Ingo Haar (born 3 February 1965) is a German historian. He received his Master of Arts from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and his PhD in History in 1998 at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His doctoral dissertation was on "Historians in Nazi Germany: the German history and the`'Ethnic struggle' in the `East'" (Historiker im Nationalsozialismus: die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der `Volkstumskampf´ im `Osten´).
The book "German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945" of which Haar was a co-editor of (along with Michael Fahlbusch) received the Choice Award for "Outstanding Book of the Year" in 2005. [1]
Dr. Haar is currently on the faculty of the University of Vienna. [2] Previously he was associated with the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung) at Technische Universität Berlin. [3]
Ingo Haar believes that civilian losses in the expulsion of the Germans from eastern Europe have been overstated in Germany for decades for political reasons. Haar argues that Cold War political pressure influenced the findings of the Schieder commission and the 1958 West German government demographic study that estimated 2 million expulsion deaths . Haar maintains that the actual number of deaths directly related to the expulsions is between 500 and 600,000 persons based on the findings of the German church search service and the report of the German government archives. Dr. Haar maintains that the figure of 2 million expulsion deaths includes "a fall in the German birth rate, persons assimilated into the local population, military dead, murdered Jews and missing persons" [4] [5] [6] Haar has criticized the Federation of Expellees for inflating the numbers of German victims of the expulsion of Germans after World War II,; [7] the former expellees' president Erika Steinbach in her reply accused Haar of reducing the number of victims. [8]
During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg (Neumark) and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union.
The evacuation of East Prussia was the movement of German civilian population and military personnel from East Prussia between 20 January and March 1945, that was initially organized and carried out by state authorities but quickly turned into a chaotic flight from the Red Army.
Ernst Klee was a German journalist and author. As a writer on Germany's history, he was best known for his exposure and documentation of medical crimes in Nazi Germany, much of which was concerned with the Action T4 or involuntary euthanasia program. He is the author of "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders first published in the English translation in 1991.
Alfred Baeumler, was an Austrian-born German philosopher, pedagogue and prominent Nazi ideologue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as an unsalaried lecturer Privatdozent. Bäumler was made associate professor (Extraordinarius) in 1928 and full professor (Ordinarius) a year later. From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education in Berlin as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy.
Aryanization was the Nazi term for the seizure of property from Jews and its transfer to non-Jews, and the forced expulsion of Jews from economic life in Nazi Germany, Axis-aligned states, and their occupied territories. It entailed the transfer of Jewish property into "Aryan" or non-Jewish hands.
Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims and says that the official figure of 2 million did not stand up to later review. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that the total death toll of the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.
The German evacuation from Central and Eastern Europe ahead of the Soviet Red Army advance during the Second World War was delayed until the last moment. Plans to evacuate people to present-day Germany from the territories controlled by Nazi Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, including from the former eastern territories of Germany as well as occupied territories, were prepared by the German authorities only when the defeat was inevitable, which resulted in utter chaos. The evacuation in most of the Nazi-occupied areas began in January 1945, when the Red Army was already rapidly advancing westward.
The Reichsuniversität Straßburg was founded in 1941 by the Nazis in Alsace after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Nazi Germany. The University of Strasbourg had moved to Clermont-Ferrand in 1939. The university's purpose was to restore the German character of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität, as the University of Strasbourg was named from 1872 to 1918, and to advance "German knowledge" in the annexed territory. When the Allies arrived in Alsace in 1944, the Reichsuniversität was first transferred to Tübingen and then dissolved.
Statistics for German World War II military casualties are divergent. The wartime military casualty figures compiled by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht through January 31, 1945 are often cited by military historians in accounts of individual campaigns in the war. A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans concluded that total German military deaths were much higher than those originally reported by the German High Command, amounting to 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and in east-central Europe. The German government reported that its records list 4.3 million dead and missing military personnel.
Theodor Schieder was an influential mid-20th century German historian. Born in Oettingen, Western Bavaria, he relocated to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1934 at the age of 26. [p. 56] He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. During the Nazi era, Schieder became part of a group of German conservative historians antagonistic towards the Weimar Republic. He pursued a racially-oriented social history (Volksgeschichte), and warned about the supposed dangers of Germans mixing with other nations. During this time, Schieder used ethnographic methods to justify German supremacy and expansion. He was the author of the "Memorandum of 7 October 1939", calling for Germanization of the recaptured Polish territories after the Invasion of Poland. His suggestions were later incorporated in the German Generalplan Ost. After the war, he settled in West Germany and worked at the University of Cologne.
Heinz Gottfried Nawratil was a German lawyer, legal author and human rights activist.
Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe is the abridged English translation of a multi-volume publication that was created by a commission of West German historians between 1951 and 1961 to document the population transfer of Germans from East-Central Europe that had occurred after World War II. Created by the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, the commission headed by Theodor Schieder consisted primarily of well-known historians, however with a Nazi past. Therefore, while in the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians, the later assessment of its members changed. The later historians are debating how reliable are the findings of the commission, and to what degree they were influenced by Nazi and nationalist point of view.
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. He focused his research on German language islands. 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 advised various Nazi plans of ethnic cleansing aimed at Jews, Poles and their replacement by German settlers from further east.
Erich Maschke was a German historian, history professor, and Nazi ideologue. He last taught at Heidelberg University. During the Nazi era he promoted racist and nationalist ideology. After the war he led the so-called Maschke Committee, commissioned by the West German parliament, which investigated the treatment of German prisoners-of-war during and after World War II by the Allies.
Gerhart Hass was a German historian. His approach reflected the Marxist prism through which East Germany's historical establishment viewed their subject. He worked at the History Institute, part of the Berlin based (East) German Academy of Sciences and Humanities, where from 1974 he was a professor. His work concentrated on the History of Fascism in Europe and the Second World War.
Günther Hillmann was a German biochemist. During the Second World War he worked on a research project to which the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele delivered blood samples from Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war, he directed the Chemical Institute of the Nuremberg Hospitals for the rest of his life.
Norbert Frei is a German historian. He holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and leads the Jena Center of 20th Century History. Frei's research work investigates how German society came to terms with Nazism and the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II.
Peter Herde is a German historian. His research activities range from fundamental work on papal diplomatics of the Middle Ages to the history of the country up to the Second World War.
Günther Franz was a German historian who specialized predominantly in agricultural history and the history of the German Peasants' War. Together with economists Wilhelm Abel and Friedrich Lütge, Franz helped shape the development and study of German agricultural history and agricultural economics in the postwar period.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)