Hans Rothfels
Hans Rothfels (April 12, 1891-June 22, 1976) was a conservative German nationalist historian.
Rothfels was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kassel, Germany. In 1910, he converted to Lutheranism. He was studying history and philosophy at Heidelberg University when World War One broke out in 1914. Rothfels enlisted in the German Army as a junior officer and was badly wounded at the Battle of the Marne. He lost one of his legs and was in a hospital until 1917. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. In 1918, Rothfels's dissertation on Carl von Clausewitz "Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg" led to Heidelberg granting him a degree in History. In 1920, Rothfels's dissertation was published as a book. In 1922, he edited and published a collection of Clausewitz's private letters.
Between 1924-1926, Rothfels taught at the University of Berlin. From 1926 to 1934, he worked as a professor, holding the Chair of History at the University of Königsberg. During his time in Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia), he was well known for his highly nationalistic interpretation of German history. An reactionary in his politics, Rothfels was hostile towards the Weimar Republic and a firm anti-communist. In foreign affairs, he often denounced the Treaty of Versailles and the eastern borders it had imposed on Germany. As a historian, his major interests were Otto von Bismarck, Carl von Clausewitz, and later on, the conservative German opposition to Adolf Hitler.
Jewish by birth, Rothfels was sacked from his university position by the Nazis. Subject to increasing persecution and discrimination by the State, he reluctantly left Germany in 1938 for Britain. What decided the issue for him was his experience during the Kristallnacht pogrom when his house was looted and trashed by the SA and he himself was arrested and held by the Gestapo for several hours.
After teaching at Oxford from 1938 to 1940, Rothfels left for the United States, where he stayed until 1951. He taught in Providence, Rhode Island and at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. During his time in the United States, he befriended the American publisher Henry Regnery and became active in the Republican Party.
In 1948, Rothfels published by far his most famous book, The German Opposition To Hitler, which celebrated those conservatives who attempted the July 20 Plot of 1944. Rothfels, who remained a steadfast German nationalist all his life, saw the conspirators against the National Socialist regime as representative of all that was best about German life and argued that the actions of the conspirators had restored Germany's honour from the disgrace the Nazis had brought upon it. Rothfels accepted Edmund Burke's idea that the best defenders of liberty come from the upper crust of society and cast the men and women of July 20 as a perfect example of Burke's theory.
The German Opposition To Hitler was a controversial book because Rothfels focused his attention largely on anti-Nazis on the Right and ignored anti-Nazis on the Left. In addition, many felt that the book was a hagiographical treatment of anti-Nazi conservatives. His motive in writing the book was in part to prevent the emergence of a new stab-in-the-back legend that might once again undermine democracy in Germany. He was dismayed by public opinion polls taken immediately after World War Two in the American zone of occupation that showed the majority of Germans had a low opinion of the men and women involved in the July 20 plot. Rothfels was determined that Germans should see them as heroes, not villains.
In 1951, Rothfels returned to West Germany, where he taught at the University of Tübingen. He worked hard for the rest of his life to exonerate German nationalism from the taint of Nazism. Upon his return to Germany, Rothfels founded the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), an historical study center devoted to the Nazi period. The institute's journal, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Journal for Contemporary History) has become one of the world's leading periodicals for the study of Nazi Germany. During the 1950s, Rothfels was one of the few German historians who attempted a serious examination of the Holocaust. In particular, he broke new ground by publishing Kurt Gerstein's reports relating to the Final Solution.
After his return to Germany, Rothfels took a strong stand against those whose work he felt could exonerate the Nazis. In 1954, he and one of his star pupils from the University of Chicago, Gerhard Weinberg had a renowned debate on the pages of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte with Andreas Hillgruber and Hans-Günther Seraphim over the issue of whether the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had been a “preventive war” forced on Adolf Hitler by the possibility of Soviet attack on Germany. Hillgruber and Seraphim argued for the "preventive war" thesis while Rothfels and Weinberg opposed it. The majority opinion was that Rothfels and Weinberg destroyed Seraphim's and Hillgruber's arguments. Indeed, Hillgruber himself did a volte-face and renounced his former thesis as mistaken. Later, in 1961 Rothfels took a stand against the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan who claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to a Anglo-Polish conspiracy against Germany. Also in 1961, Rothfels assisted Weinberg with the publication of Adolf Hitler's Zweites Buch which Weinberg had discovered in 1958, and for which Rothfels wrote the introduction.
Another area of interest for Rothfels was the expulsion of the ethnic German population from Eastern Europe after World War Two. In the 1950s, Rothfels worked with Theodor Scheider, Martin Broszat and Hans-Ulrich Wehler to produce the multi-volume Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe. Ironically enough for an ultra-conservative, Rothfel’s disciples included a number of prominent left-wing historians such as Martin Broszat, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Hans Mommsen.
In his lifetime and since his death, Rothfels has been a very controversial figure. Many see him as apologist for the anti-democratic German Right, and in particular, his attitude towards the Weimar Republic has recently been the subject of controversy in Germany. The historian Heinrich August Winkler has discovered a radio address Rothfels wrote but was prevented from delivering in 1933 calling on Germans to preserve democracy. Rothfels's critics contend that his planned radio address was too little, too late.
Work
- Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg, Dümmlers Verlag, Berlin, 1920.
- Bismarck Und Der Staat; Ausgewählte Dokumente, Eingeleitet Von Hans Rothfels, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1925.
- The German opposition to Hitler, an appraisal Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, Illinois, 1948; published in Germany as Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler Scherpe, Krefeld, 1949, revised editions 1961 & 1963.
- Bismarck-Briefe. Ausgewählt Und Eingeleitet Von Hans Rothfels, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1955.
- Das politische Vermächtnis des deutschen Widerstandes, Bonn : Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, 1956.
- Bismarck; Vorträge und Abhandlungen, Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer 1970.
References
- Berg, Nicolas "Hidden Memory and Unspoken History: Hans Rothfels and the Postwar Restoration of Contemporary German History" from Leo Baeck Year Book XLIX 2004.
- Lehmann, Hartmut & Sheehan, James (editors) An Interrupted Past : German-speaking refugee historians in the United States after 1933 Washington, D.C. : German Historical Institute, 1991.