Wilhelm Kraiker

Wilhelm Kraiker (born August 4, 1899 in Frankfurt am Main , † April 24, 1987 in Rome ) was a German classical archaeologist .

In 1927 Kraiker received his doctorate in Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius , in 1928/29 he received a travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute , then he was an assistant at the University of Heidelberg and at the German Archaeological Institute in Athens and Rome; on July 12, 1937, he received his habilitation in Heidelberg. From June 1941 to September 1944 Kraiker was active in Athens during the German occupation in World War II for the newly established art protection department , which was subordinate to the Army High Command, Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner , from July 1942 onwards. This art protection department, together with the German Archaeological Institute Athens and the Foreign Office, succeeded in driving Reichsleiter Rosenberg's task force from Greece. In 1943 Kraiker was appointed adjunct professor at the University of Innsbruck . Since May 1, 1948 Kraiker has been the professor for Classical Archeology at the University of Kiel . On January 1, 1949, he was appointed full professor and director of the Kiel Collection of Antiquities . In 1968 he retired.

Kraiker's best-known work is the study of Greece written with Ernst Kirsten (1st edition 1955), which emerged from guide sheets of the German art protection for soldiers during the Second World War. The work was completely revised and reissued in 1962.

literature

• Julia Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen: German Archaeological Enterprises in Occupied Greece 1941–1944. In: Athenian communications. 110, 1995, pp. 465-466.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Kraiker in the catalog of the German National Library