The Schneider/Schwerte Phenomenon

The Schneider/Schwerte PhenomenonFalsifying One’s Biography and the Role of the Manipulative Character in Education after Auschwitz

Earl Jeffrey RichardsRomance Languages and Literatures, University of Wuppertal

In May 1995 German academe was rocked by the revelation that oneof its most respected members, Hans Schwerte, the recently deceasedformer rector of the University of Aachen and Goethe scholar, wasactually Hans Ernst Schneider, a high-ranking official in Himmler’sresearch organization, the SS-Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”). Sincethis revelation there has been a veritable explosion of literature, noless than twelve monographs and essay collections,1 devoted to thequestions of whether Schneider as Schwerte is an exemplary or sym-bolic figure for Germany’s transformation into a democratic society,whether his career as an “academic manager” in the Third Reich andhis university career in the Federal Republic attest to the well-knowncontinuity of elites, independent of political beliefs, and whetherSchneider owed his subsequent professional success to connectionswith somewhat unsavory (albeit fully legal and quite public) networksof former Nazis. The authors of two of the more prominent works onthis topic even approached Schneider himself, and the results of theseinteractions confirm Theodor Adorno’s emphasis on the manipula-tive talent of the Nazi leadership—a talent that Schneider skillfullyemployed to cast himself as the victim rather than the perpetrator.While the metaphors used to describe Schneider’s two careers maybe open to question, his manipulative skill in both careers is most cer-tainly not.

The scandal over his real identity cost Schneider his professorialtitle—a price that was upheld in September 14, 1999, when Düssel-dorf’s Court of Administrative Law rejected Schneider’s appeal to

German Politics and Society, Issue 53, Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter 1999 74

reclaim use of his title. Legally Schneider could use the name Schw-erte only as a nom de plume, or rather Künstlername, and in one sense,this determination is correct: Schneider was a consummate rhetoricalartist whose artistic domain was Identitätsdiskurs, and who manipu-lated this discourse of identity in order to sustain the illusion that hisnew identity was wholly distinct from his former one. Someobservers have been taken in by this illusion, others have not. In thisessay I will focus primarily on the three monographs among thesestudies—those by Ludwig Jäger, by Gerd Simon and Joachim Lerchen-mueller, and by Claus Leggewie, with occasional side glances to indi-vidual contributions in the other volumes. I will concentrate not somuch on what Schneider himself did during the Third Reich butrather on how his actions have been interpreted as part of contempo-rary political reflections on the Third Reich. Making an individualthe symbol for the transformation of Germany recalls the belief, dat-ing back to Walter Benjamin’s theory of German fascism2 andimplicit in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherliches’ The Inability toMourn, that Germany’s “national identity” has been determined bythe consciousness of loss—that is, that its national identity has consis-tently been defined by intellectuals ex negativo. In fact, Schneider’sown statements, “I lived one life and then a new one, I did not dou-ble myself” and “I do not know who Schneider is, but I will have toanswer for it”3 are rooted in a sense of lost self and in the search for aself that never quite concludes. Efforts to see Schneider/Schwerte asa symbol of Germany (whether it is a matter of conversion or ofchanging sides, masks, or just changing) rarely delineate in positiveterms his “new” identity except to say he is a “democrat.” Ratherproponents of this view insist that he was the former Nazi whoceased being a Nazi, who had lost his Nazi character (assuming hehad had one, which even some observers question). This model of adefinition of national identity based on loss, of a national identitydetermined not so much by what one is as by what one is not, subtlyand unwittingly rehabilitates the long discredited concept of anational character itself. At the same time, Schneider reinforced thelonging of some contemporary observers for a new sense of Germanidentity by denying historical facts and falsifying his own biography.

75

The Schneider/Schwerte Phenomenon

Legal Judgments versus Metaphors: How Can One Describe Schneider’s Identity?

Since explanations of the Schneider/Schwerte phenomenon some-times confuse legal, historical, and philosophical analysis, in partbecause Schneider did so in his own defense, it is helpful to begin withthe comparatively clear legal aspects of the phenomenon. Introducingthese details is especially useful because the recent Düsseldorf decisionsignals a shift in dealing with the Nazi past that shatters the politicalillusions of the cold war, during which former perpetrators of Nazicrimes were tolerated—a tolerance that ultimately constitutes one of thegreatest obstacles to “education after Auschwitz.” Two issues of law areinvolved in Schneider’s case: complicity in murder committed before1945, and malicious fraud or forgery committed after this date. OnOctober 10, 1996, less than eighteen months after the public revelationof his Waffen-SS past, German prosecutors in Ludwigsburg, followinga pattern all too familiar in postwar German jurisprudence, closedtheir investigation into Schneider’s possible complicity in murder. Thiscomplicity was suggested by his documented involvement from mid-1942 to February 1943 in the negotiations for the requisition of med-ical equipment from the University of Leiden for medical experimentsconducted on concentration camp inmates at Dachau. By contrast—and perhaps somewhat like Al Capone’s situation in which the govern-ment caught up with the capo di tutti capi on tax charges and not onracketeering—the 1999 court decision against Schneider limited itself tonoting that, if he had not falsified his curriculum vitae, he would nothave been named professor in the sensitive border region aroundAachen and therefore maliciously defrauded the ministry and univer-sity. Significantly, many of the arguments that Schneider’s lawyeradduced in his defense and that the Düsseldorf court rejected hadbeen used with success almost fifty years ago during denazification. Inthis single legal decision that has escaped widespread commentary, thepolitical fictions and illusions typical of the cold war have finallyceased to convince. The recent French conviction of Maurice Papon asa Nazi collaborator shows that the shift in the legal treatment of Nazicrimes is an international phenomenon.

Whether the Düsseldorf decision marks a real break with the pre-vious pattern illustrated by prosecutors in Ludwigsburg will remain to

76

Earl Jeffrey Richards

be seen. Schneider was punished for falsifying his biography and notfor being a member of Himmler’s general staff or for having anyconnection whatsoever to the medical experiments in Dachau andNatzweiler. Whereas German courts have often been diffident inprosecuting Nazi crimes, the Düsseldorf decision marks an importantbreak with the past that goes far beyond a merely symbolic act sinceit recognized Schneider’s legal defense arguments as political fictions.

Thus Schneider, unlike so many other former high-ranking Nazis,did not go scot-free: the ministry responsible for universities inNorthrhine-Westphalia divested him of his professorial title and posi-tion as a retired civil servant and demanded repayment of the differ-ence between the pension that he had received under false pretensesas Schwerte and the pension to which Schneider would have beenentitled for his years of employment, an amount estimated aroundone million deutsche Marks. This decision is all the more striking ina country that otherwise pays official, ample lip-service to the resis-tance against Hitler (which effectively costs nothing, especially con-sidering that the dependents of executed members of the resistancehave not been justly compensated) while paying generous pensionsto veterans of the Waffen-SS (something that costs real money andtends to corroborate the legitimacy of an organization deemed crim-inal). The ministry has literally put its money where its mouth is.

The Manipulative Character and ConfusingPerpetrators with Victims

Paying back the difference between the pension he received and thepension to which he was entitled reduced Schneider to a welfare case(entitled, of course, to medical insurance and rent support, althoughas a retired SS officer and veteran, he did retain the right to apply fortwenty-five years back payment of his SS pension, which, with inter-est, must be a tidy sum). He skillfully exploited his impoverishment topresent himself as a victim of a hypocritical witch-hunt. By employingthis tack, Schneider sought to manipulate legal, historical, moral, andphilosophical arguments in his favor. That members of the Waffen-SShave consistently tried to portray themselves as victims of their situa-tion began with Himmler’s celebrated speech in Posen in 1943. Here

77


Himmler stressed that the sacrifice of the SS lay in remaining decentin the midst of mountains of corpses: “Most of you will know what itmeans when one hundred corpses are lying around, when five hun-dred are lying there or when one thousand are lying there. To havepersevered through this and at the same time, apart from the excep-tions of human weakness, to have remained decent: this has made ushard. This is a page of glory in our history that has never been andwill never be written.”4 In his memoirs, Rudolf Höss, commandant ofAuschwitz, followed this pattern of portraying the crimes of the SS asa tragedy for the murderers rather than the murdered.5 That Nazis intheir efforts to portray themselves as victims even resort to using thelanguage of their victims is also an old pattern: Eichmann told hisIsraeli captors that he also knew some Hebrew and began reciting theKaddish, which he of course heard often enough, viva voce from thelips of the Jews he murdered.

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich explained that this patternof portraying oneself as a victim contributes to externalizing evil, toseeing evil as extrinsic:

Replacing mourning through an identification with an innocent victimoften happens; it is above all a consistent defense against guilt.… Thepast is portrayed in consciousness in the following way: one sacrificeda lot, suffered through the war, afterwards was discriminated againstfor a long time even though one was innocent because one had ofcourse been ordered to do everything for which one is now accused.This strengthens the inner belief that one is the victim of evil forces:first of the evil Jews, then of the evil Nazis, finally of the evil Russians.In each case evil is externalized; it is looked for outside and strikesone from outside.6

The pattern of confusing victims and perpetrators was furthersanctioned by Ronald Reagan at Bitburg when he noted there thateven the members of the Waffen-SS were also victims of Nazism.Besides being applied to Schneider, it was also recently invoked indefense of Hans-Robert Jauß, the well-known Romanist scholar fromKonstanz, in response to the publication of the details of his careeras a decorated Waffen-SS officer that ended with an assignment toDachau in April 1945.7 Now, over fifty years after the war, for manyobservers, there are only victims and no perpetrators.

Putting this kind of spin on the deeds of the Waffen-SS demonstrateswhat Adorno called “the manipulative character of the perpetrators

78


of Auschwitz” in his famous 1966 radio lecture, “Education afterAuschwitz.” Adorno, though, had held out the hope that the perpetra-tors of Auschwitz might in fact help determine how their characterarose in the first place. Rather than making this hoped for contribution,they consistently portray themselves as victims, as the recent literatureon Schneider amply demonstrates. Adorno commented originally:

In attempting to prevent a repetition of Auschwitz it would appearessential to me to clarify first how the manipulative character origi-nates.… I would like to make a concrete suggestion: to study the per-petrators of Auschwitz with all the methods available to science,especially long-term psychoanalysis in order to determine possiblyhow someone turns into such a person. The only good that these peo-ple could still do is when they help somewhat, in contradiction totheir own character, that this situation not happen again. This wouldonly happen if they would be willing to cooperate in investigatingtheir own genesis.… Anyway, in the meantime they feel so safe—pre-cisely in their feeling like a collective, that they are all to a man oldNazis—that indeed hardly one of them has shown even feelings ofguilt. However, there are probably points of psychological connectionin them, or at least in many of them, through which this could bechanged, perhaps their narcissism, or simply put, their vanity. Theywould probably think themselves important if they could speakunhindered about themselves, like Eichmann, who apparently ofcourse expounded entire libraries.8

Although Schneider gave extensive interviews, the results weredisappointing. The rhetorical and legal strategy he apparently had tofollow for establishing his own innocence had to be to portray him-self as being harmless, convivial, decent, and avuncular, the veryepitome of the Biedermann, both before and after the Third Reich.Decency, as Himmler’s speech in Posen reveals, has always beenimportant for members of the Waffen-SS. If Schneider had admittedtoo much, he would have raised questions he would have preferrednot to have to answer, so that he necessarily had to play dumb—arole that stands in crass contradiction to the kind of cold intelligenceso omnipresent in his two careers. In light of the kind of evidenceassembled about his past, this strategy was perhaps more incriminat-ing than if he had been truthful. While artful, his lies revealed a pro-foundly narcissistic and manipulative character as predicted byAdorno, but, more importantly, the ingenuous response of someobservers to these lies is symptomatic of the current discourse onnational identity in Germany.

79


Before examining these reactions, a brief review of Schneider’s SScareer is called for. The SS-Ahnenerbe investigated under Himmler’sdirect sponsorship a variety of topics, ranging from the banal to theevil, to support and promote Nazi ideology. Topics and projectsincluded folk dance, runes, linguistic sociology, Germanic archeol-ogy, the publication of ten journals, including one on world literaturethat Schneider edited, racial physiology (Hirt’s skeleton collection)and “applied military research” (Wehrzweckforschung). This latter termcovered four kinds of medical experiments conducted on concentra-tion camp inmates ( Jews and members of the Polish Roman Catholicclergy): inmates were sprayed with mustard gas at close range invarying concentrations to determine which internal organs weredestroyed first and at what rate; inmates were placed in chambersthat reproduced atmospheric conditions at an altitude of several kilo-meters, causing them to die instantly; inmates were thrown into vatsfilled with salt water and ice while researchers patiently determinedhow long it took them to die from exposure; and inmates were shotat point blank range and then given an experimental drug to induceblood clotting. Schneider’s immediate superior Wolfram Sievers wastried and sentenced to death during the “doctors’ trials” in Nurem-berg. The Ahnenerbe also recruited thousands of so-called Germanicvolunteers for the SS from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, andFrance. Schneider distinguished himself in Holland where he ran theSS-Ahnenerbe operations in The Hague from late May 1940, rightafter the German invasion of Holland, to the end of June 1942.Schneider belonged to the staff of Hanns Albin Rauter, the rankingSS general in the Netherlands who was executed in Holland after thewar. Rauter wrote Sievers an enthusiastic recommendation in favor ofSchneider. From July 1942 to March 1945, Schneider was the deputydirector of the Ahnenerbe in Berlin, a position he accepted instead ofjoining the Reichsicherheitsdienst (SD), with which he nonetheless hadclose contact. A directive dated August 14, 1942, signed by SS Gen-eral Gottlob Berger, appointed Schneider head of all scholarly andscientific activity within the Ahnenerbe itself. In March 1945 itappears that Schneider switched to the SD and, as it now seemslikely, left Berlin for Schleswig-Holstein with other members of theSD. With this skeleton outline in mind, one can now turn to themajor studies of Schneider’s career that have appeared.

80


Changing Sides? Who Changes to Whose Side?

Ludwig Jäger, a professor of German with a speciality in linguisticsand semantics, has produced a thoroughly documented study ofSchneider’s first career in his study, Seitenwechsel, Der Fall Schneider/Schwerte und die Diskretion der Germanistik. This dense book presentsseamlessly Schneider’s career from 1933 to 1965, devoting virtuallyno space to speculation or commentary of any kind. It demonstratesthe massive and widespread collusion and sympathy of universitycolleagues in the first two decades after the war that made possibleSchneider’s second career. Jäger reconstructs in particularly minutedetail Schneider’s movements until he left Berlin in April, 1945 withmembers of the SD. Jäger’s work supplants the interim report pre-sented in August 1996 by a committee of historians officially com-missioned by the Ministry of Culture to investigate Schneider’spast—a report that gives the basic outline of both of Schneider’scareers.9 Jäger however fails to mention previous important researchconducted by Gerd Simon and by four graduate students fromAachen who authored Schweigepflicht, Eine Reportage.

Jäger’s work contradicts unequivocally the conclusions of theinterim report that an archeologist colleague of Schneider’s, Waltervon Stokar, rather than Schneider, was chiefly responsible for theconfiscation of medical equipment destined for Dachau and thatthere was no “conspiracy of professors” behind Schneider’s secondcareer. Actually Jäger does not show the existence of a “conspiracy”(a straw man set up by the interim report) but rather the quotidiancontinuity of influence maintained after the war by Nazi intellectuals(if one can use this term to characterize university-trained Nazis).Schneider did not need a conspiracy: the Nazi elite, functioning as anelite, automatically took care of its own, and not for dark ideologicalmotives but for the sake of self-preservation—whence the outrage feltby Schneider’s supporters that he had been singled out for specialpunishment. The reconstruction of Schneider’s postwar careerfocuses on the close support he received from Germanists who hadactively collaborated with the Ahnenerbe. The story that Jäger tells isutterly damning.

81


Jäger’s documentation for the period he considers, in particular, hisreconstruction of Schneider’s flight from Berlin, is invaluable, even ifhis presentation is not necessarily the most accessible. He demon-strates that members of the SS-Ahnenerbe who remained in Berlin inthe spring of the 1945 attached themselves to the “cultural depart-ment” of the Sicherheitsdienst under the overall leadership of OttoOhlendorf. In 1942 Ohlendorf commanded mobile killing units in theSoviet Union; in 1948 he was tried, convicted, and in 1951 executedfor crimes against humanity. Ohlendorf divided his subordinates intoa northern and a southern group, both of which were conceived asthe core for a future intelligence organization under Admiral Dönitz.The southern group was headed by Wilhelm Spengler, with whomSchneider had worked closely and unofficially for several years andwho co-edited several volumes with Schneider in the 1950s in a pub-lishing house where another SD comrade from Berlin, Erich Rößner,worked as reader. The “Ohlendorf-Nordgruppe” left Berlin by car onthe evening of April 19 headed for Schleswig-Holstein. During thistime Schneider must have acquired his new identity under SD aus-pices. Since Schneider knew that his work in the Ahnenerbe had oncebeen the subject of a BBC broadcast, he could have been afraid thathis name was on an Allied search list (it was not, but he had no wayof knowing this still-classified information), whence the self-incrimi-nating impulse to change his name.

When I originally uncovered Schneider’s past, the director of theBerlin Document Center, David Marwell, stressed to me that Schnei-der was too prominent a Nazi to have escaped denazification with-out protection. If the Americans had not protected him, as they hadKlaus Barbie (whose “cultural activities” as a member of the SD inThe Hague were administratively subordinate to Spengler, Schnei-der’s own SD contact and later collaborator), who had? One neednot look far: Schneider’s former contacts in the SD were Spenglerand Rößner, who both held doctorates in German literature. The1954/55 volumes that Schneider co-edited with Spengler were pub-lished by Stalling Verlag where Rößner worked as a reader. As earlyas 1951 Spengler was a prominent member of the board of directorsof the fully legal mutual aid association of former members of the SScalled “Die Stille Hilfe” and ran the press office for this organizationuntil 1958.

82


The continuity of elites before and after 1945 is the most strikingresult demonstrated by Jäger’s work and contradicts somewhat histitle, “changing sides.” Schneider cast his lot with the West Germanuniversity elite, an elite that successfully resisted denazification. Hedid not change sides; the elite to which he belonged did. The eliteremains in power, regardless of the dominant ideology, and it changesits beliefs with a certain cynical nonchalance characterized by the for-mula cuius regio, eius religio: the religion (or, in this case, ideology) ofthe ruler determines that of his subjects.

One of the concluding remarks made by Jäger bears closer scru-tiny. After examining the careers during the Third Reich of theGermanists who supported Schneider’s nomination as professor inAachen, Jäger stresses the virtual inevitability of Schneider’s beingappointed to the faculty of the Technical University of Aachen:

Therefore, if one examines all in all the close biographical connectionsof the outside evaluators or those involved in evaluating the naming ofa professor of German in Aachen and their involvement in Nazi poli-cies of scholarship and culture as well as the corresponding activities ofHans Ernst Schneider, then it becomes understandable why the list ofcandidates suggested by [Paul] Böckmann for Aachen already …appeared to be fixed before the search committee began its work.…Apparently, among other things, the lack of a historically sensitivePhilosophical Faculty at the Technical University of Aachen predes-tined this university to become the place where Schneider/Schwertewould be named professor.10

While entirely valid, Jäger’s conclusion essentially repeats a historicaltruism: West German universities were notorious for sheltering for-mer Nazis. More pressing and complicated is whether the early post-war generalized tolerance of former Nazis gave way in the course ofthe cold war to a more ominous phenomenon: whether, for example,the Stasi used specific knowledge of Schneider’s Waffen-SS career forthe purposes of blackmail. Could someone have threatened Schnei-der with revelation decades before the 1995 disclosure? To date it isstill not clear who knew about Schneider’s past and when.

Much of the literature about Schneider skirts the circumstancesconcerning the public revelation of his Waffen-SS career, as thoughthis matter were tangential. The exception to this rule is Schweigepflicht,and its account is recommended for further reading on this topic.While this situation is not pertinent to what Schneider himself did, it

83


does raise the issue of whether insiders knew of Schneider’s past andwhat they did with this knowledge. Jäger studiously avoids the ques-tion. In fact, Jäger apparently had intended to publish his study withKiepenheuer & Witsch and was forced to withdraw the book andrevise it after threats of legal action from Günther Weydt, the Ger-manist who, as director of the Deutsches Institut in Brussels duringthe war, must have known Schneider and who in 1965 actively sup-ported Schneider’s candidacy in Aachen. Other researchers, fearfulas well of legal action by members of the faculty at Aachen, whosemajor contribution to clarifying the phenomenon has been mutualvilification, have either been forced to withdraw their work on thistopic, such as Claus Leggewie, or to reprint a careful selection ofalready printed opinions on the issue, such as Gerd Simon andJoachim Lerchenmueller.

A brief chronology of the discovery bears repeating. In July 1992,while conducting research at the Berlin Document Center on thecareer of literary scholars during the Third Reich, I stumbled acrossSchneider’s double identity. David Marwell, the center director andformer chief investigator of the Justice Department in the Klaus Bar-bie affair, immediately granted me virtually unlimited research sup-port to reconstruct Schneider’s past because, since Schneider andBarbie had both worked in The Hague at the same time, Marwellwas afraid that Schneider, like Barbie, might have been protected bythe Americans after the war. German observers have completelyignored this specifically American context for the research that I con-ducted on Schneider: Marwell wanted to avoid a second Barbie scan-dal. With Marwell’s recommendation, I sent my reconstruction ofSchneider’s past to Simon Wiesenthal on August 14, 1992. Withintwo months Wiesenthal had determined that any crimes Schneidermight have committed were no longer within the statute of limita-tions. With the first results of my inquiry—as recommended by Mar-well—to the US Army archives in Fort Meade, it quickly becameapparent that the counter-intelligence corps had had no contact atany time with a Hans Ernst Schneider (though it seemed sometimesas though every other Hans Schneider in Germany turned up in theirfiles). At this point in the late fall of 1992 the matter appeared closed.Schneider seemed at best an interesting example of two careers inone lifetime and nothing more.

84


In June 1994, during a faculty meeting discussion of my candidacyfor a professorship in Comparative Literature at Aachen, JohannesFloß, then dean of the Philosophical Faculty, alluded in veiled termsto my research on the Nazi past of a former high-ranking member ofthe university. He has never explained how he knew of my work inthis area, although he clearly did not know that I had communicatedthe results of my research to Wiesenthal. Although this statementcould not have been vaguer, some of his listeners knew immediatelywho and what were in question. The rumor mills began to turn furi-ously. Schneider’s past was suddenly the talk of the town. The univer-sity itself began a timid investigation that led nowhere.

In early November 1994, Peter Marx, the personal assistant of theminister for universities, asked me informally whether there was anytruth to the rumors in Aachen. In response I traveled to the ministryin Düsseldorf with copies of documents from the Berlin DocumentCenter and showed him what I had found. This action led the min-istry to initiate its own investigation. A pair of journalists from theDutch broadcasting company KRO (Holland 1) had also gottenwind of the rumors in Aachen and had begun their own research,which eventually led to a broadcast in April 1995 that marked thepublic revelation of Schneider’s double identity. These journalistsdiscovered in Ludwigsburg the list of medical equipment confiscatedfrom the University of Leiden that Schneider had signed. They alsofound out that in the late 1960s Schneider had been under investiga-tion in absentia by the Ludwigsburg office for Nazi war crimes forcomplicity in murder. Wiesenthal had concluded prematurely thatthe statute of limitations no longer applied to Schneider and anentirely new situation took hold because of this discovery.

The predominant reaction of outrage throughout the Germanpress, however, was quickly overshadowed by nebulous charges lev-eled (and just as quickly withdrawn) by officials from the Universityof Aachen that the University had been blackmailed. Schneider him-self indicated that he had received a series of threatening telephonecalls from a caller speaking in a markedly southern German accent.Suddenly interest centered not on Schneider’s Waffen-SS career, butrather about how knowledge of this past could have been used in thepresent. Questions were raised as to whether any of Schneider’s col-leagues might have known and used this knowledge. While this

85


question at first glance might seem important, it ultimately trivializesthe entire issue. A person might be conceivably blackmailed, forexample, because of past sexual or financial indiscretions, but thestuff of sexual or financial scandal is hardly in the same league withknowing that Schneider had run Himmler’s research organization ona day-to-day basis.

The fact that the charge of blackmail was raised so loudly, sovehemently, and so suddenly (and then vanished as though it hadnever been mentioned in the first place) should not be overlooked.Marwell’s observation that Schneider was too high-ranking a Nazi tohave escaped denazification without protection assumes a new sig-nificance in this context. At the same time Schneider’s contacts withprominent former members of the SD such as Rößner and Spenglercould hardly have escaped notice from careful observers at the time.For this reason, I would surmise that the Stasi was aware of Schnei-der’s career and may have made use of this knowledge to protecttheir agents in the West. The GDR published the Braunbuch in theearly 1960s listing the Nazi pasts of prominent members of WestGerman society and politics (omitting any reference to East Ger-mans). Schneider is not listed there. Yet in the early 1970s he hadbeen invited on a lecture tour to the GDR. It is impossible to believethat the Stasi had not investigated his past before allowing an invita-tion to be issued to him. It is therefore likely, especially given theimportance of the technical and scientific research conducted atAachen (which as an institution has one of the highest amounts ofprivate-sector-sponsored research in all of Germany) that at somepoint in the past someone used knowledge concerning Schneider’spast to protect West German agents of the Stasi who also were affili-ated with the university of Aachen. When Leggewie asked Schneiderabout possible Stasi connections, Schneider answered with a cleverrhetorical question: what would he as a Germanist have to offer tothe Stasi? What Schneider neglects to mention, however, is that as a university administrator with an unrevealed SS past, he was pre-eminently open to blackmail for institutional reasons. Since, as isknown, the Stasi recruited engineering students in Aachen, whywould they have stopped there? The future publication of the namesof West German agents (particularly within the universities and jus-tice system) who worked for the Stasi (the still-classified Rosewood

86


Files) will certainly cast much needed light on this issue and removean important and consummately practical obstacle to a truly mean-ingful education after Auschwitz.11

Changing Masks?

After the public disclosure of his SS past, Schneider skillfully por-trayed himself as a victim. This pose was a self-serving mask. Butwas this the only mask Schneider ever wore? Gerd Simon, a Ger-manic linguist affiliated with the University of Tübingen, has collab-orated with a younger colleague, Joachim Lerchenmueller, anassistant lecturer of German at the University of Limerick, to pro-duce a highly uneven account of Schneider’s two careers. Much oftheir book was ready for publication in late 1995 and should havebeen published then. Their treatment is sometimes flawed by inter-pretative comments that are frankly amateurish.12 They apparentlydid not revise their findings to include subsequently published mate-rial, and this fact explains the book’s fragmented character. AlthoughSimon and Lerchenmueller’s book is not nearly as heavily annotatedas Jäger’s, their presentation of certain key areas is often clearer.They offer a lucid portrayal of the “nest of Germanists” in the SD(chapter 9), of Schneider’s close working relationship to the SD(chapter 18), of the journal Die Weltliteratur (chapter 12) that Schnei-der edited, and of the “Germanic scientific effort” (chapter 17). Theyalso raise in an unbiased but somewhat abbreviated manner the fun-damental questions of who in Aachen knew what and when, andwhy the ministry responsible for universities initially dragged its feetin investigating Schneider’s past (chapter 29). Some of the shorterchapters, while not breaking new ground, afford useful summaries ofrelevant matters such as institutions within the Third Reich responsi-ble for scholarly affairs (chapter 8), or the individual stages ofSchneider’s career in the SS-Ahnenerbe (chapters 11 and 19-22).

They argue forcefully that Walther Wüst, the Indo-Europeanistwho served as curator of the SS-Ahnenerbe (and rector of the Uni-versity of Munich responsible for sending Sophie and Hans Scholl tothe guillotine), must have known perfectly well what Rascher andHirt were up to with their “human experiments,” even though Wüst

87


was clever enough to argue in Nuremberg that as a specialist in thehumanities he could not understand what this “research” entailedand pinned the blame instead on Wolfram Sievers, who was theAhnenerbe’s manager and Schneider’s immediate superior. Sieverswas convicted and hanged.

Having made a cogent argument for Wüst’s culpability, they fail tomake the connection that Schneider himself, when confronted withhis signature on the list of medical equipment confiscated for Dachau,mounted the exact same defense as Wüst did in Nuremburg. Theyeven reproduce (253) Rascher’s cover letter to the list of requestedequipment that specifically asks that the list be forwarded to Dr.Schneider (clear proof that Rascher and Schneider must have knowneach other). If the “I dunno, I’m just a layman” defense worked forWüst fifty years ago, then obviously it must (and did) work for Schnei-der with contemporary prosecutors in Ludwigsburg—and this despitethe overlooked fact that the supposed medical layman Schneideredited a volume in the 1950s devoted to leading researchers in thefield of medicine, biology, and anthropology (Forscher und Wis-senschaftler im heutigen Europa: Erforscher des Lebens, Mediziner, Biologen,Anthropologen, Oldenburg: Stalling-Verlag, 1955).13 In the ten yearsafter the war, how did the layman Schneider, otherwise sufficientlybusy with building up his career as a Germanist, suddenly acquire suf-ficient medical knowledge as a layman to invite some thirty-two con-tributions, including one from Otmar von Verscheur, once director ofthe Frankfurt University Institute of Hereditary Biology and RacialHygiene and dissertation adviser of Josef Mengele?

In light of this expertise, how plausible is Schneider’s claim14 thathe did not know what Rascher’s list implied, because he was a med-ical layman? The negotiations and preparations for the confiscationof the medical equipment for Leiden were not a one-time affair, butwent on for a period of over six months prior to January 1943 whenthe list in question appears with Schneider’s signature. Evidenceoriginally published by the Dutch scholar N.K.C.A. In’t Veld, andamplified with materials now available in Jäger’s book, indicates thatin February 1943 Schneider and Sievers were holding talks in TheHague regarding the delivery of the equipment previously requestedbut not yet delivered.15 All of the arguments adduced by Schneiderin his own defense stress that a single signature on one occasion does

88


not and cannot demonstrate complicity in murder. The entire mat-ter, however, goes far beyond a single incident; it was a long-termproject that Schneider worked on over a period of several months.

Perhaps this conclusion is immediately obvious, but it is hardlyoverstated. It is perplexing when two researchers as well informedand diligent as Simon and Lerchenmueller, shy away from drawingthese inferences. In reading their book, one cannot get away from thefeeling that they are pulling their punches. Here lies, regrettably, thefailure of their book: because, as the subtitle of their book says, theywish to tell not only the story of Schneider but also “other historiesabout the adaptability of German scholarship in the twentieth cen-tury.” While giving parallel cases to Schneider helps contextualize theentire phenomenon, much more space would have been required todo justice to the question. For this reason, regrettably, the cursorymention of similar cases weakens the focus of their analysis.

Part of the failure also originates with the organizing metaphor ofthe book itself: changing masks. They begin their book with an expla-nation of identity as mask, based on a popular, albeit false, etymologyof the word person. The Latin term for mask, persona, does notderive, as they claim, from the unattributed per-sonare, “to make asound through [a mask],” as the most cursory inspection of the rele-vant historical linguistic scholarship immediately shows.16 This over-sight on the part of two scholars whose home discipline is linguisticsis unfortunate. Their musings on identity, specifically Schneider’sidentity, depend on a false popular etymology reinforced with allu-sions to Kant’s epistemology, and they beg the question of whether“Schneider” and “Schwerte” are mutually exclusive identities.

They ask whether we have learned, whether we even want tolearn anything from the Schneider/Schwerte phenomenon. After all,they note, Hans Schwerte was still living among us. While not wish-ing to downplay Schneider’s change of name as a peccadillo orKavaliersdelikt, they conclude their book with the remark, “one canonly wonder about a public that without a word regarding suchabrupt, 180-degree changes of mask returns to its daily agenda butthat for years gets excited about the name change from Schneider toSchwerte in the most heated debates as though we had personallymet the devil in our midst.”17

89


Given the Faustian context that affords the backdrop of much ofthe debate about the Schneider/Schwerte phenomenon, why do theyraise and then immediately belittle the phenomenon’s moral aspect?Schneider was assuredly no Mephisto, certainly was not the spirit whoalways negated, der Geist, der stets verneint. Quite the contrary, he wasan opportunist, first and foremost, der Geist, der stets zu Diensten ist, thespirit who always stood ready to serve whatever master was there.Schneider was no devil, no Mephisto, for his two careers show that helacked the courage for disobedience or the fascination of evil, or evenpurity (to cite Jacques Maritain’s remark that Satan est pur). He washardly a Faust either, for neither did two spirits inhabit his breast nordid his two careers show intellectual curiosity or striving of the leastsort, but rather a great deal like the studious Wagner, the servant ofFaust: eager to learn, dutiful, subordinate, and dull.

Learning from History?

Claus Leggewie’s Von Schneider zu Schwerte, Das ungewöhnliche Lebeneines Mannes, der aus der Geschichte lernen wollte, is at once the best andthe worst study of the Schneider/Schwerte phenomenon. It is thebest because, as a piece of prose, it is skillfully written, well orga-nized, and highly readable, though almost journalistic rather thanscholarly, and especially because it draws on personal conversationswith Schneider/Schwerte himself. Yet it is the worst because itbecomes ultimately an apology rather than an objective criticalanalysis. Although Leggewie, a professor of sociology at the Univer-sity of Giessen, is undoubtedly familiar with the overwhelming evi-dence for the continuity of Nazi elites in the Federal Republic(especially in universities), he insists that Schneider sincerely con-verted to democracy (and here the conversion model fits the old for-mula cuius regio, eius religio), that he did not lead a “double life,” andthat his adherence to democracy showed he was “unambiguouslyanti-restoration” (297). What specific policies or beliefs demonstratethis hackneyed claim remain unmentioned.

The evidence that Leggewie assembles to support this claim isultimately not convincing on its own merits, independent of thesympathetic spin that Leggewie gives it. Schneider’s articles on the

90


tragic published during the war stress that “the German” is tragicbecause he falls victim to his illusions. This argument anticipatesSchneider’s study Faust und das Faustische. Schneider’s musings on thetragic were written at the same time that he was busy organizing theconfiscation of scientific equipment for the medical experiments atDachau. But “the German” is the victim, “the German” is tragic.Schneider succeeded, at least partially, in getting some contempo-rary German observers to accept his status as tragic victim.

As engaging as Leggewie’s conversations with Schneider were, heseems often to have been a very credulous, if not gullible interviewer.For example, Leggewie notes that the entire question of the credibilityof Schneider’s “shock conversion” depends on the plausibility of hisvarious explanations. Leggewie repeats in extensive detail the tall taleof Schneider’s adventuresome flight by bicycle from Berlin to Lübeckin the last week of April 1945, commenting only that this account“sounds highly improbable” (149). Schneider would have had to passthrough the Russian lines encircling Berlin, not to mention escapenotice from the mobile SS police troops on patrol to round up andexecute deserters summarily. Yet in order to underscore the probabil-ity of Schneider’s escape, he reiterates Schneider’s claim of hardlybeing alone on the road. That the roads in Mecklenburg at this timewere full could not be more true: Leggewie might have and indeedshould have noted that in the last week of April 1945 Schneider’salleged route would have crossed that of the death march of the con-centration camp inmates from Ravensbrück and from Sachsenhausen.Concentration camps? Schneider claimed not to have known of theirexistence until he saw pictures of Bergen-Belsen posted by the Britishin Lübeck in early May 1945, as though he did not know where themedical equipment confiscated from Leiden was sent. Since Jäger hasestablished the more likely scenario for Schneider’s departure fromBerlin, further commentary is unnecessary.

At this point in Leggewie’s account a minor but ultimately highlysymptomatic mistake occurs. In order to escape detection as a mem-ber of the Waffen-SS, Schneider had to remove the tattoo of hisblood group that most members of the Waffen-SS had under theirleft armpit (done in order to facilitate blood transfusions on the bat-tlefield). Leggewie, however, speaks of the “membership numberthat all SS members had tattooed” (157) on their upper arms. Only

91


inmates of the concentration camps had their numbers tattooed ontheir forearms. Either Schneider told Leggewie another tale orLeggewie (and perhaps Schneider) confused the tattoos of the vic-tims with those of the perpetrators. Since Leggewie’s apology of theconverted Nazi Schneider seeks to portray him as a victim (followingthe implicit rule: bad Germans were perpetrators, good Germanswere victims, and Schneider is a good German), this confusion isboth telling and predictable. Further evidence for this confusioncomes when Leggewie refers to Schneider’s success at recruitingDutch volunteers for the Waffen-SS by noting that these 20,000 sol-diers served “on the wrong side of the European civil war” (94). Thisterm for World War II was popularized by Ernst Nolte in 1987 and,as Deborah Lipstadt noted, “comes dangerously close to validatingthe deniers” of the Holocaust.18

Another minor but again significant inconsistency emerges inSchneider’s explanation of why he walked around the universitycampus in Erlangen in SS riding pants and boots after the war. Not,as some would have it, that Schneider felt so sure of not beingdenounced; rather, he simply did not have the money for otherclothes (189). While there are many accounts of students in the earlypostwar years wearing their old army uniforms, provided of coursethey had been dyed a new color, this fact does not explain howSchneider, who had left Berlin on a bicycle, or his wife, who had leftBerlin with her trusty genagelte Haferlschuhe (145), came into posses-sion of this uniform. (This term for Frau Schneider’s shoes is sokitschy that it defies translation, and of course its kitschiness is delib-erately intended to exculpate. But, as Saul Friedländer has shown,the recent discourse on Nazism recurrently invokes kitsch, andLeggewie’s brief allusion to the genagelte Haferlschuhe fits a larger pat-tern.19) Schneider claimed that he left Berlin by bicycle in aninfantryman’s uniform, not in SS riding boots, and he claimed thathis wife by pure coincidence ended up in a village in Lower Franco-nia whose folksy name is also (of course) the occasion for a joke, andwhich also by coincidence was very close to the interim headquartersfor the SS-Ahnenerbe after its evacuation from Berlin. Coincidently,no one has noticed until now that this same village, Neuendettelsau,was home to a series of “nursing homes” that represented, as RobertJay Lifton has noted, a network of medical institutions that played an

92


essential role in the Nazis’s “euthanasia program.”20 Leggewie fails toask how Schneider managed to come up with, of all things, anundyed SS uniform in Erlangen. Instead we are told how poor thestruggling Germanist with a growing family was.

Moreover, given Schneider’s own consistent hostility to Catholi-cism, it is startling that Leggewie chooses, without apparent irony, toexplain Schneider’s conversion in secularized terms explicitly takenfrom Catholic theology (164f.): while Schneider avoided a publicconfession, or “contrition of the mouth” (contritio oris), his secondcareer, according to Leggewie, showed the “contrition of [his] heart”(contritio cordis) that is mirrored in penetential acts (satisfactio operum).Leggewie never actually names the “sins” Schneider committed forwhich he should feel contrition in the first place. On reading thispassage, one cannot forget that as early as 1940 Schneider dismissedany Christian interpretation of literature or culture. In any discus-sion of possible contrition, one might recall the observation made bythe Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim: “One must face the stern,bitter truth that a repentant Höss or Eichmann, Himmler or Hitlercannot be conceived. Indeed, even Heidegger, if ever he repented atall, failed to do so in public. Yet the sin that required repentance hadbeen committed in the glare of worldwide publicity.”21

By the end of the book, however, Leggewie drops these Catholicnotions to conclude with the thesis (perhaps more Protestant in itsstress on justification by works) that informs the entire book thatSchneider “did not work through his past in the public eye, but workedoff his past professionally and in the context of his institution. And inthis manner he has even made himself worthy of the Federal Repub-lic.”22 (Emphasis in original.) The distinction between workingthrough and working off one’s past was suggested to Leggewie bySchneider himself. It begs a brace of questions: a past that one canwork off implies a neatly delineated quantum, a quantifiable debt,imposed from the outside that must be paid off, like a war repara-tion, whereas a past that one works through implies an interiorizedprocess arising from an inner, moral necessity that impinges on thepresent and future. Here one sees that Schneider is an utterly cynicaland unreconstructed Nazi: he views the German defeat in World WarII in terms comparable to the Kriegsschuldfrage of World War I.

93


If one judges Schneider’s conversations with Leggewie in light of Adorno’s suggestion about speaking with the perpetrators ofAuschwitz about its cause, one sees only that Schneider’s self-right-eous vanity emerged triumphant to manipulate his interviewer.Although Leggewie subtitles his book, “the unusual life of a manwho wanted to learn from history,” he never actually specifies whatSchneider in fact learned from history. Should one therefore assumethat Schneider’s mere desire to learn from history redeemed him?

To make Schneider into a symbol of Germany’s tranformationfrom a dictatorship to a democracy, the epitome of the Germancareer, is a subtle denial that excuses Schneider too quickly, anduncritically sweeps under the rug the involvement of an entire net-work of former SS collaborators and German politicians and bureau-crats. The exemplary feature of Schneider’s career lies not in anunproven claim of his conversion to democracy, but rather in thecontinuity of elites.23 As a sociologist, Leggewie might have consid-ered the ambiguities of this phenomenon and how it illustrates whatMaurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who died in Buchenwald, calledla sociologie de méconnaissance, “the sociology of failed recognition.”What Schneider told Leggewie attests not only to Schneider’s failureto recognize the causes leading to Auschwitz but also to Leggewie’sfailure to recognize Schneider for the manipulative character that heconsistently was. As a sociologist, Leggewie should have looked toReinhard Bendix’s sober incorporation of biographical and autobio-graphical materials into a larger social context. Perhaps the petitebourgeoisie from which Schneider came has indeed been trans-formed in a modern democratic Germany. These larger dimensions,however, are not treated here.

Education after Auschwitz: Moving from the Inability to Mourn to Productive Outrage

The works devoted to Schneider employ a range of metaphors thatalready mark a bias toward the subject and all beg the question of howmuch Schneider actually changed. These metaphors include “chang-ing sides,” “changing masks,” and “transformation zone.” A differentSchneider appears in each of these studies, largely because it is hard

94


to determine exactly what Schneider’s careers mean when takentogether. The metaphors that have been employed to describe Schnei-der’s two careers in one life remain ultimately just that: metaphors. As long as one does not confuse the object described metaphoricallywith the metaphor, no danger is done, for no metaphor equals its ref-erent. Metaphors (to use a metaphor) can be like the broom of themagician’s apprentice: they can take on a life of their own and sweepaway important distinctions.

The one overwhelming conclusion that emerges from all of theseworks is Schneider’s consummate artistry as a unrepentant manipula-tive character. Schneider’s contemporary success can be judged bythe fact that some observers are eager to absolve him of a Nazi pastin a symbolic gesture of absolving Germany of this same past. Yetalongside these naive attempts by some commentators remains thedeeply felt outrage expressed by so many younger contemporaries atthe public revelations of Schneider’s SS past—an outrage that echoesthe unspoken fear that Germany is perhaps still not free of the manip-ulative character that made Auschwitz possible. While much of theanger at the revelations of Schneider’s past has been dismissed asbeing hypocritical, this reaction is mistaken. It marks a crucial depar-ture from the discussion of (some) Germans’ inability to mourn: nowwith cold war constraints removed, education after Auschwitz canrecommence. Of course it is important to establish who knew aboutSchneider’s past and used this knowledge improperly, but it is moreimportant to take note of the outraged reactions among many con-temporaries because this very outrage marks the emergence of a farmore productive political discourse in Germany.

95


Notes

1. The works include the following:1. “Von aller Politik denkbar weit entfernt …” Die RWTH — Ein Lesebuch, ed. Oase

e.V. (Aachen, 1995).2. “Die Feierlichkeiten sind nicht betroffen”: Die Fälle Schneider, Gehlen und Rohmoser

im 125. Jahr der RWTH Aachen, ed. Fachschaft Philosophie der RWTH(Aachen, 1995).

3. Ein Germanist und seine Wissenschaft, Der Fall Schneider/Schwerte, ed. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlanger Universitätsreden, Nr.53/1996, 3. Folge.

4. AutorInnenkollektiv für Nestbeschmutzung, Schweigepflicht, Eine Reportage,Der Fall Schneider und andere Versuche, nationalsozialistische Kontinuitäten in derWissenschaftsgeschichte aufzudecken (Münster, 1996).

5. Sprache und Literatur im Unterricht 77 (1996)6. Vertuschte Vergangenheit, Der Fall Schwerte und die NS-Vergangenheit der deutschen

Hochschulen, ed. Helmut König, Wolfgang Kuhlmann and Klaus Schwabe(Munich, 1997).

7. Ungeahntes Erbe, Der Fall Schneider/Schwerte: Persilschein für eine Lebenslüge, EineDokumentation, ed. Antirassismus-Referat der Studentischen Versammlungan der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Aschaffenberg,1998).

8. Ludwig Jäger, Seitenwechsel, Der Fall Schneider/Schwerte und die Diskretion derGermanistik (Munich, 1998).

9. Claus Leggewie, Von Schneider zu Schwerte, Das ungewöhnlicheLeben einesMannes, der aus der Geschichte lernen wollte (Munich, 1998).

10. Der Fall Schwerte im Kontext, ed. Helmut König (Opladen, 1998).11. Verwandlungspolitik, NS-Eliten in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, ed.

Wilfried Loth and Bernd-A. Rusinek (Frankfurt, 1998).12. Gerd Simon and Joachim Lerchenmueller, Maskenwechsel, Wie der SS-

Hauptsturmführer Schneider zum BRD-Hochschulrektor Schwerte wurde und andereGeschichten über die Wendigkeit deutscher Wissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert(Tübingen, 1999).

2. Walter Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” in Walter Benjamin, EinLesebuch (Leipzig, 1996), 191: “Es ist nicht nur der Krieg der Materialschlachten,sondern auch der verlorenen. Damit freilich inganz besonderem Sinne derdeutsche. Den Krieg aus ihrem Innersten heraus geführt zu haben, könnten auchandere Völker von sich behaupten. Ihn aus dem Innsten veroren zu haben, nicht.Das Besondere an der gegenwärtigen letzten Phase jener Auseinandersetzung mitdem verlorenen Krieg, die Deutschland seit 1919 so schwer erschüttert, ist nun,daß gerade sein Verlus für die Deutschheit in Anspruch genommen wird.… Wasnun das letzte Unternehmen, mit dem wir es hier zu tun haben, von den früherenabhebt, das ist die Neigung, den Verlust des Krieges ernster zu nehmen als diesenKrieg selbst.”

3. Leggewie, 10, 23: “Ich habe ein Leben und dann ein neues Leben geführt. Ichhabe mich icht verdoppelt.… Ich weiß nicht, wer Schneider ist, aber ich werdedafür geradestehen müssen.”

96


4. Der Nationalsozialismus, Dokumente 1933-1945 (Frankfurt, 1957), 114: “Von Euchwerden die meisten wissen, was es heißt, wenn 100 Leichen beisammenleigen,wenn 500 da liegen oder wenn 1000 da liegen. Dies durchgehalten zu haben,und dabei — abgesehen von Ausnahmen menschlicher Schwächen — anständiggeblieben zu sein, das hat uns hart gemacht. Dies ist ein niemals geschriebenesund niemals zu schreibendes Ruhmesblatt unserer Geschichte.”

5. Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, Foundations of Post-Holocaust JewishThought (Bloomington, 1982), 242.

6. Alexander and Margarete Mitschlerlich, Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern, Grundlagenkollektiven Verhaltens (Munich, 1967, 1977), 60: “Die Ersetzung der Trauer durchIdentifikation mit dem unschuldigen Opfer geschieht häufig; sie ist vor allemeine konsequente Abwehr der Schuld … Im Bewußtsein stellt sich die Vergan-genheit dann folgendermaßen dar: Man hat viele Opfer gebracht, hat den Kriegerlitten, ist danach lange diskriminiert gewesen, obgleich man unschuldig war,weil man ja zu alledem, was einem jetzt vorgeworfen wird, befohlen war. Dasverstärkt die innere Auffassung, man sei das Opfer böser Mächte: zuerst derbösen Juden, dann der bösen Nazis, schließlich der bösen Russen. In jedem Fallist das Böse externalisiert; es wird draußen gesucht und trifft einen von außen.”

7. See my article, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung nach dem Kalten Krieg, Der FallHans Robert Jauß und das Verstehen,” Germanisten, Tidskrift för svensk germanistik,Zeitschrift schwedischer Germanisten, Jahrgang 2, Nummer 1 (1997), 28-43.

8. Now published in Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” Kulturkritikund Gesellschaft, II: Eingriffe, Stichworte, Anhang (Gesammelte Schriften, 10:2)(Frankurt, 1977), 684-5: “Bei Versuchen, der Wiederholung von Auschwitz entge-genzuwirken, schiene es mir wesentlich, zunächst Klarheit darüber zu schaffen,wie der manipulative Charakter zustande kommt.… Ich möchte einen konkretenVorschlag machen: die Schuldigen von Auschwitz mit allen der Wissenschaft ver-fügbaren Methoden, insbesondere mit langjährigen Psychoanalysen, zu studieren,um möglicherweise herauszubringen, wie ein Mensch so wird. Das, was jene anGutem irgend noch tun können, ist, wenn sie selbst, in Widerspruch zu ihrer eige-nen Charakterstruktur, etwas dazu helfen, daß es nicht noch einmal so komme.Das würde nur dann geschehen, wenn sie mitarbeiten wollten bei der Erforschungihrer Genese.… Einstweilen jedenfalls fühlen sie — eben in ihrem Kollektiv, imGefühl, daß sie allesamt alte Nazis sind — sich so geborgen, daß kaum einer auchnur Schuldgefühle gezeigt hat. Aber vermutlich existieren auch in ihnen, oderwenigstens in manchen, psychologische Anknüpfungspunkte, durch die sich dasändern könnte, etwa ihr Narzißmus, schlicht gesagt ihre Eitelkeit. Sie mögen sichwichtig vorkommen, wenn sie hemmungslos von sich sprechen können, so wieEichmann, der ja offenbar ganze Bibliotheken von Bändern einsprach.”

9. Bernd-A. Rusinek, Ottfried Dascher, Friedrich P. Kallenberg and Horst Müller,Zwischenbilanz der Historischen Kommission zur Unstersuchung des FallesSchneider/Schwerte und seiner zeitsgeschichtlichen Umstände (Düsseldorf, 1996).

10. On page 337: “Betrachtet man also insgesamt die enge biographische Vernet-zung jener Gutachter bzw. gutachterlich Tätigen im Aachener Verfahren undihre Verstrickung in die NS-Wissenschafts- und Kulturpolitik sowie in dasentsprechende Tätigkeitsfeld Hans Ernst Schneiders, so wird nachvollziehbar,warum die im wesentlichen von Böckmann generierte Aachener Liste bereits …vor Beginn der Arbeit der Berufungskommission festzustehen schien.… Offen-sichtlich hat u.a. die Nichtexistenz einer historisch sensiblen Philosophischen

97


Fakultät der RWTH Aachen diese Hochschule dazu prädestiniert, zum Beru-fungsort Schneider/Schwertes zu werden.”

11. Hubertus Knabe, in Die unterwanderte Republik. Stasi im Westen (Berlin: Proplyäen,1999), pp. 349-50, identified the importance of the University of Aachen for theStasi: “Für die Technische Hochschule Aachen zeichnete hingegen die H[aupt]V[erwaltung] A-Abteilung XV [der Stasi] verantwortlich, die hauptsächlich dieRüstungsindustrie, die Raumfahrtforschung sowie den Anlagen- und Fahrzeugbauin der Bundesrepublik ausspionierte und daher interessiert sein mußte.”

12. In chapter four, the authors present an excursus on the concept of race before1933, accepting for unclear reasons Kant’s determination that race represented avalid and a priori philosophical concept. The problems here are legion: the bibli-ography is sketchy and no mention is made, for example, of Erich Voegelin’s clas-sic study from 1933, Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus. Theyseem unfamiliar with contemporary critical race theory in which the concept ofrace has been examined in its historical, philosophical, legal and political con-texts and which stresses that race is a social construct, not a biological concept.

13. Although Schneider uses the term Anthropologen in his title, in his table of con-tents he uses the term Anthropobiologen.

14. Leggewie, “Was es damit auf sich hatte, konnte ich als medizinischer Laie ohne-hin nicht beurteilen” (135).

15. N.K.C.A. In’t Veld, De SS en Nederland: Documenten uit SS-Archieven 1935-1945(The Hague, 1976), 943-4.

16. Walther v. Wartburg, “persona,” Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Basel,1958), Bd. 8, 269-73; Fritz Altheim, Geschichte der lateinischen Sprache, von denAnfängen bis zum Beginn der Literatur (Frankfurt, 1951), 328-45; “Persona,” PaulysReal-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft begonnen von Georg Wissowa(Stuttgart, 1938), Bd. 19, col. 1036-41.

17. Page 391: “Wer diesen Maskenwechsel im Kontext sieht, kann sich nur wundernüber eine Öffentlichkeit, die über solche abrupten Maskenwechsel ‘um 180 Grad’wortlos zur Tagesordnung übergeht, sich aber über einenNamenswechsel wie denvon Schneider zu Schwerte in hitzigsten Debatten über Jahre hinweg aufregt, alsseien wir dem Teufel persönlich in unserer Mitte begegnet.”

18. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory(New York: Plume, 1994), 214.

19. Saul Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism, An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York,1982), 27, 49.

20. The Nazi Doctors, Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: BasicBooks, 1986), p. 67.

21. To Mend the World, 195. I have deliberately cited Fackenheim because contempo-rary German observers in their readiness to dispense absolution to Schneiderhave forgotten the voice of his victims, whether Jewish or Catholic.

22. Leggewie, 309: “Schwerte hat seine Vergangenheit zwar nicht … coram publicoaufgearbeitet, er hat sie aber professionell und im Rahmen seiner Institution abgear-beitet. Und damit hat er sich um die Bundesrepublik sogar verdient gemacht.”

23. Robert D. Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, 1976).

98


Documents

The Schneider/Schwerte Phenomenon