Ottokar Lorenz (economic historian)

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Ottokar Lorenz (born May 25, 1905 , † after 1943) was a National Socialist economic historian and a functionary of the Hitler Youth .

origin

Lorenz's parents were Marie, geb. Müller and the Munich musicologist Alfred Ottokar Lorenz , who married in 1902. His mother was the daughter of Wilhelm Müller and Marianne Fürbringer. His father was the son of the Viennese historian of the same name, Ottokar Lorenz .

Life

Lorenz joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party and the Sturmabteilung as early as 1923 . He took part in the Hitler putsch in Munich , where he was slightly injured in one hand by a grazing shot. He was later awarded the medal in memory of November 9, 1923 for this. After the re-establishment of the NSDAP, Lorenz received the low membership number 546.

Lorenz initially tried to do his doctorate in Munich with Hermann Oncken , but the latter refused that a polemic directed against Karl Marx should appear at his chair. Then Arnold Oskar Meyer became the supervisor of the dissertation in Göttingen. In 1928 Lorenz returned to Munich with Meyer when he succeeded Oncken, who was called to Berlin. In dealing with Marx and Engels, Lorenz tried to justify the term “creative classes”.

In 1931 Lorenz was appointed advisor for press and propaganda in the economic policy office of the new Munich headquarters of the NSDAP . In 1932 he became head of the economic policy department of the Reich Youth Leadership with the rank of area leader of the Hitler Youth. He also headed the economics group in the National Socialist German Student Union .

He was friends with the historian Walter Frank , whom he had met as a student in Karl Alexander von Müller's seminar . Lorenz and Frank worked together for the newspaper Akademischen Beobachter , founded in 1929 , a student edition of the Völkischer Beobachter . Frank had been hostile to Oncken since the mid-1920s, and in 1935 caused Oncken's forced retirement with attacks in the Völkischer Beobachter .

Frank became head of the Berlin Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany , newly founded in 1935 , and appointed Lorenz to its advisory board. Within the Reich Institute, Lorenz supported Frank in a power struggle against Wilhelm Grau .

In the 1938 Reichstag election , Lorenz ran on the only approved “List of the Führer” without receiving a Reichstag mandate. On the part of the Hitler Youth, who only allowed leading members to marry “hereditary full partners”, the Reich Youth Leader granted Lorenz and Dorothea Jendryssel a public marriage permit in October 1938. In 1939 he left the Reich Youth Leadership and, together with Wolfgang Höfler, was entrusted by Frank with the management of the main department for economics and economic history at the Reich Institute. At the same time Lorenz began the book project of a "National Socialist Economics" at the Reichsinstitut. The subject was later changed and the book should now cover “German, English and Jewish economic thinking”. Lorenz received a high research fee of 500 Reichsmarks per month for his project and was postponed as indispensable from 1941 .

The Reich Institute represented an anti-Semitic nationalism and participated in its propagation. This is why articles by Lorenz appeared in the German-speaking European daily press during the Second World War .

Lorenz again supported Frank in the fall of 1941 in his power struggle with Alfred Rosenberg . After the archivist and the librarian had been drafted into the military, Lorenz was appointed managing director of the Reichsinstitut, which had meanwhile moved from Berlin to Munich, in April 1943. In the summer of 1943 a chapter "Adam Smith as a representative of the British plutocracy" from Lorenz 'planned book was pre-published, but it no longer appeared.

Fonts (selection)

  • Karl Marx as the pacemaker of capitalism , with an introduction by August Winnig , Süddeutsche Monatshefte , Volume 25 (1928), No. 5
  • The concept of the bourgeoisie in Marx and Engels , dissertation, Munich 1930
  • Der Marxismus , Eher , Munich 1931 (National Socialist Library 27)
  • The elimination of unemployment , Wirtschaftspolitischer Verlag, Berlin 1932 (National Socialist Economic Policy 1)
  • with Robert Ley and Franz Hochstetter Editing of: Der Weg zum Nationalozialismus, Volume 2. The overcoming of Marxism through German socialism Adolf Hitler , Military Publishing House, Berlin 1934
  • To a new economics. 2 speeches and 12 theses , Berlin 1936
  • The German labor movement , Publishing House for Military History and German Literature, 1938 (Deutsche Schriften 1)
  • Economy and Race , Rather, Munich 1939 (National Socialist Science 7)
  • Adam Smith as a representative of the British plutocracy , in: Reich und Reichsfeinde , Volume 4, Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, 1943, pp. 71-184

literature

  • Karl Alexander von Müller : In a changing world. Memories Volume Three, 1919-1932 . Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich 1966, pp. 232-233.
  • Helmut Heiber : Walter Frank and his Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1966, pp. 401-403.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reinhold Schlötterer:  Lorenz, Alfred. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , p. 174 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ KA v. Müller: In a changing world. , 1966, p. 233
  3. ^ Ernst Nolte: Marxism and National Socialism (1.379 MB pdf), in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 31 (1983), Issue 3, pp. 389-417, here p. 389
  4. ↑ KA v. Müller: In a changing world. , 1966, p. 232
  5. ^ The HJ , October 15, 1938, based on Michael Buddrus: Total education for total war. Hitler Youth and National Socialist Youth Policy, Volume 1 , KG Saur, 2003, p. 921
  6. ^ Patricia von Papen: Schützenhilfe National Socialist Jewish Policy. The 'Jewish research' of the “Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany” 1935-1945, in: Fritz Bauer Institute (Ed.): Elimination of Jewish Influence. Anti-Semitic Research, Elites, and Careers under National Socialism. , Campus, 1999, pp. 17–42, here p. 36
  7. ^ H. Heiber: Walter Frank , 1966, p. 68
  8. ^ H. Heiber: Walter Frank , 1966, p. 403
personal data
SURNAME Lorenz, Ottokar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and Hitler Youth functionary
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1905
DATE OF DEATH after 1943