Walter Kuhn (27 September 1903 – 5 August 1983), 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.
Kuhn continued his academic work post-war in West Germany, becoming a professor at the University of Hamburg and an 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 (1988). Kuhn's pre-war work has been linked to anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, and promoting a belief in German superiority.
Biography Early life and studies Kuhn was born in 1903 in the town of Bielitz (Bielsko) 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 study German settlement in Eastern Europe while he was a student, including undertaking several trips to Poland and Ukraine and making several publications. In 1926 Kuhn went to Ukraine (Volhynia) 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 . 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 language islands, which Winson Chu takes to mean Kuhn's own hometown of Bielitz/Bliesko. Kuhn also secretly worked for the organization 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 that the Polish census of 1921 had omitted half of Poland's German population.
Even before he had begun his doctoral studies, Kuhn was known as a scholar of language islands. Kuhn received his doctorate in 1931 from the University of Vienna, writing on German language islands 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 (Kattowitz) in 1932. He received this job through the help of Otto Ulitz, leader of the German minority in Upper Silesia, and Eduard Pant, a German-Polish politician and member of the Sejm. While living in Poland, Kuhn was a sympathizer of the pro-National Socialist Jungdeutsche Partei.
Career under the Nazis Alexander Pinwinkler writes that Kuhn's career benefited 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 (NOFG), a Nazi research organisation. Kuhn served as a liaison between the leaders of the 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 .
Kuhn became a professor for "folklore and East-German folk-ways" 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, Nazi 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.
Kuhn was part of an irredentist training group set up 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. Kuhn was in constant contact with the Deutsches Auslands-Institut, which worked on behalf of German Sicherheitsdienst, the German intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party; in some cases Kuhn ranked people's migratory racial worthiness for Germanization based on a combination of present and historical circumstances.
Second World War Following the annexation by Nazi Germany of his hometown of Bielitz (Bielsko), 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 (a new German university that replaced the older Polish University of Poznań) 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.
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. 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 Kuhn. The memorandum called for the immediate "resettlement" of 2.9 million Poles and Jews and their replacement with German settlers. 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. In the winter of 1940, Kuhn served as an advisor to the Immigration Headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst in Litzmannstadt (Łódź) 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.
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 Kuhn was released from British captivity in 1947. Kuhn's wife had fled from Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) 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 (Bielsko), he was the only one of them to be able to continue his academic career after the war. The German language islands 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 (Ostsiedlung). 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.