Peter-Heinz Seraphim

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Peter-Heinz Seraphim (born September 15, 1902 in Riga ; † May 19, 1979 in Rosenheim ) was a Baltic German economist , Eastern researcher and author of racist-ideological non-fiction books.

family

Peter-Heinz Seraphim was the son of the well-known German-Baltic historian and journalist Ernst Seraphim , who was editor-in-chief of several German newspapers in the Baltic States, and his wife Sophie geb. Wegener (1871–1945), daughter of a manor owner from Livonia. Peter-Heinz had six siblings, the youngest of whom was a girl. Peter-Heinz 'older brother Hans-Jürgen Seraphim (1899–1962) was also an economist and during the Third Reich was temporarily director of the Eastern European Institute in Breslau. Peter-Heinz's cousin Hans-Günther Seraphim (1903–1992) was a historian and librarian. After the war he worked as an expert in the Nazi trials .

End of the First World War and the Weimar Republic

Seraphim fought in Latvia in 1919 under the Free Corps Leader Rüdiger von der Goltz in the Baltic State Armed Forces , where his father was a press officer , against the red Latvian riflemen . According to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918, the territory of Latvia was occupied by the Central Powers , followed by the declaration of independence on November 18, 1918.

Seraphim used the career that the Black Reichswehr offered a young man whose father supported a family of nine with German-Baltic-national tales.

He was talented as a writer and worked in a difficult number of institutes which were financed from hidden military budgets.

Seraphim studied since 1921 at the University of Tartu , the Albertus University of Königsberg , the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz and the University of Breslau Economics and received his doctorate in 1924. After that he was a research assistant and in 1930 moved to the Institute for East German Economics in Königsberg. In the same year he joined the People's Conservative Reich Association .

National Socialism

In 1933 Seraphim joined the NSDAP and the SA . In training courses and in his journalistic activities, he propagated an Ostpolitik that was shaped by the German sense of mission . The anti-Semitism that was popular with Germans and Poles, Seraphim was a scientific veneer. Seraphim had stolen a substantial part of the data for his investigations from the Jewish scientists whom he defamed. His elaborations presented the Jewish inhabitants of the areas as a unified, spatially displaceable mass and made a methodical and propagandistic contribution to the National Socialist plans for extermination.

Seraphim used racist and ideological platitudes and rushed in the Frankfurter Zeitung of April 30, 1939, by presenting an action-oriented entanglement of the “ overpopulation question ” with the “ Jewish question ” in such a way that the “solution” of one “question” would considerably alleviate the other .

Institute for Eastern European Economy

Theodor Oberländer had been director of the Institute for Eastern European Economics at the Albertina in Königsberg since 1933 . Seraphim became a lecturer and deputy dean in this institute in 1937. From 1937 Oberländer was rector at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald , where his colleague Seraphim completed his habilitation in 1940. As Federal Minister for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims , Oberländer published a book by Seraphim in 1955.

Institute for German Ostarbeit in Krakow

After the attack on Poland , Seraphim became an “expert for Jews” at the Institute for German Eastern Labor in the General Government in Krakow.

In accordance with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 24, 1939 over the spheres of influence, Latvia was occupied by the Red Army in 1940 without resistance and incorporated as the Latvian SSR . The Baltic Germans were brought to homes and workplaces in the Warthegau with the slogan “ Heim ins Reich ” , from which the Polish and Jewish residents had been deported to the Generalgouvernement according to the racist classification propagated by Seraphim.

Editor of the magazine "Der Weltkampf"

On March 26, 1941, the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question was opened in Frankfurt . Seraphim gave an opening lecture with the title “Population and economic problems of a European total solution to the Jewish question ”.

Furthermore, he took over the editorial management of the institute newspaper Der Weltkampf , which like the institute belonged to the Rosenberg office . The sheet was published by Hoheneichen-Verlag ; the circulation was 3800 copies, from February 1944 still 3500.

Office for Defense Economy and Armaments

With the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Seraphim was on an inspection trip on behalf of the Office for Defense Economics and Armaments of the OKW under Georg Thomas in the first attacked Ukraine .

The task of the Office for Defense Economics and Armaments was to prepare the occupied territories for the war economy. According to Petersen, Seraphim participated in the robbery of Jewish cultural assets, the task of the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). Seraphim witnessed mass shootings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD . In a written report to his superior at OKW, he protested against these mass shootings, which he considered economically questionable.

Director of the Oder-Danube Institute

In 1943 he became the managing director of the Oder-Danube Institute in Stettin. The institute served the war economy by evaluating documents on the economy of southern Europe in the form of "confidential reports".

post war period

Like Reinhard Gehlen , Seraphim was brought to the USA as a prisoner of war and an expert on the East. He lived for over a year at Camp Ritchie , where he wrote studies for the US military intelligence service, particularly on the Soviet armaments industry. In July 1946 he returned to West Germany, where he was taken to the American interrogation camp, Camp King . He was released from captivity in August 1946. Seraphim was from 1946 to December 1949 head of the so-called "professors group" of the organization Gehlen , which provided this study for a fee. He received the work orders from the head of the organization, initially Hermann Baun and later Gehlen, and passed them on, as well as the payment, to the individual scientists; he also recruited new scientists. Seraphim received help with his denazification from the Gehlen organization. Seraphim continued to work for the Federal Intelligence Service and evaluated the Polish press for it. Seraphim is still considered one of the experts in Eastern research today . In his construction of the enemy image, Judaism was replaced by communism.

In the Soviet occupation zone , Seraphim's writings, Judaism in Eastern Europe (1938), Judaism in Eastern Europe (1938), The Economic Structure of the General Government (1941), The Significance of Judaism in Southeastern Europe (1941), Population and Economic Policy Problems of an Overall European Solution, were published der Judenfrage (1943) and Das Judentum (1944) placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

In 1954 Seraphim became head of the private administration and business academy in Bochum .

Fonts (selection)

Books and Brochures:

  • Judaism in Eastern Europe . Edited with the participation of the Institute for Eastern European Economics at the University of Königsberg in Prussia. Essener Verlagsanstalt , Essen 1938. (A National Socialist propaganda publisher) (According to Steinweis, the book is "a milestone in anti-Jewish research.")
  • Judaism in Eastern Europe . Bund Deutscher Osten , Berlin 1938 (National Socialist Propaganda Organization)
  • Migration movements of the Jewish people . Kurt Vowinckel Verlag , Heidelberg 1940.
  • The economic structure of the General Government . Institute for German Ostarbeit , Krakow 1941
  • The meaning of Judaism in Southeast Europe . German Information Center, Berlin 1941.
  • Judaism - Its Role and Significance in the Past and Present . Deutscher Volksverlag GmbH / Munich 15, print: NS-Gauverlag and print shop Tirol-Vorarlberg, 1942.
  • Population and economic problems of a European total solution to the Jewish question . Hoheneichen-Verlag , Munich 1943. (Nazi propaganda publishing house )
  • with Reinhart Maurach and Gerhart Wolfrum: Ostwärts der Oder and Neisse , Wissenschaftliche Verlagsanstalt, Hannover 1949.
  • The cooperative system in Eastern Europe . Raiffeisdruckerei, Neuwied 1951.
  • East Germany and today's Poland . Westermann, Braunschweig 1953.
  • Industrial combine Upper Silesia . Rudolf Müller publishing house, Cologne 1953.
  • Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Albert Hesse: General and applied economics . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1955.
  • The displaced persons in the Soviet occupation zone . Published by the Federal Ministry for All-German Issues , Bonn 1955.
  • with Bergrat (Asesor górniczy) Kurt Seidl, engineer Karl Tänzer: Germany's lost coal and steel industry . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1955.
  • German economic and social history . Gabler Publishing House, Wiesbaden 1962.
  • In-service training in administration and business , administration and Business Academy Industrial District, Bochum 1965.

Magazine:

literature

  • Hans-Christian Petersen: Population Economics - Ostforschung - Politics. A biographical study of Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902–1979). (= Individual publications of the German Historical Institute Warsaw , 17) Osnabrück 2006, ISBN 3-938400-18-8 . ( Full text online ), plus a review by Corinna Unger at H-Soz-u-Kult .
  • Alan E. Steinweis : The pathologization of the Jews - The case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim. Main focus: »Research on Jews« - Between Science and Ideology. In: Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute. Vol. 5, V&R, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36932-8 . Pp. 313-327.
  • Hans Christian Petersen: Seraphim, Peter-Heinz , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/2, 2009, p. 763f.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Alan E. Steinweis : The pathologization of the Jews - The case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim. Main focus: »Research on Jews« - Between Science and Ideology. In: Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute. Vol. 5, V&R, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36932-8 . P. 316 ff.
  2. ^ Frankfurter Zeitung of April 30, 1939; Götz Aly in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1993/4 http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1993_4.pdf
  3. ↑ As a document VEJ reprinted in 3/171: The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (source book) Volume 3: Empire and Protectorate September 1939 - September 1941 (Edit by Andrea Loew.), Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58524-7 , pp. 438-447.
  4. ↑ See Gerd Simon about the ERR, under date 1944-01-29
  5. ^ Hans-Christian Petersen: Population economics - Ostforschung - politics. A biographical study of Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902–1979). Osnabrück 2006.
  6. ↑ Klemens Grube: The Szczecin Oder-Danube Institute in the field of tension between economic interest, science and war . In: Dirk Alvermann (ed.): “… Drop the last barriers” . Studies at the University of Greifswald under National Socialism. Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2015. ISBN 978-3-412-22398-4 , pp. 202–223.
  7. ↑ Thomas Wolf: The emergence of the BND. Construction, financing, control . Ed .: Jost Dülffer et al. (=  Publications of the Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 . Volume 9 ). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-022-3 , pp. 65 ff .
  8. ↑ Uwe Ritzer, Willi Winkler: hunter, collector, bird friend. Glimpse into the shadowy realm of the notorious BND boss Reinhard Gehlen. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. December 2, 2017, accessed February 27, 2020 .
  9. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-s.html
  10. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1947-nslit-s.html
  11. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-s.html
personal data
SURNAME Seraphim, Peter-Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist and Eastern expert on National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1979
Place of death Rosenheim