He also worked for the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question .

"Jews and English"

In the widespread magazine for politics published by his temporary boss Wilhelm Ziegler , Rössler leaves no doubt about his anti-Semitism in an article with this title : He sees a “spiritual and spiritual affinity” between Jews and English. He parallels Judaism with English Puritanism . England was the first European country to drive out Jews in general. Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism made their return possible. He sees one in Judaism

“Popular degeneration from the warlike shepherd of primeval times to the parasitic Jewish city dweller of the Diaspora ... Judaism is the result of this degeneracy process, the Jewish people are the paradigm of human degeneration . That is why the Jewish question is and has always been a question of race in a double sense: on the one hand, because the Diaspora Jew settled among peoples of different blood, a question of a foreign race, but above all because he brought his typical degeneracy with him everywhere, a question of sick race. [...] It is the corrosive Jewish mind that was allowed to flatter itself to profess a religion that does not make any demands on it that go beyond the limits of what is comprehensible to it and does not impose any inhibiting ties on its activity aimed at material success. "

Rössler claims that the Jews staged the Enlightenment :

“From this first 'clearing up' there is a straight path to all later 'clearing up' in history. All so-called progressive ideologies, liberalism and materialism , democracy and pacifism , are children of the same spirit. The capitalist modern degenerate form of economic life, the classic form of which in the British Empire we call plutocracy , unmistakably shows the same features [...] England with its political and economic, as with its intellectual Jewishness, with its eloquence, its plutocratic imperialism is in the last For centuries it has become an anti-European power, from which the peoples of the greater European area, in order to arrive at the appropriate shaping of their fate, have to free themselves as well as from the internally parasitic international Jews. "

After his release from captivity and his denazification he became an associate professor at the University of Tübingen in 1954. In 1964 he was appointed full professor at the newly founded seminar for Semitic Studies at the University of Marburg , where he stayed until his retirement in 1975.

His son is the chemist Otto E. Rössler .

Works (selection)

  • Investigations into the Akkadian version of the Achaemenid inscriptions . Diss. Berlin 1938.
  • Verbal construction and verbal inflection in the Semitohamite languages. Preliminary studies on a comparative Semitohamite grammar . In: Journal of the German Oriental Society , 100, 1950, pp. 461-514.
  • To the old Hebrew tense system. A Morpho-Syntactic Inquiry, in his anthology Hebraica . Reimer, Berlin 1977.
  • Collected writings on Semitohamitistics , ed. v. Thomas Schneider . Ugarit (AOAT 287), Münster 2001, ISBN 3-934628-13-3 .

literature

  • Jeffrey Herf : Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. Yale UP, New Haven 2010 ISBN 978-0-300-14579-3 (in Engl.) (E.g. BS 202, 300, note 24; there further important literature about R. as a Nazi propagandist)
  • Horst Junginger : From philological to national religious studies: The subject of religious studies at the University of Tübingen from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the Third Reich. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1999 ISBN 3-515-07432-5 (especially Rössler: p. 242f and passim, 17 mentions; readable online)
  • Jürgen Matthäus : "Weltanschauung research and evaluation." From the files of Office VII in the Reich Security Main Office. in Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism 5. Campus, Frankfurt 1996, pp. 287-330
  • Peter Rohrbacher: Werner Vycichl (1909–1999). A pioneer of comparative literature in: Predag ​​Budovec (ed.), Christian Orient in Portrait - History of Science of the Christian Orient. Congress files of the 1st meeting of the RVO (December 4, 2010, Tübingen). Volume 2. Hamburg: Kovač 2015, 899–948 (= Religions in the Middle East 3) (especially Rössler: p. 915f)
  • Rainer Voigt:  Rössler, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , pp. 750 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ z. B. Minutes of a meeting of the SS security service in April 1942 (PDF; 161 kB)
  2. ↑ Quotation from the official German, in Matthäus, p. 302
  3. ↑ p. 292
  4. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 504. Incorrect dating in Kater, Ahnenerbe, to 1945; By the way, because of his research, R. describes Kater as a "fanatical Nazi".
  5. ↑ Horst Junginger: From philological to national religious studies: the subject of religious studies at the University of Tübingen from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the Third Reich . Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-515-07432-5 , pp. 242 ff .
  6. ↑ Issue 30, 1940, pp. 423-427
  7. ↑ the book by Kum'a N'dumbe, Hitler Africa, Iko-Verlag, ISBN 3-88939-104-4 of 1993 (German) in both languages (Ger., Fr.) Published and relatively easy to find, unlike specified.
personal data
SURNAME Rössler, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roessler, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Semitist and Africanist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Eisenstadt , then the Kingdom of Hungary
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1991
Place of death Marburg , Germany