Walter Kuhn

Walter Kuhn (27 September 1903 – 5 August 1983), was an Austrian-born German folklorist (Volkskundler), 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.

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.

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 known as a scholar of language islands.

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 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 language 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.

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.

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.

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 Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland.

In 1936, Kuhn moved to Germany to take a professorship at the University of Breslau.

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" (guter Kamarad) who was "fixed and secure in the world view of the Third Reich" (fest und sicher in der Weltanschauung des dritten Reiches).

Throughout the thirties and into the war, Kuhn was seen as a "foreign-German National-Socialist".

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.