Werner Maser

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Werner Maser (born July 12, 1922 in Paradeningken , Insterburg district , East Prussia ; † April 5, 2007 in Speyer ) was a German historical revisionist historian , journalist and university professor .

Family and education

After graduating from the secondary school Konigsberg son served an East Prussian farmer and horse breeder as an infantry officer in World War II and after the war in the Soviet special camp Sachsenhausen interned. He studied theology , philosophy , political science , education and German in Berlin , Munich and Erlangen . In 1951 he passed the state examination in Berlin. From 1950 Maser worked as a research assistant to Ernst Niekisch at the Humboldt University in East Berlin . There he was in 1954 with the work the organization of the leaders legend Dr. phil. PhD .

Maser last lived with his second wife Ingrid in Speyer, where he died on April 5, 2007. The couple had three children.

Professional Activities

1955 to 1957 Maser worked as a lexicon editor in Frankfurt am Main , from 1957 to 1960 as magazine editor in Bochum , Leverkusen and Mannheim . He later became a lecturer at the Munich School of Politics , where he taught history and international law until 1975 . He has also held visiting professorships in the United States , Japan and Finland . From 1991 until his retirement in 1993 he took over the representation of the chair for modern history at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg .

Historian during the Nazi era

Maser dedicated his work as a historian above all to the time of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler . He wrote:

“When Hitler jovially advised me, the almost fourteen-year-old student, on March 18, 1936, to give me some thought about whether I really wanted to write about history - and above all about him - which I explained to him with reverent stammering had, it wasn't so absolutely certain. "

Document finds

In 1951, Maser received access to the main archive of the NSDAP and was the first West German historian to evaluate it. He found and received other documents on Hitler, including the medical reports of his doctors, which had been lost until then. He used these finds for his dissertation (1954), for his early history of the NSDAP (1965) and his annotated edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf (1966).

Some relatives of Hitler put Maser as "estate administrator" for his inheritance. In 1981 he told the magazine Der Stern that there was no evidence that Hitler had ever kept a diary. He contractually transferred all rights to the publication of Hitler's documents that Heidemann owned to Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann for DM 20,000  . Konrad Kujau adopted Maser's theses that Jean Loret was an illegitimate son of Hitler and that Hitler had composed an opera in 1981 in the Hitler diaries forged by him . After the star had published the diaries in 1983, Maser stated that they had been offered them to him as early as 1976, but that he immediately recognized them as a forgery from the GDR and rejected them.

Works on Adolf Hitler

Maser's book Adolf Hitler: Legende - Mythos - Reality (1971) had 18 editions by 2001, was translated into 22 languages ​​and is therefore considered to be his most successful work. In it, Maser turned against "the formation of legends" about Hitler and his portrayal as a psychopath (see Adolf Hitler's psychopathography ). He claimed that the French railroad worker Jean Loret was a biological son of Hitler, whom Hitler had fathered during his reporting period in the First World War. This was initially widely discussed as a sensation, but was then rejected by most specialist historians.

Some historians have criticized Maser's approach to focusing on minor "legends" as a deliberate or unintentional revival of the Führer myth . The cultural scientist Matthias N. Lorenz described the book as a “very confused” biography of an “amateur historian”. Maser hardly mentioned the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes. Emil Fackenheim accused him of dealing with marginal details of National Socialism and the Holocaust in order to mitigate or even avoid the “horror of the whole thing”.

With his book Hitler. At the end of the Führer legend of 1980, Maser claimed to remedy a deficiency in previous Hitler research : she paid too little attention to the "investigation and analysis of his mentality, decisions and decisions and to initiate leadership and government measures". Maser also took a new thesis in relation to his biography of Hitler: Hitler's policy was determined by his serious “reluctance to make decisions and make decisions”. That requires a completely new image of Hitler in research.

Maser's late work, Falsification, Poetry and Truth about Hitler and Stalin , met with rejection from specialist historians. Siegfried Schwarz criticized it as "a hodgepodge of numerous, incoherent individual considerations of details and episodes in Hitler's life ... almost all of which do not concern the core of the Nazi policy of violence and its fatal consequences for Germany and Europe". He accused him of a grotesque "distortion of the weights of the essential and the insignificant", a "relativization of Nazi crimes" against the state of research and the "concealment of the criminal nature of Hitler's rule": Maser had dealt with Hitler's health problems "in a lengthy way", but kept silent that Hitler systematically prepared and triggered the Second World War. Instead, Maser presented the British air raids on the Ruhr area (May 1940) as the beginning of a planned extermination campaign, denied Hitler's responsibility for the murders in the alleged Röhm Putsch , relativized the German concentration camps as a British invention, presented the German attack on the Soviet Union as a preventive war and explains in detail "excessive exaggerations of enemy propaganda ... about Auschwitz and the Birkenau concentration camp that was built later " without addressing Hitler's policy of extermination of European Jews.

About the Nuremberg Trial

In the book Nuremberg. The Tribunal der Sieger (1977) described Maser the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals of the Nazi regime as illegal “ victors ' justice ” of the Allies, referred to their war crimes and equated them with Nazi crimes such as the Holocaust. The victorious powers had concealed their own crimes or downsized them in order to be able to demand more reparations from the Federal Republic.

According to the magazine Der Spiegel (1977), Maser described the Nuremberg Trial from the point of view of the accused. However, he described the chaotic preparation of the process correctly and, with new documents found, uncovered a procedural trick of the Western Allies: In 1944, the latter had softened military penal laws on refusal of orders in their own armies in order to invalidate the expected German defense with the lack of orders in advance.

Some information in Maser's book turned out to be incorrect: Albert Speer had concluded a "secret agreement" with the American chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal Justice, Robert H. Jackson ; his documents proved that. Research with Albert Speer and Jackson's son did not reveal any documents to support Maser's claim. Eugene Davidson proved to Maser that Joseph Stalin himself had ordered the Katyn massacre and that camp commanders subordinate to him did not misinterpret his order when they turned the prisoners over to their camps to be murdered. Maser also misrepresented Joachim von Ribbentrop's role.

In the new edition of 2005, Maser reiterated the main theses of the book, including in a detailed interview with the National-Zeitung . The work now only found approval in the right-wing extremist spectrum.

Preventive war thesis

In his book Der Wortbruch (1994) Maser dealt with the relations between Germany and the Soviet Union from August 1939 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (" Operation Barbarossa "). He claimed: Despite an expected future clash of their states and ideologies, Hitler sought an understanding with Stalin before and after the attack on Poland in 1939. The latter, on the other hand, had already planned a war against Germany as a step towards world domination. Hitler had come to terms with Stalin with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939, but his foreign minister, Molotov , challenged Hitler to war with unacceptable demands. The Great Terror (1937–1939) and the Finnish War (1940) did not weaken the Red Army significantly. Because Winston Churchill rejected Hitler's demand for disarmament in the summer of 1940, the latter had to fear the Soviet urge to expand. Stalin's planned attack had hit Hitler just in time on June 22, 1941. Statements by Soviet prisoners of war documented his intention to attack. Only in the course of the war did the racial ideology develop and have a murderous effect.

Rolf-Dieter Müller ruled this in 1994: Maser was leading a “rampage against 40 years of hard work by specialists” without any evidence or new documents, ignoring the results of the last 30 years, vehemently contradicting the recognized Hitler research by Andreas Hillgruber , withholding or devaluing newer literature . Instead, he tries to substantiate his "adventurous theses" with long, uncommented Hitler quotes and outdated reference works from the 1950s: "Hitler's former lieutenant tries to avenge the dictator."

Maser's book is a typical example of the historical revisionist preventive war thesis , which until 1997 was refuted again by historical research and international research exchange.

Relationship to Nazi research

Maser's relationship to Nazi research was ambivalent. He worked mostly as a freelance writer without an academic position; his late professorship was controversial. He claimed to represent the Nazi story against "pseudo historians and charlatans" as it "actually was" ( Leopold Ranke ). By Joachim Fest and his pupil Guido Knopp he distanced himself from and criticized repeatedly due to lack of or incorrect references. With secret sources only accessible to him, he temporarily had a knowledge advantage and was able to prove, for example, that Eberhard Jäckel had taken over falsified sources.

Maser's archival work, knowledge of sources and secondary literature, contacts with contemporary witnesses and experts, and research methods met historical standards in his early works, so that his document finds with previously unknown details about Nazi history were recognized as research stimuli. Martin Nissen, for example, saw Maser far superior to many specialist historians in the stringing together of facts.

However, many specialist historians criticized his handling of these facts: Karl Dietrich Bracher , Robert GL Waite and Siegfried Schwarz accused him of collecting incoherent details from other works in his books during the Nazi era, juxtaposing the essentials and the inessentials in a distorting manner do not distinguish.

Maser's publications during the Nazi era, like those of other “outsiders”, were initially rated as “lateral thinking, but productive” contributions to contemporary history and to a popular scientific “Hitler wave”. However, since 1977 Maser was classified as a history revisionist : especially because of his works "Nuremberg: Tribunal der Sieger" (1977), "Der Wortbruch" (1994) and "Falsification, Poetry and Truth about Hitler and Stalin" (2004). His overall theses on Hitler and National Socialism were rejected by Nazi research.

biographer

In addition to his biography on Hitler, Maser also wrote biographies on Friedrich Ebert , Paul von Hindenburg , Heinrich George , Hermann Göring and Helmut Kohl . During his reign as Federal Chancellor (1982-1998), Maser was considered "a kind of court historiographer of the Bonn Republic". His biography of Kohl was criticized as an undifferentiated act of courtesy, based only on statements from Kohl's supporters himself. Heiner Geißler rejected Maser's portrayal of the Kohl critics in the CDU in a social democratic magazine and interpreted Kohl's last years as chancellor as “the party's self-humiliation”.

editor

In 1966 Maser published excerpts from Hitler's work Mein Kampf (1925/26) with comments on them . This first German-language edition was the most widespread edition of this work with ten editions up to 2002. Maser also published memoirs of high-ranking National Socialists and generals of the Nazi era.

From 2003 until his death in 2007, Maser tried to obtain the copyrights for Mein Kampf from the Free State of Bavaria in order to publish the work entirely under his direction. To this end, Maser cited the Jewish author C. C. Aronsfeld and the first German Federal President Theodor Heuss , who recommended that Maser publish Mein Kampf in 1959 with comments. He also wanted to persuade surviving family members of Hitler to fight for the copyrights for themselves again.

Works

author
  • The organization of the Führer legend: studies on the early history of the NSDAP up to 1924. 1954; New edition: The early history of the NSDAP. Hitler's way until 1924. Bonn 1965.
  • Comrades do not pray - church struggle of communism. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1963.
  • The storm on the republic. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1973, ISBN 3-421-01662-3 ; New edition: The storm on the republic. Early history of the NSDAP. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-34041-5 .
  • Germany, dream or trauma: no requiem. Droemer Knaur, 1984, ISBN 3-426-26145-6 .
  • Between the Empire and the Nazi Regime: The First German Republic 1918 to 1933. Bouvier, 1992, ISBN 3-412-02354-X .
  • Adolf Hitler: Legend - Myth - Reality. (Naumann & Göbel, Cologne 1971) Bechtle, 18th edition, Munich / Esslingen 2001, ISBN 3-7628-0521-0 .
  • Nuremberg. Tribunal of the victors. (Düsseldorf 1977) Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2005, ISBN 3-935063-37-7 .
  • Adolf Hitler. The end of the leader's legend. Moewig, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-8118-4325-7 .
  • In the beginning there was the stone: the history of the West, a race for natural resources. Droemer Knaur, 1984, ISBN 3-426-26127-8 .
  • Poor Schubert! Forgery and manipulation. Marginalia to Franz Schubert's Symphony from 1825. Goldoni, Stuttgart 1985.
  • The regime. Everyday life in Germany 1933–1945. Dietz, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01732-2 .
  • The broken word. Hitler, Stalin and the Second World War. Olzog Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-7892-8260-X .
  • The Third Empire. Bublies, 1997, ISBN 3-926584-43-2 .
  • Falsification, fiction and truth about Hitler and Stalin. Olzog Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7892-8134-4 .
  • The broken word. Hitler, Stalin and the Second World War. Pour le Mérite Verlag , Selent 2007, ISBN 978-3-932381-06-5 .
biographer
  • President Friedrich Ebert. Social Democrat and Patriot. A political biography. (1987) Druffel & Vowinckel, Inning am Ammersee 2007.
  • Helmut Kohl. Ullstein, 1990, ISBN 3-550-07401-8 .
  • Hindenburg. Moewig, 1990, ISBN 3-8118-1118-5 .
  • Heinrich George: Man made of earth: the political biography. Quintessenz Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-86124-351-2 .
  • Hermann Goering. Hitler's Janus-headed Paladin - The Political Biography. Edition q, Berlin 2000, ISBN 978-3-86124-509-4 .
editor
  • Paul Devrient : My student Hitler. Ludwig Verlag, 1975, ISBN 3-7787-1022-2
  • Heinz Linge: Until the end. As head of personal service with Hitler. Herbig, Munich 1980
  • Harald Poelchau: Pastor at the scaffold of the Nazis: the authentic report of the man who accompanied over 1000 victims of the Hitler regime on their way to the executioner. Pabel-Moewig Verlag, 1982, ISBN 3-8118-3155-0 .
  • Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf: Origin, structure, style, changes, sources, source value, annotated excerpts. Bechtle, 1966; New edition: Adolf Hitler. My fight. History. Extracts. Comments. Bechtle, Esslingen 2001, ISBN 3-7628-0409-5 .
  • Hitler's letters and notes. His worldview in handwritten documents. (Droste 1988) Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz 2002, ISBN 3-7020-0950-7 .
  • Wilhelm Keitel. My life - fulfillment of duty until the end. Hitler's General Field Marshal and Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht in personal testimonies. Quintessenz Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-86124-353-9 .

Web links

Adolf Hitler: Outline of my person. From previously unknown letters and notes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1973, p. 46-60 ( Online - Apr. 2, 1973 ).
1. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1973, p. 134-147 ( Online - Apr. 9, 1973 ).
2. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1973, p. 158-180 ( Online - Apr. 16, 1973 ).
3. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1973, p. 134-153 ( Online - Apr. 23, 1973 ).
4. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1973, p. 130-148 ( Online - Apr. 30, 1973 ).
5. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1973, p. 130-154 ( Online - May 7, 1973 ).
6. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1973, p. 126-142 ( Online - May 14, 1973 ).
7. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1973, p. 112-137 ( Online - May 21, 1973 ).
8. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1973, p. 110-130 ( Online - May 28, 1973 ).
9. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1973, p. 118-135 ( online - 4 June 1973 ).
10. Continuation and conclusion . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1973, pp. 102-124 ( Online - June 11, 1973 ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner K. Lahmann: Waiting without reunion Überlingen: BVT, 2001.
  2. ^ A b c d e Martin Nissen: Historical non-fiction books - historical reference books: The case of Werner Maser. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek: History Goes Pop: For the representation of history in popular media and genres. Transcript, 2009, ISBN 3-8376-1107-8 , p. 108
  3. ↑ a b Hitler researcher Werner Maser died . In: Die Welt , April 10, 2007.
  4. ↑ Werner Maser, Forgery, Poetry and Truth about Hitler and Stalin , Olzog 2004 ISBN 3-7892-8134-4 .
  5. ↑ Hitler 73: Greetings from your AH In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1973, p. 38-44 ( online ).
  6. ^ Martin Nissen: Historical non-fiction books - historical reference books: The Werner Maser case. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek: History Goes Pop: For the representation of history in popular media and genres. 2009, p. 110 .
  7. ↑ Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff: Plump? - That offended me. Konrad Kujau on his forged Hitler diaries . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1984, pp. 109-124 ( Online - Mar. 12, 1984 ).
  8. ↑ Günther Picker: The Kujau case: Chronicle of a forgery scandal. Ullstein, 1992, ISBN 3-548-34993-5 , pp. 73 ff.
  9. ^ Werner Maser: Adolf Hitler . Bechtle, 1971, p. 13.
  10. ↑ Werner Maser: Adolf Hitler , Bechtle, 1971, pp. 622–624; Werner Maser: Adolf Hitler: father of a son . In: Zeitgeschichte , 5, 1977–1978, pp. 173–202; Werner Maser: Hitler Research in Detail. The case of Jean Loret. In: Guido Knopp (ed.): Hitler today: Conversations about a German trauma. Pattloch, 1979, ISBN 3-557-60009-2 , pp. 110-124.
  11. ↑ Example: Hitler: Love in Flanders . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1977, pp. 127-134 ( Online - Nov. 7, 1977 ).
  12. ^ Anton Joachimsthaler : Correction of a biography. Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920. Munich 1989, p. 162 ff .; Ian Kershaw : Hitler, 1889-1936. 4th edition, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998, ISBN 3-7632-4881-1 , fn. 116 to chapter 3.
  13. ↑ Hans W. Gatzke in: The American Historical Review , Volume 79, No. 4 (Oct. 1974), pp. 1205 f.
  14. ↑ Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz (Ed.): Lexicon of "Coping with the Past" in Germany. Debate and discourse history of National Socialism after 1945. Bielefeld 2007, p. 221.
  15. ^ Emil L. Fackenheim: The Nazi Holocaust as a Persistent Trauma for the Non-Jewish Mind . In: Journal of the History of Ideas , Volume 36, No. 2 (Apr-Jun. 1975), pp. 369-376.
  16. ↑ Martin Nissen: "We, the Historians and Biographers": On the genre poetics of the historical non-fiction book (1945–2000) (PDF, 53 kB). In: Andy Hahnemann and David Oels (eds.): Non-fiction and popular knowledge in the 20th century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 2008, pp. 39-50, here p. 48.
  17. ^ Siegfried Schwarz: Review of: Maser, Werner: Forgery, poetry and truth about Hitler and Stalin . Munich 2004 , H-Soz-u-Kult, July 10, 2004.
  18. ^ Martin Nissen: Historical non-fiction books - historical reference books: The case of Werner Maser. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek: History Goes Pop: For the representation of history in popular media and genres. 2009, p. 114f.
  19. ↑ Nuremberg Trial: Dispute among the judges . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1977, pp. 90-100 ( Online - Mar. 7, 1977 ).
  20. ↑ Gitta Sereny : Albert Speer. His Battle with Truth. Picador, London 1995, ISBN 0-330-34697-0 , p. 583.
  21. ^ Eugene Davidson in The Review of Politics Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan., 1980), p. 109.
  22. ^ National-Zeitung, October 13, 2006: Bad Germans, good winners? Exclusive interview with Professor Dr. Maser ( Memento from November 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  23. ^ Martin Nissen: Historical non-fiction books - historical reference books: The Werner Maser case. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek: History Goes Pop: For the representation of history in popular media and genres. 2009, p. 115
  24. ↑ Rolf-Dieter Müller: Political Book: Hitler - Also Just a Victim? In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1994, pp. 40-42 ( online ).
  25. ↑ Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauss: Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Franz Steiner, 2002, ISBN 3-515-08253-0 , p. 208
  26. ^ Martin Nissen: Historical non-fiction books - historical reference books: The Werner Maser case. In: Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek: History Goes Pop: For the representation of history in popular media and genres. 2009, pp. 111-114
  27. ^ Dieter Buhl : History as a favor . In: Die Zeit , No. 50/1990.
  28. ^ Neue Gesellschaft - Frankfurter Hefte 04/00: Interview with Heiner Geißler; cited u. a. from Michael Schlieben: Political leadership in the opposition: The CDU after its loss of power in 1998. With an introduction to the history of the party by Franz Walter. Vs Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-15454-1 , p. 51, book excerpt.
  29. ↑ Werner Maser: " Hitler's Money and His Heirs ", in: Ostpreußenblatt , January 11, 2003.
  30. ↑ Torsten Hampel: What does Hitler's family inherit? In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 3, 2003.
personal data
SURNAME Maser, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Paradeningken , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2007
Place of death Speyer