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German historian

Hans Rothfels (12 April 1891 – 22 June 1976) was a German historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours. After his applications for honorary Aryan status were rejected, due to his Jewish ancestry and increased persecution of Jewish people by Nazis, he was forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom and later to the United States during the Second World War, after which he became opposed to the Nazi regime. Rothfels returned to West Germany after 1945 where he continued to influence history teaching and became an influential figure among West German scholars.

Rothfels was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kassel, Hesse Nassau. In 1910, he converted to Lutheranism. He was studying history and philosophy at Heidelberg University when World War I broke out in 1914. As a student, Rothfels had been a leading pupil of Friedrich Meinecke. Rothfels served in the German Army as a reserve officer and was badly wounded near Soissons. He lost one of his legs and was in a hospital until 1917. 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. In addition, Rothfels published several collections of Otto von Bismarck's letters, and was the first historian to be authorized by the Bismarck family to publish the Iron Chancellor's correspondence. Rothfels was noted for his claim that Bismarck was neither the "iron chancellor" of "banal legend" nor an "opportunist", but rather a profoundly religious man struggling to deal with a reality whose full complexity was only understandable to God. Between 1924 and 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, he was well known for his highly nationalistic interpretation of German history. A reactionary in his politics, Rothfels was hostile towards the Weimar Republic, As a historian, his major interests were Otto von Bismarck, Clausewitz, and later on, the conservative German opposition to Adolf Hitler. A major interest of Rothfels in the 1920s was his belief in the obsolescence of the nation state, and the need for a "loosening up" of the Versailles borders through increased protection of minorities. Rothfels promoted an idea of race classification based on readiness of non German ethnic groups in Eastern Europe to submit themselves to rule of German Third Reich The Eastern and Southeastern nationalities were to be "restructured" and integrated with German "master race". Eventually, Rothfels was forced to leave his university position due to his Jewish ancestry, despite intervention by Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi president of Danzig Senate, and Theodor Oberlander, director of League of German East (Bund der Deutschen Osten) and NSDAP's East Prussian intelligence agency, Subject to increasing persecution and discrimination by the State, he reluctantly left Germany in 1938 for the United Kingdom. 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, during which he was deprived of his crutches and beaten up. Together with his wife and their three children, Rothfels left for the United Kingdom, where he hastily began to learn English, a language that he subsequently mastered.

After teaching at St. John's College, Oxford from 1938 to 1940, Rothfels was interned on the Isle of Man. 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 20 July as a perfect example of Burke's theory. Rothfels claimed that the German opposition was motivated by the highest possible ethical and moral considerations, and asserted that there were no self interested motives whatsoever amongst the men and women of the 20 July. Rothfels argued that the actions of the 20 July conspirators were motivated a sense of noblesse oblige, devotion to the principles of Christianity and the highest form of patriotism. Rothfels was fond of pointing out the difficulties involved in attempting to overthrow one's government in war time, which in Rothfels view, was a sign of the true patriotism of the 20 July conspirators. Rothfels saw Nazism as a type of totalitarianism, and often argued that there was no moral difference between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; in his view, the Cold War was merely a continuation of the struggle between what he called the "conservative freedom movement" and totalitarian forces. In particular, Rothfels was opposed to any sort of Sonderweg interpretation of German history, and argued that Nazism was the result of the general problems of modern civilization, which Rothfels saw as based on a set of values that were overtly materialistic, secular, and dehumanizing, and which had reduced most people to a mindless mass. Rothfels wrote "In many respects, Nationals can be considered as the final summit of an extreme consequence of the secularization movement of the nineteenth century". Rothfels argued that the Nazis came to power as a result of a series of unfortunate developments that had occurred in Germany after World War I such as the Great Inflation of 1923 and the Great Depression, and often criticized those in his view promoted the view that sought to equate Deutschum with Nazism such as Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, William L. Shirer, A. J. P. Taylor and Sir John Wheeler Bennett. Moreover, far from Nazism being rooted in German traditions, Rothfels claimed that the strongest opposition to Nazism came from those grounded in traditional values. In Rothfels's opinion, "the traditions of a genuine 'Prussian militarism'" provided the principle "bulwark against nationalistic and demagogic excesses". The German Opposition to Hitler ended with a call for people all over the West to embrace what Rothfels regarded as the noble ideas of the conservative opponents of Nazism, which Rothfels saw as leading to back to the higher values of the West. The German Opposition To Hitler was a controversial book because Rothfels focused his attention largely on anti Nazis on the Right and for the most part ignored anti Nazis on the Left. 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. Within a few years, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte had the highest circulation of any historical journal in West Germany. During the 1950s, Rothfels was one of the few German historians who attempted a serious examination of the Holocaust, which was a subject that most German historians preferred to ignore during that decade. In particular, he broke new ground by publishing Kurt Gerstein's reports relating to the Final Solution in the first edition of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1953 and another article in 1959 that examined the plight of Polish Jewry under Nazi rule. In his works Rothfels aimed at minimising the German hostility to Jews, while highlighting any attempts to save them by German individuals. Crimes and support for anti semitism were downplayed, and opposition to racial discrimination portrayed by Rothfels as dominant. As such his text produced a vision of history in which for example the 1930s were virtually absent from anti semitism, and non Jewish Germans were completely willing to help Jews. After his return to Germany, Rothfels was a pioneer of contemporary history, the study of the "epoch of those who lived at the time" to use Rothfels's words. In Rothfels's view, contemporary history was the study of the recent past, where despite or rather because the lack of documentation caused by studying events so close to the past and the challenge of writing about events that one experienced oneself, required special patience, skill and ability of the part of the historian. In particular, Rothfels called for historians working in the field of contemporary history to approach matters in an objective and neutral matter while keeping in mind the moral questions. In practice, contemporary history came to refer history from 1914 on. 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, arguing that it was Nazi racial theories that were the origins of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 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 strong stand against the American neo Nazi historian David Hoggan who claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to an 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 II. In the 1950s, Rothfels worked with Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze and other historians to produce the multi volume Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe. Many later prominent historians such as Martin Broszat, Hans Ulrich Wehler and Hans Mommsen were involved in this project.

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 Ingo Haar in his 2000 book Historiker im Nationalsozialismus called Rothfels an enemy of the Weimar Republic and a Nazi sympathizer. The historian Heinrich August Winkler has strongly criticized Haar, who had erroneously used a radio address Rothfels gave in 1930 praising Friedrich Ebert, Gustav Stresemann, and Paul von Hindenburg as great German leaders as a proof for Rothfels' support of Hitler. While Haar had implied the speech dates from 1933 and was addressed to Hitler after he took over power in Germany, Winkler verified the actual circumstances of the speech, which Rothfels repeated several times prior to 1933. Rothfels's critics contend that his planned 1933 radio address was too little, too late. Rothfels and his inner circle at Königsberg in the early 1930s are often referred to as the Königsberg circle (Königsberger Kreis). Its most prominent members, apart from Rothfels himself, were his students Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze. Whereas Rothfels had to emigrate, Schieder and Conze joined the NSDAP. They were active in the field of Ostforschung, where they supported ideas such as 'dejewfication' (Entjudung). After Rothfels' return the three became leading figures among the historians of the newly founded West Germany. They soon found themselves together in a commission led by Schieder that was set up by the government for documenting the expulsion of Germans after World War II. In 1998 the 42nd Deutscher Historikertag marked the beginning of a public debate among German historians about the "brown history" of their field.

Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg, Dümmlers Verlag, Berlin, 1920. Bismarck Und Der Staat; Ausgewählte Dokumente. Eingeleitet Von Hans Rothfels, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer Verlag, 1925. "Clausewitz" pages 93–113 from The Makers of Modern Strategy edited by Edward Mead Earle, Gordon A. Craig & Felix Gilbert, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1943. "The Baltic Provinces: Some Historic Aspects and Perspectives." Pages 117–146, Journal of Central European Affairs, Vol. IV, July 1944. "1848 – One Hundred Years After," Journal of Modern History, Vol. 20, No. 4 (December 1948)
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.
Review of Die Entscheidung des Abendlandes by Rudolf Rocker" pages 839–841 from American Historical Review, Volume 56, Issue #4, July 1951. "Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe" pages 1–8 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 1, 1953. Bismarck Briefe. Ausgewählt Und Eingeleitet Von Hans Rothfels, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1955. Das politische Vermächtnis des deutschen Widerstandes, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, 1956. "Die Roten Kämpfer Zur Geschichte einer linken Widerstandsgruppe" pages 438–460 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 7, 1959. "Zur „Umsiedlung" der Juden im Generalgouvernment", pages 333–336 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 7, 1959. Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960. Bismarck; Vorträge und Abhandlungen, Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer 1970.