Imperial University of Poznan

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Imperial University of Poznan

The University of Posen was founded during the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945 on April 27, 1941 by the German Reich . As a “borderland university”, it served the National Socialist ideology.

history

After the attack on Poland , the German Reich annexed the former provincial capital Poznan with the Wartheland , which had belonged to Polish territory since 1919 . The re-establishment in 1941 under the rector and agricultural scientist Peter Carstens used the infrastructure of the Polish Uniwersytet Poznański (University of Posen), which was established in 1919/20 after Poland became the largest part of the former Prussian province of Posen after the First World Warwas slammed. The Poznan University was able to continue its teaching operations underground after the dissolution. Carstens was drafted in 1942 and handed over the rector's business to the geographer Walter Geisler . After his resignation in 1944, business economist Otto Hummel took over the rectorate in April . Numerous university professors from the Herder Institute in Riga , who had been expelled by the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, were accepted into the teaching staff .

The University of Posen oscillated between propagandistic staging of power and practice-related everyday science during the war. Even if it remained a front-facing university, the National Socialists initially staged it as a NS model university and so-called “leadership school of the German East”. In the Faculty of Agriculture, concepts for settlement and agricultural policy were developed. Furthermore, faculties for philosophy and natural sciences as well as medicine were established, later law, political and economic sciences were added. The supported fields of work included agriculture, natural sciences and, towards the end of the war, especially defense research, in close cooperation with the Poznan Reich Foundation for German East Research . The Faculty of Philosophy, led by Dean Reinhard Wittram , was given the task of legitimizing the claimed superiority of German culture in East Central and Eastern Europe.

Under the war conditions, the development of the university made slow progress. The main building went back to the Prussian Royal Academy , which existed between 1903 and 1919. The former Kaiser Wilhelm library served as the university library . The central institute for cancer research founded in 1942 in Nesselstedt (Polish: Pokrzywno) near Posen was assigned to the university . a. also engaged in the development of biological weapons .

The University of Posen dissolved at the end of the war in 1945.

A number of professors continued their academic careers in West Germany in the post-war period , including the historians Reinhard Wittram , Werner Conze , Herbert Ludat , the Turkologist Gerhard von Mende and the physiologist Manfred Monjé .

Known teachers

Well-known students

  • Jens Rohwer (1914–1994), music teacher, composer, musicologist and author

literature

  • Błażej Białkowski: utopia of a better tyranny. German historian at the University of Poznan (1941-1945) . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2011 ISBN 978-3-506-77167-4
  • Helmut Wilhelm Schaller : The Imperial University of Poznan. 1941-1945 , Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2010 ISBN 978-3631576434
  • Teresa Wróblewska: The imperial universities of Poznan, Prague and Strasbourg as models of National Socialist universities in the areas occupied by Germany . Marszalek, Toruń 2000, ISBN 83-7174-674-1
  • Teresa Wróblewska: The role and tasks of a National Socialist university in the so-called Eastern Reich areas using the example of the Reich University of Posen 1941–1945 , Pädagogische Rundschau , No. 3, 1978, pp. 173–189
  • Ingo Loose: Berlin scientist in the "Osteinsatz" 1939–1945. Academic mobility between Berlin University and the University of Posen. In: Christoph Jahr (ed.): The Berlin University in the Nazi era. Vol. 1: Structures and people. Stuttgart 2005, pp. 49-70

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Irena Mamczak-Gadkowska: acts of the State University of Poznan in the archives of the Adam Mickiewicz University. Biuletyn Polskiej Misji Historycznej / Bulletin of the Polish Historical Mission, No. 6/2011, pp. 168–184. [1]
  2. ↑ Błażej Białkowski: The University of Poznan as a parade example of the “policy of enrichment” of the Ministry for Science, Education and National Education , in: Baechler, Ch .; Igersheim, F .; Racine, P. (eds.): Les Reichsuniversitäten de Strasbourg et de Poznan , Strasbourg 2005, pp. 47-65.
  3. ↑ Błażej Białkowski: Reichsuniversität Posen , in: Ingo Haar , Michael Fahlbusch Ed .: Handbook of national science. People - Institutions - Research Programs - Foundations , Munich 2008, pp. 569–578.
  4. ↑ Błażej Białkowski: Reich Foundation for German East Research in Posen , in: Haar, Fahlbusch Ed .: Handbook of National Science. People - Institutions - Research Programs - Foundations , Munich 2008, pp. 556–562.