Rudolf Hippius

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Rudolf Werner Georg Hippius (born June 9, 1905 in Schadriza, Pskow governorate , today: Schadrizy ( Russian Жадрицы ), Pskow Oblast ; † October 23, 1945 in Prague ) was a Baltic German psychologist . His methodologically innovative work on “ Völkerpsychologie ” is part of National Socialist race research and served to shape the National Socialist “Germanization policy” in Poland and Czechoslovakia .

Life

School, studies, career entry

Rudolf Hippius was the son of the chief forester and landowner Georg Hippius. After attending a reformed school in Saint Petersburg , he switched to the cathedral school at Reval in 1919 . After graduating from high school, he began studying theology at the University of Vienna in 1924 , which he broke off in the same year to study philosophy at the University of Dorpat . In 1929 he submitted his master's thesis and then worked for two years as a research fellow of the German Research Foundation and then for two more years as an assistant at the Psychological Institute of the University of Leipzig with Felix Krueger. He finally received his doctorate in Dorpat in 1934.

Since August 1933 he was married to Maria-Theresia , née Winterer, who later became Countess Dürckheim (1909–2003). He met his wife, a doctor of psychology, at the Leipzig Institute for Psychology.

time of the nationalsocialism

Return to Estonia

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he joined the Nazi teachers' association in 1934 and became a training director in this Nazi organization.

Hippius returned to Estonia in 1934 and obtained his doctorate in the same year at the University of Dorpat. phil. He then worked at the Institute for Scientific Local Research at the University of Dorpat and was the representative of the German Cultural Administration for teacher training and aptitude tests. Here he carried out an occupational psychological examination at German schools.

The German nationalist Hippius, member of the German-Baltic Party in Estonia since 1924 , became involved in Estonia's National Socialist renewal movement from 1934 onwards . He became deputy country leader of the People's German Association and in 1939 President of the German People's Federation Dorpat . In the course of the resettlement of the Baltic Germans in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact , he became deputy resettlement manager for the city and district of Dorpat.

Lecturer in Poznan

At the end of 1939, Hippius Konrad Meyer was able to present a memorandum on population planning in the Warthegau , which also reached Heinrich Himmler's office and caught the attention of Hans Joachim Beyer . The Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS approved funding and in 1940 he became a lecturer in psychology and philosophy as well as acting head of the seminar for psychology and pedagogy at what was later to be known as the University of Posen . In 1940 he was also assigned to the General Command XXI in Posen as a war administrator and psychologist in the Army of the Wehrmacht , where he carried out the DFG project "Warthegau as a settlement area". In this study, carried out from October 1940 to April 1941, the willingness of 4,700 Wehrmacht soldiers stationed there to settle was queried, but only 20% of them were willing to settle in the Wartheland .

As a lecturer in Poznan, Hippius headed the “suitability research” working group at the Reichsstiftung für Deutschen Ostforschung (Reich Foundation for German East Research) and carried out “aptitude psychological and characterological evaluations” on children of German-Polish marriages in Posen and Litzmannstadt . It was a kind of aptitude test for the "half-breeds" for the German People's List , which was in the context of Hans Joachim Beyer's population research and on which Hippius' wife Maria and the later Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz also worked. In contrast to earlier “mixed race studies” such as those of the anthropologist Eugen Fischer , Hippius applied modern aptitude and association tests . The head of the German People's List, SS leader Herbert Strickner , praised the usefulness of the research by Hippius and Beyers in compiling the People's List, as they had proven that language, religion and attitudes were also "racially" determined and as indicators of classification Could be used.

Hippius published his research results in 1943 in the collective work Volkstum, Gesinnung und Character . He came to the conclusion that the increasing “ethnic-racial mixture” was reducing the substance of character and characterized the Polish character traits as a counter-type in the sense of Erich Jaensch . “It therefore seems generally justified,” said Hippius, “in questions of ethnicity (as well as in questions of race) to form groups and draw boundaries according to the absolute size of the ethnic blood portion." For the first time, clear evidence is provided that the blood-like mixture of peoples unites brings about a regular change in character hereditary values ​​that can be grasped in every detail. ”This makes him one of the masterminds and creators of the National Socialist“ Germanization policy ”in occupied Poland.

The central element of his scientific approach was "the idea of ​​being able to transfer basic psychological structures from the individual to entire ethnic groups in order to arrive at a new kind of 'ethnic psychology'". In Poznan, Hippius advocated a reform of the training of psychologists, as he wanted to expand the content in addition to the fields of professional and educational counseling to include the "training of counselors in the structure of racial care". The background of his considerations was the “consolidation of the German nationality” and the “treatment of foreign nationalities”; the training content should u. a. In addition to “racial and psychological studies” also include “ethnic psychology” and “methods of ethnic group analysis”.

A request for recognition of the habilitation, which Hippius made to the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education immediately after taking office in Poznan , was initially not complied with. a. because his dissertation had already been published in Munich and was not recognized as a habilitation achievement by the University of Leipzig . Hippius therefore only obtained official status in 1942.

University professor in Prague

After Hans Joachim Beyer's chair for “folk teaching including border and foreign Germanism” had been transferred to the German Charles University in Prague in 1942 under the influence of Reinhard Heydrich , Hippius was also given a chair for social and ethnic psychology in Prague at the end of 1942. Together they headed the “Institute for European Ethnology and Ethnic Psychology” of the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation . From 1943 the later educational scientist Hans Mieskes worked for Hippius. In the concept of the foundation, psychology was supposed to penetrate “the spiritual structure of these people”, to research their attitudes, influenceability and ideological ties. For his investigations, Hippius received extensive spatial and personnel equipment in Prague, including a. He examined Czech applicants for their racial suitability for study at German universities and Czech citizens in Prague.

Hippius also devoted himself to "Bolshevism research". His institute published “Volkswissenschaftliche Feldpostbriefe” for students at the front and for officers of the Waffen SS . He personally gave many lectures to members of the Wehrmacht or to Junkers of the Waffen SS on the psychology of the peoples of the Soviet Union. In September 1944 he set up a working group with Lothar Stengel-von Rutkowski to “research the Bolshevik threat to the world”, and most recently in March 1945 he submitted an expertise to the SS headquarters on “Psychological documents on the question of population control in Ukraine”. At this time he worked with Beyer and other Prague colleagues such as Karl Thums and Stengel-von Rutkowski for a reorientation of the National Socialist Ostpolitik. They propagated a “European civil war” as a defensive struggle against Bolshevism and Americanism. In order to motivate the conquered peoples for a common struggle under German leadership, the Nordic idea of masters should be dropped and the interaction of the numerous special qualities of the European races emphasized.

At the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories , Hippius represented the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation at the Central Research Center for Eastern Research as head of the section for ethnic psychology.

Hippius, who achieved the rank of Obersturmführer in the SA , was only accepted into the NSDAP in 1944 after the application was made in 1942 . Hippius was also a member of the Federation of German East (BDO). Although he worked closely with the SS, nothing is known about membership in the SS.

After the Prague uprising in May 1945 and the subsequent invasion of the city by the Red Army , Hippius became a prisoner of war . He died in October 1945 in a Soviet internment camp .

Critical appraisal

When the news of death became known in Germany in 1959, the psychologist Johannes Rudert , who still knew Hippius from Leipzig , regretted this: “A researcher of stature was lost to German psychology before he had fully developed his abundant possibilities. “The historian Roland Gehrke, on the other hand, judged Hippius' Posen study:“ The work, which is heavily interspersed with pseudoscientific vocabulary (cf. the adventurous word creation 'Völkischer Resonanzraum') and which to today's reader inevitably seems bizarre, is a particularly blatant example of what can hardly be surpassed In the Third Reich, nonsense was fabricated in the name of science. ”Egbert Klautke, on the other hand, attests to Hippius'“ Völkerpsychologie ”, that it was based on modern experimental psychological test procedures.

Fonts (selection)

  • Cognitive touch as perception and as a cognitive process , CH Beck, Munich 1934. Also published in: New Psychological Studies. Vol. 10, H. 5 University publication. Also: PhD thesis at the University of Dorpat
  • About community , Dorpat 1935. From: Dt. Newspaper. 1935, No. 28. 34. 40 and 46
  • The resettler group from Estonia: Your social, spirit. u. soul. Structure , Kluge & Ströhm, Posen 1940 (with P. Armsen; JG Feldmann)
  • Willingness to settle in the East , Hist. Ges. Im Wartheland, Posen and Hirzel, Leipzig, 1942 (with JG Feldmann)
  • Power and Limits of the Model , Kluge & Ströhm, Posen 1943. From: Lectures and essays // Reichsuniversität Posen; H. 5.
  • Ethnicity, ethos and character: report on psychol. Investigations on Posen German-Polish Half-breeds u. Poland , Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1943, from: Publications of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Ostsiedlung.
  • The timeless face of Europe , Kohlhammer, Prague 1944

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Full name and dates of life according to the Baltic Biographical Lexicon . In the subject-related literature, the birthday is sometimes given as June 10th. B. in Ernst Klee's personal dictionary on the Third Reich
  2. ↑ a b c Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Rudolf Hippius. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital
  3. ^ A b c Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin 2006, p. 402
  4. ↑ On the 100th birthday of Maria Hippius - Countess Dürckheim 1909 - 2009 on www.duerckheim-ruette.de/
  5. ^ Pieter Loomans: Hippius, Maria-Theresie [Countess Dürckheim] In: Gerhard Stumm et al. (Ed.): Personal dictionary of psychotherapy. Springer, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-211-83818-X , p. 216 f.
  6. ^ A b c d Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin 2006, p. 249.
  7. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 258.
  8. ↑ Michael Garleff , Karl-Ernst von Baer-Stiftung, Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Baltic German, Weimar Republic and Third Reich , Volume 1 of The Baltic States in Past and Present , Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2007, p. 406f.
  9. ^ A b c Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin 2006, p. 250.
  10. ↑ a b c Egbert Klautke: German "Race Psychology" and its Implementations in Central Europe. Egon von Eickstedt and Rudolf Hippius. In: M. Turda, M and P. Weindling (Eds.): 'Blood and Homeland'. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940. Central European University Press, Budapest 2007, pp. 23-40. PDF
  11. ↑ Michael Garleff, Karl-Ernst von Baer-Stiftung, Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Baltic German, Weimar Republic and Third Reich , Volume 1 of The Baltic States in Past and Present , 2007, p. 406.
  12. ^ Helmut Wilhelm Schaller: The "Reichsuniversität Posen" 1941−1945 , Peter Lang GmbH - Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 102.
  13. ^ Völkisches Handbuch Südosteuropa (PDF; 760 kB), p. 61.
  14. ↑ Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin 2006, p. 250f.
  15. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation in Prague (1942–1945) , Dresden 2000, pp. 94–97.
  16. ↑ Detlef Brandes : "Umvolkung, Umsiedlung, racial inventory": Nazi "Volkstumsppolitik" in the Bohemian countries . Oldenbourg, Munich, 2012 ISBN 978-3-486-71242-1 , pp. 232ff
  17. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation in Prague (1942–1945) , Dresden 2000, p. 62f.
  18. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation in Prague (1942–1945) , Dresden 2000, p. 61
  19. ↑ Michael Garleff, Karl Ernst von Baer Foundation, Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Baltic German, Weimar Republic and Third Reich , Volume 1 of The Baltic States in Past and Present , 2007, p. 412.
  20. ^ Johannes Rudert, obituary for Rudolf Hippius . In: Psychologische Rundschau 10 (1959): p. 73.
  21. ↑ Gehrke, Deutschbalten , pp. 406f.
personal data
SURNAME Hippius, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hippius, Rudolf Werner Georg (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Shadritsa, Pskov Governorate
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 1945
Place of death Prague