Werner Conze

Werner Conze (December 11, 1910, in Amt Neuhaus – April 1986 in Heidelberg) was a German historian.

Werner Conze was born in 1910 in Amt Neuhaus.

He was the grandson of Alexander Conze, an archaeologist and one of the chief excavators of Pergamon.

In 1929 he began his studies at the University of Leipzig, initially in art history.

Conze quickly changed his degree to history.

That same year he joined a student society, the (DAG), which had völkisch and antisemitic ideals.

As a member of the DAG, Conze became friends with Theodor Schieder, and also met Theodor Oberländer and.

In 1931, Conze transferred to the University of Königsberg, where he began to study Slavic studies and Ostforschung in addition to history.

Conze also studied at the in Riga.

He was trained in the tradition of so-called Volksgeschichte, which concerned the history of ethnically defined groups of people.

Conze joined the SA on May 10, 1933, the day of the Nazi book burnings.

In Königsberg, Conze was a doctoral student of Hans Rothfels, where he wrote his dissertation on the German linguistic island of Hirschenhof in Livonia (now Irši, Lithuania).

His dissertation argued that Germans had a positive role in development of eastern Europe.

Conze was Rothfels' last doctoral student, as Rothfels, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, was fired from the university the same year that Conze finished his dissertation.

He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1934.

An important influence on Conze's dissertation was the work of German Ostforscher Walter Kuhn.

From 1934 to 1935, he did military service in an artillery regiment in Preussisch Eylau.

He became an assistant of the sociologist in Königsberg in 1935.

Conze's field of Ostforschung studied east-central Europe and the region's connections to Germany- many scholars and institutions in Ostforschung supported the Nazi policy of German expansion in eastern Europe, even advocating measures such as ethnic cleansing.

While he continued to work on his habilitation under Ipsen in Königsberg, in 1936 Conze accepted a scholarship of the (PuSte), part of the Prussian State Archives in Berlin.

The PuSte was a politically motivated organization aimed at countering the work of Polish historians.

Conze was also supported by the (NOFG), for which Conze made reports about the areas around Vilnius and northeast Poland, which included an involvement with German intelligence services.

Conze joined the Nazi party on May 1, 1937, after the prohibition of new members that had been enacted after the Nazi seizure of power was lifted.

In 1937, Conze stopped his work for the PuSte and NOFG to return to Königsberg and work on his habilitation with Ipsen, for which he took agrarian society in Lithuania and Belarus as a topic, with the intention of solving the problem of "village overpopulation".

Between 1937 and 1940 in a series of articles Conze proposed the purging of Jews from Eastern Europe by unspecified means, particularly in Lithuania and Belarus.

In 1938 Conze blamed the lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination", and referred to Vilnius as a "center of world Jewry", a "foreign body" which would have to be removed.

Tasked by Ipsen with discussing "Polish overpopulation" for the canceled 14.

Sociological Conference in Bucharest in 1939, Conze argued that the Polish population had "degenerated" because Jews in the cities were preventing it from moving into trades there.

His proposed solutions were re-division of agrarian land and the surrender of Polish sovereignty to Germany in exchange for agrarian reform, as well as the purging of Jews from Polish cities and towns.

In Conze's habilitation, which he finished at the University of Vienna in 1940, where he had followed Ipsen, Conze continued these positions, arguing that the "class of farmers" was threatened by Jews and legitimizing anti-semitic legislation.

Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians."

In the postwar years, Conze moved away from his earlier völkisch positions and became a major mentor of new historians between the 1950s and 1970s; he was one of the most significant advocates of social history.

Through his work on the encyclopedia , he was also important for the development of conceptual history.

From 1956 to 1961, he was a member of the Schieder commission, which documented the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the War in a way that skirted the issue of German atrocities.

He served as rector of the University of Heidelberg from 1969 to 1970 and as president of the from 1972-1976.

Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.

A student of the national conservative historian Hans Rothfels at the University of Königsberg, Conze began his career during the Nazi period, working on Ostforschung, specifically studying German language islands and agrarian society in Eastern Europe.

Conze became a member of both the SA and the Nazi Party.

His early writings evince völkisch and antisemitic ideas, including advocating for the purging of Jews from Eastern Europe by unspecified means.

After the war, Conze continued to work in academia, eventually becoming a professor at the University of Heidelberg.