Walter Kuhn
Walter Kuhn, was an Austrian-born German folklorist, historian and Ostforscher. Prior to World War II, Kuhn belonged to the German minority in Poland. His academic work specialized in German minorities outside Germany, particularly in the area of Ukraine, especially Volhynia. In 1936, Kuhn moved to Germany to take a professorship at the University of Breslau. In 1940, he joined the Nazi party. During the war, he was involved as an advisor in various Nazi plans of ethnic cleansing aimed at Jews, Poles and their replacement by German settlers from further east. Kuhn continued his academic work post-war in West Germany, becoming a professor at the University of Hamburg and a recognized expert in the German Ostsiedlung. He retired in 1968, moving to Salzburg, where he died in 1983. Kuhn's post-war work was internationally recognized, but received some criticism from Polish scholars in particular.
Although they were largely ignored or denied in the post-war period, Kuhn's close connections to National Socialism before and during World War II have come under increased scholarly scrutiny since the publication of Michael Burleigh's Germany Turns Eastward. Kuhn's pre-war work has been linked to anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, and the promotion of German superiority.
Early life and pre-war career
Kuhn was born in 1903 in the town of Bielitz in Austrian Silesia, in a German-speaking enclave surrounded by Polish speakers. Kuhn's parents belonged to the Away from Rome!-movement and were both supporters of the unification of Austria with Germany. As a boy, Kuhn distributed flowers to soldiers guarding against Polish youths who were celebrating the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which Michael Burleigh argues shows an early consciousness for national issues. After the First World War, this territory was annexed to Poland, confronting Kuhn with the issue of German enclaves in Slavic territory while still young, and Kuhn was, therefore, a Polish citizen in the interwar period. Kuhn met several later scholarly collaborators on matters of German minorities in Eastern Europe after joining the Wandervogel movement in Bielitz in 1919. While he initially studied electrical engineering in Graz till 1927, he later attended universities in Vienna and Tübingen.Kuhn began to involved with studying German settlement in Eastern Europe while he was still a student, including undertaking several trips to Poland and Ukraine and making several publications. In 1926 Kuhn went to Ukraine with several other members from the Wandervogel movement funded by various German agencies where he studied German communities and praised "the strength and beauty of German Volkstum". While the official purpose of the visit was to study German communities, Michael Burleigh writes that it served mostly to reinforce the participants' notions of German superiority towards Polish people. Kuhn wrote five of the eight essays about the expedition that were subsequently published in the journal Deutsche Blätter in Polen. Kuhn argued that more recent German enclaves in Eastern Europe, because they felt themselves to be superior to the surrounding Slavs, were less like to intermarry or become "de-Germanised", as opposed to older enclaves which were more prone to assimilation. Kuhn viewed himself and his colleagues as "bearers of civilization" and his goal as "to transform the instinctive feeling of superiority and pride towards the surrounding peoples into a true national consciousness". Unlike the formerly Prussian members of the expedition, Kuhn argued that the Volhynian Germans were true Germans and should be allowed to develop on their own under the guidance of more mature linguistic islands, which Winson Chu takes to mean Kuhn's own hometown of Bielitz/Bliesko. Kuhn also secretly worked for the organization Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland to verify the population numbers on the German minority in Poland given by the Polish government. Kuhn, writing under the pseudonym Andreas Mückler, claimed in a publication of the Viennese Institut für Statistik der Minderheitsvölker that the Polish census of 1921 had omitted half of Poland's German population.
Even before he had begun his doctoral studies, Kuhn was well known as a scholar of linguistic enclaves. Kuhn received his doctorate in 1931 from the University of Vienna, writing on German linguistic enclaves in Poland. Kuhn's first attempt at achieving an academic position was a failure, and he returned to Bielitz, but Kuhn received a job as an assistant to Viktor Kauder at the Deutsche Kulturbund in Katowice in 1932. He received this job through the help of Otto Ulitz, leader of the German minority in Upper Silesia, and Eduard Pant, a leading German-Polish politician and member of the Sejm. While living in Poland, Kuhn was a sympathizer of the pro-National Socialist Jungdeutsche Partei.
Alexander Pinwinkler writes that Kuhn's career benefitted greatly from the Nazi's taking of power in 1933. Kuhn engaged in many activities in nationalist-conservative and Nazi organizations and participated in numerous Nazi organized conferences. Beginning in 1934, Kuhn's work was supported monetarily by , a Nazi research organisation. Kuhn served as a liaison between the leaders of the German minority in Poland, who secretly supported German revisionist politics towards Poland, and scholars in Germany, performed various ethnographic work and promoting the interests of the German minority to the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland.
Kuhn became a professor for folklore and East-German folk-ways Volkskunde und ostdeutsches Volkstum) at the University of Breslau in 1936. His naming to this post was somewhat controversial, as Kuhn was not seen as a representative folklorist and had not written a habilitation; according to Alexander Pinwinkler and Ingo Haar, Kuhn achieving the professorship was mostly the work of nationally influential pro-Nazi historians Albert Brackmann and Hermann Aubin rather than the faculty in Breslau itself. In a report likely from the summer of 1936, Heinrich Harmjanz described Kuhn as a "good comrade-in-arms" who was "fixed and secure in the world view of the Third Reich". Throughout the thirties and into the war, Kuhn was seen as a "foreign-German National-Socialist". A secret protocol created for the Sicherheitsdienst by SS-Untersturmbahnführer Ernst Birke in 1937 noted that Kuhn's work supported the ideals of the German Youth Movement and ethnic politics, but that Kuhn was not interested in politics and would "see 'any closer connection to a certain political direction' as a disturbance of his work". Birke hoped that Kuhn's reticence about politics could be loosened by his connections to the group around historian Hermann Aubin.
In 1937, Kuhn took over duties as director of the Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde. In 1939, Kuhn became director of the Silesian Society for Folk Studies and a representative of the NOFG at the Upper Education Office of the Nazi Party. He was also honored with the "Nikolaus-Kopernikus Prize" of the Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe-Stiftung, a prize for Volksdeutsche, for his academic publications. By the start of World War II, Kuhn was a famous scholar.His publications in "Deutsche Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift in Polen" with other German scholars were aimed at proving German character of Western Poland and alleged superiority of German culture over Slavic and Polish cultures
Antisemitism and Anti-slavism
In his work on linguistic enclaves Kuhn expressed both antisemitism and anti-Slavism. Slavs and Jews were presented as hostile "others to German "volk-body" that were harmful to Germans. He proposed that "German colonist" antisemitism was based on "instinct" to pursue "righteousness and health", and Jews were portrayed as merchants that Germans should oppose through boycott. Kuhn also described Germans as superior to Slavs in Poland. The idea of German superiority was used by Kuhn to argue for "foreign traits" of Poles of Jews and description of non-German groups as objects rather than subjects in his research.Work for Nazi Germany intelligence services
in his work dedicated to activity of German minority in Poland writes that Kuhn was part of an irredentist training group set up by Nazi Germany on 23 February 1939 in Poznań under leadership of Richard Bloch that was housed in local German Consulate, the goal of the group was to organize evening lectures on techniques of intelligence gathering work. According to historian Karol Grunberg Kuhn was in constant contact with Deutsches Auslands-Institut which worked on behalf of German Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany.Second World War
Politics
As Nazi Germany invaded Poland Kuhn praised "eternalized German achievements in the East" as means to produce "German Lebensraum'' and stated that it will bring "new German cultural forms to culturally less mature eastern people". Following the annexation by Nazi Germany of his hometown of Bielitz, Kuhn applied to join the Nazi party on December 6, 1939. He was admitted on February 1, 1940. However, in 1941 Kuhn refused to take a position at the Reich University of Posen despite persistent attempts to get him to take the position. Kuhn himself would later explain his refusal as due to the incompatibility of his research interests with the new position.Advisor for SS
describes Kuhn as one of Nazi hack academics but also one of the "finest minds" whose expertise was used for ethnic cleansing plans carried by Nazi Germany.In 1939, Kuhn served as an advisor to the SS for the resettlement of ethnic Germans. He returned to German communities in Ukraine to assist in determining their "racial qualities" connected to Nazi plans of resettlement; the SS considered his reports in determining which ethnic Germans would be repatriated to Germany. Kuhn advised the resettlement of German villages as groups to areas of Poland that had similar climatic and soil characteristics to the areas they were taken from, but advised that villages that showed signs of in-breeding, sectarianism, or "spiritual sickness" should be broken up. His other advice was to keep German settlers separated from their non-German farmhands. In practice, the resettlement did not tend to follow Kuhn's suggestions, and regional and social differences between various groups of Polish Germans were ignored.
On September 29, 1939 Kuhn authored a position paper titled "German settlement areas beyond the old Reich Borders" for the German-Soviet Border Commission in which he argued that Germany should annex various areas of Poland that had not belonged to the German Empire based on their ethnic makeup. On October 11, 1939 the Prussian Privy State Archives published a memorandum titled "Germanization of Poznań and West Prussia", authored by several German historians including Walter Kuhn. The memorandum called for the immediate "resettlement" of 2.9 million Poles and Jews and their replacement with German settlers "with a healthy social organization", who would maintain the "national struggle with Polishness". The memorandum also called for the "removal of Jewry" and of elites, and the "reduction" of the total population, in order that the territory could be settled as Lebensraum by the state. Markus Krzoska characterizes this memorandum as an attempt by scholars such as Kuhn to ingratiate themselves with the Nazi hierarchy responsible for settlement in the occupied territories, as the Nazis relied on the expertise of Kuhn and other Ostforscher less and less as the war progressed. According to Winston Chu Walter Kuhn was instrumental in making an ethnic argument for Nazi Germany annexing Lódź and other parts of Central Poland
In the winter of 1940, Kuhn served as an advisor to the Immigration Headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst in Litzmannstadt for German settlers being resettled out of the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland and the General Government. Prior to the resettlement of Germans in these villages and homes, Poles had been deported to the General Government. Kuhn also advised on the "Germanization" of Slavic groups in Silesia: Kuhn argued that many German-speakers in Silesia were in fact Polish immigrants to the territory who had adopted German and replaced Germans who had moved to the West.
Kuhn undertook a final trip with a number of students in 1942, to Volhynia, which he had been unable to visit in the 1930s.
Military service
In 1943 he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and was captured by the British in 1944. He remained a prisoner until 1947; according to Kuhn, this was because as the British sent him to a re-education camp.Postwar career in West Germany
Kuhn was released from British captivity in 1947. Kuhn's wife had fled from Breslau to Magdeburg, but had not brought any of Kuhn's manuscripts, notes, or books with her. Kuhn briefly considered emigrating to Chicago in the United States due to financial troubles before Hermann Aubin arranged for him to take a temporary teaching position at the University of Hamburg that same year. Although before World War II Kuhn had belonged to a network of German folklorists from Bielitz, he was the only one of them to be able to continue his academic career after the war. The German linguistic enclaves that Kuhn had studied before the war had been destroyed by the resettlement policy of the Nazis and the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II, so Kuhn changed his focus to the history of German settlement in the region. Kuhn's pre-war work came under critical fire, especially from the folklorist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, who accused him of ethnocentrism and of deliberately polarizing the differences between Germans and Poles. Kuhn's activities advising the SS during the war were not brought up, however. Kuhn himself never acknowledged any wrongdoing, instead bemoaning the loss of his wartime work and framing himself as a victim.In 1955, Kuhn became professor for the history of German settlement and folklore at the University of Hamburg, a position that was specifically created for him by Hermann Aubin. While Kuhn initially focused on German settlement in the modern period, following publications in the mid 1950s, he came to focus more on medieval German settlement, particularly in Silesia and Poland. Kuhn went on to advise many dissertations, including after his retirement in 1968, and frequently functioned as a reviewer of Polish-language scholarly works. He was also involved in various scholarly organisations and received various honors. He was the head of the from 1952 until 1964. Kuhn retired to Salzburg, where he continued to publish numerous scholarly works. Norbert Angermann identifies him as "the most significant historian of the German Ostsieldung" in the period before his death in 1983. Kuhn's connections to National Socialism before and during World War II would not become a topic of discussion until 1988, when Michael Burleigh published Germany Turns Eastward.
Scholarly appraisals and reception
Pre-war work
Writing in 2010, the Polish scholar Dariusz Chrobak characterizes Kuhn as a "pioneer" who founded the study of German linguistic enclaves. Referring to the acceptance of Kuhn and Alfred Karasek as scholars after the war, Winson Chu writes "hat their works remained respectable in the post-1945 period is in part due to the fact that they focused less on the highly politicized and revisionist goals of the interwar period than on broader völkisch und ethnographic concepts." Wilhelm Fielitz argues that Kuhn's pre-war work shows Social Darwinist, ethnocentric tendencies, although he also used modern field-work techniques. Alexander Pinwnkler writes that Kuhn's work approached the Nazi concept of a utopian "racially pure" state. Matthias Weber, Hans Hennig Hahn, and Kurt Dröge write that Kuhn's work on linguistic enclaves was particularly apt to support concepts of imperialistic aggression. His works from this period are described by Zdzisław Gębołyś as belonging to genre that was one-sided favouring the German point of view, were tendentious and often used simplifications. While former Nazi argued that no one could find any nationalism in Kuhn's writings from this time and defended Kuhn's focus on German linguistic enclaves as part of the spirit of the time, Christian Lübke noted a strong similarity the vocabulary of Nazi propaganda and the vocabulary of Kuhn and other contemporary German scholars engaged in studying Eastern Europe: as a specific example, Lübke notes that Kuhn published an article in 1939 in which he wrote about the "vital force inherent in German culture in the East" at a moment in which according to him Germans were engaged in "ethnic struggle". Norbert Angermann, however, argues that Kuhn's pre-war work was not influenced by the racial theories of the Nazis.Kuhn's focus on linguistic enclaves had mostly been replaced by inter-ethnic studies by 1970, largely through the work of folklorist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann and historian Walter Schlesinger., a former of student of Kuhn from Hamburg, writes that Kuhn's pre-war work remains useful in its collection of facts, but less so in their systematic comprehension of the situation of linguistic enclaves. Although works such as Kuhn's continue to provide the fullest accounts of German minority populations in areas such as Volhynia, Heinke Kalinke writes that their use today "requires especially careful source criticism and contextualization in academic history".
Post-war work
Contemporary reviews
Kuhn's post-war work was mostly positively reviewed in his lifetime, but received some criticism, particularly from scholars in Poland. Kuhn's first post-war publication, Siedlungsgeschichte Oberschlesiens received positive reviews by Gotthold Rhode and John Leighly. Rhode describes Kuhn's engagement and scholarly knowledge as "masterful" and praises his knowledge of Polish scholarship. Leighly states that Kuhn's work "is likely to remain for a long time the best source of information on both the history and geography of settlement in Upper Silesia." A more critical review comes from Stephen Borsody, who while acknowledging Kun's "outstanding job of research", his "great thoroughness" and diligence, states that Kuhn's work "is written in protest against the expulsion of the Germans from Upper Silesia," and that Kuhn makes "nonchalant comments on the Hitler era." Borsody criticizes Kuhn's thesis that Germans brought Silesia into Western Civilization for Kuhn's failure to separate the history of Germans in Silesia from the Third Reich, or to condemn its atrocities.Kuhn's two-volume Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung in der Ostsiedlung in der Neuzeit received extremely positive reviews from Rhode, Hans Mortensen, and Hans Linde. Rhode states that Kuhn's monograph will become the standard work on the subject, while Mortensen says that science owes Kuhn a special thanks for his work, and hopes for a third volume. Linde states "t is not likely that this exposition will ever be superseded" and that "the evidence is here presented in a dispassionate and objective manner which excludes any kind of polemic." praised Kuhn's synthesis and the work's maps while nevertheless criticizing Kuhn's attempt to connect German settlement with that of other Western Europeans. Former Nazi Rhode claimed that despite many criticisms of this same work, the Polish historian Gerard Labuda stated he had to bow his head to Kuhn's achievement., while acknowledging several interesting aspects of the work, criticizes Kuhn's tendency toward conclusions that are "flattering to national self-esteem", and Kuhn's decision to selectively cite Polish and Baltic historians without engaging critically with them. similarly, while calling the book important, criticized that it seems to have been written "to the greater glory of Germany." Józef Kokot and Andrzej Brożek describe Walter Kuhn as one of "nationalist Ostforscher" who "nourish old myths and falsifications" with Kuhn engaging in myth making about supposed "cultural mission" of German colonization in the east.
Reviewing Die Deutschen und ihre östlichen Nachbarn: ein Handbuch, co-edited by Kuhn, found the book factually accurate, but criticized the book for its failure to critically analyze the concepts behind contemporary German scholarship on Eastern Europe. Zernack describes Kuhn's own essays in the volume as "respectable".
In his review of Die deutschrechtlichen Städte in Schlesien und Polen in der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts, praises Kuhn for showing that Poles and German and other immigrants were together responsible for the founding of cities in medieval Poland, rather than attributing the development to one group or the other. Kossmann expresses his hope that Kuhn's work could lead to greater cooperation between German and Polish scholars. However, the author of a review of Kuhn's atlas ""Die mittelalterliche deutsche Ostsiedlung", in Putzger states that it is a typical example of biased interpratation of historical events for use of political propaganda with the aim of giving Germans "moral right" to take over and Germanize territories of other nations, including Poland.
Both Jürgen Petersohn and gave Kuhn's essay collection Vergleichende Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Ostsiedlung very positive reviews. In his review of Kuhn's history of Bielitz, Günther Stökl calls the work the "crowning achievement of rich life's work". Kuhn's posthumously published essay collection Neue Beiträge zur schlesischen Siedlungsgeschichte received positive reviews from Heinrich Appelt and, both of whom were pleased that the collection included Kuhn's biographical writings.
Retrospective reviews
Writing retrospectively, Norbert Angermann writes that Kuhn always strove to be objective in his work, despite his emotional attachment to the subject., writing at Kuhn's death in 1983, praises Kuhn for writing knowledgeable and incisive reviews of Polish scholars in particular, while referring to Kuhn as "the most important and most knowledgable representative" of scholarship on German minorities in Eastern Europe., Kuhn's former student at Hamburg, writes that Kuhn's work on the Ostsiedlung is "of lasting value", and he notes the positive reception of Kuhn's work in countries besides Germany, including, "with certain, to some extent justified qualifications" in Poland. Weczerka nevertheless criticizes Kuhn's fixation on Deutschtum to the exclusion of the people surrounding German settlers and enclaves and notes that not everyone could agree to some of Kuhn's conclusions. As a specific example, Weczerka notes that one of Kuhn's maps in the Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung depicted the Masurians, Kashubians, Sorbs, and Upper Silesians as "groups that according to language and feeling of belonging have become German" . Holocaust scholars Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt refer to Kuhn as representative of "first-rate German historians". They state that Kuhn is the writer of "excellent histories of the medieval development of Upper Silesia in general and of Auschwitz in particular", yet that he nevertheless mentions Auschwitz concentration camp only twice in his entire oeuvre.Historian Marek Cetwiński writes that Kuhn till end of his life remained a "propagandist", who treated history as a servant. Michal Lis writes that Kuhn and other Ostforschung scholars in post-war West Germany continued to propagate historical and sociological myths aimed at undermining and questioning the Polish identity of the population of Upper Silesia. Andrew Demshuk writes: "As professor for Siedlungsgeschichte at the University of Hamburg, dedicated his work to all who remained "faithful" and wrote tales of German suffering through the ages under Slavic oppression." Dariusz Przybytek names an atlas Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung by Walter Kuhn and Willifried Krallert about German Ostsiedlung as having a "propagandic character" Zygmunt Szultka writes that Kuhn made unbelievable errors in his work such as estimating growth of German population in Pomerania to be 10% per year in the time period of 1200-1300, which according to Szultka aren't even worthy of debate Historian Kazimierz Jasinski names Kuhn as "Silesian regionalist" historian, full of anti-Polish prejudice Stefan Guth writes that study of post-war works about Ostsiedlung by Walter Kuhn leave no doubt that he remained loyal to his concentration on Germanness in his post-war works just as in the '30s.