Universities in Nazi Germany

This article discusses universities in Nazi Germany. In May 1933 books from university libraries which were deemed culturally destructive, mainly due to anti-National Socialist or Jewish themes or authors, were burned by the Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Student Union) in town squares, e.g. in Berlin, and the curricula were subsequently modified. Martin Heidegger became the rector (and later head) of Freiburg University, where he delivered a number of National Socialist speeches and for example promulgated the Führerprinzip at the University on August 21, 1933.

Public burning of un-German writings and books on Opernplatz in Berlin. Students and National Socialists at the Unter den Linden cremation site.

Well-known expelled professors

• Albert Einstein
• Max Born
• Fritz Haber
• Otto Fritz Meyerhof
• Theodor W. Adorno
• Martin Buber
• Ernst Bloch
• Max Horkheimer
• Ernst Cassirer
• Herbert Marcuse
• Louis Hamilton, 1879-1948 (not Louis Kemppel Hamilton, 1890–1957)

Austrian universities

The University of Vienna participated in National Socialism. Eduard Pernkopf (rector 1943–1945) compiled a "Topographical Anatomy of the Human Species". Hans Sedlmayr, a declared National Socialist, led an art institute throughout the war.

Germanized universities

The first Reichsuniversität started to work in Prague, November 4, 1939.

The University of Poznań was closed by the German Occupation in 1939, and reopened 1941 as "Reichsuniversität Posen", a "Grenzlanduniversität" aligned with the German occupation forces' ideology. Its faculty included SS-Hauptsturmführer Reinhard Wittram and SS-Untersturmführer Ernst Petersen, who was a professor of the Department of Prehistory for one year, and anatomist Hermann Voss. It ceased operations in 1944.

The University of Strasbourg was transferred to Clermont-Ferrand in 1939 and Reichsuniversität Straßburg existed 1941–1944. As Dean of the Medical School, August Hirt constituted, National Socialist politics, anatomical institutions, and anatomists.

See also

• German Student Union
• National Socialist German Lecturers League
• National Socialist German Students' League
• Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State

Sources

• John Connelly; Michael Grüttner, eds. (2005). Universities under dictatorship. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271026954.
• When books burn (web exhibit). University of Arizona Library. 2006. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
• Historiker im Nationalsozialismus... by Ingo Haar
• Wechsler, Patrick (1991). La Faculté de Medecine de la „Reichsuniversität Straßburg“ (1941-1945) à l’heure nationale-socialiste (in French), dissertation, University of Freiburg. Published online, 2005. Retrieved 2019-05-07. urn:nbn:de:bsz:25-freidok-18966
• Louis Hamilton, A British Scholar in Nazi Germany, 1933–1938, in Nigel Copsey (ed.), Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2016.
• Hentschel, Klaus (ed. 1996) Physics and National Socialism. An Anthology of Primary Sources, Basel: Birkhäuser 1996. ISBN 978-3-0348-0202-4
• Teresa Wróblewska: Die Reichsuniversitäten Posen, Prag und Strassburg als Modelle nationalsozialistischer Hochschulen in den von Deutschland besetzten Gebieten, Marszalek, Toruń 2000. ISBN 83-7174-674-1
• “Louis Hamilton, a British academic and Canada specialist in Germany”, in William Keel (ed.), Yearbook of German-American Studies, 2008.