Erich Maschke

Erich Maschke
Born	(1900-03-02)March 2, 1900 Berlin, German Empire
Died	Heidelberg, West Germany
Occupation	Historian, professor

Erich Maschke (March 2, 1900 – February 11, 1982) was a German historian and history professor. He taught most recently at the Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg. He is best known for publishing the report from the Maschke Committee which investigated the death of German prisoners-of-war during World War II.

Biography

Born in Berlin on 2 March 1900, Maschke was the son of an ophthalmologist. After graduating from Askanische high school in 1919 he studied medicine in Berlin, Innsbruck and Freiburg. He was involved in the Bündische Jugend, a German Youth Movement. He was an editor with the magazine Der weiße Ritter (The white knight). These experiences led him to change career. He went to Berlin in 1923 and Königsberg in 1925 where he studied history and geography, among other things, under Erich Caspar. In 1927, he completed his doctorate with a thesis on the Teutonic Knights and his habilitation in 1929 with his habilitation thesis on Peter's Pence in Poland and eastern Germany. His research was also focused on the history and historiography of Prussia and the European Late Middle Ages.

1933–1945

After completing his habilitation in 1929, Maschke was appointed lecturer and in 1935 non-tenured associate professor of East and West Slavic history in Konigsberg. He became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1933 and also joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1937. That same year he was appointed Chair of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Jena.

For a publication accompanying an exhibition to the Nazi Party in 1938 under the title "Europas Schicksal im Osten" (Europe's fate in the East), Maschke posed the question of "east colonization", explaining that this is historically seen as the "ethnic history of the German return-migration in the once-Germanic East". He coined the phrase Dreieinheit von Rasse, Volk und Raum (trinity of race, ethnicity and space).

During the Second World War he was in charge of training the Wehrmacht General Staff in Poznań. In his journalistic contributions in 1940 and 1941, he welcomed the military change as a prerequisite to the establishment of a German domination in Europe. In 1942 he was called to the University of Leipzig, where he researched mainly on the Middle Ages, especially the study of the Staufers. From 1943 to 1945, Maschke lectured on the German American Bund. He also worked as a research consultant with the Amt Rosenberg, participating in the development of curricula for Nazi Ordensburg and worked as an editor for Alfred Rosenberg's Literature Office as well as for the Party Censorship Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature (PPK). In 1943 he was able to publish, in a monograph, the results of his research into the imperial history of the house of Hohenstaufen.

Post-1945

In 1953, after eight years of being a Soviet prisoner of war, he returned to his family, then living in Speyer. Pursuant to an agreement with the city, he published various works on Speyer's history for several years beginning in 1954. In the same year he received, through Fritz Ernst, a teaching position at the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg. He taught the trade and economic history of the Middle Ages. In 1956 he became head of the Department of Economic and Social History. From 1959 until his retirement in 1968, he led, together with Werner Conze, the newly founded Institute for Social and Economic History. In the 1960s he published several works on 15th Century German cartels and the history of Gutehoffnungshütte. Through connections in France, including to Fernand Braudel in Toulouse, leader of the Annales School, in 1963 Maschke received one of the first invitations to a German after the Second World War as a visiting professor at the École pratique des hautes études in Sorbonne.

In 1958 he was appointed to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. From 1968 he was a member of the Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities and was also instrumental in the preparation for the Staufer exhibition in Stuttgart which took place in 1975.

From 1962 to 1974 he was the editor of a 22-volume series, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges (The History of German prisoners of war of in the Second World War). This series was the report compiled by the Scientific Commission for the History of the German Prisoners of War, set up to investigate the killing of Germans captured as prisoners of war. The commission was headed by Maschke and was more popularly known as the Maschke Commission or Maschke Committee. The committee's report revealed considerable atrocities against Germans in American, Belgian, British, Czechoslovakian, French, Polish, Yugoslavian, and Soviet POW camps.

Personal life

Maschke married Elsbeth Horn whom he met in 1931 while she was a student in Ziegelhausen, Heidelberg. Their marriage produced two sons. Maschke died on 11 February 1982 just days after the death of his wife, who had often accompanied him on meetings, conferences and lecture tours in his later years due to his visual impairment. Maschke's estate is located in the Central State Archive Stuttgart, parts of his documents were also at the Bundesarchiv-military archive in Freiburg im Breisgau issued.

Bibliography

• Werner Conze: Nachruf Erich Maschke (1900–1982). In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Volume 69 (1982), p. 301.
• Friedrich Facius, Jürgen Sydow (Editors.): Inhalt Aus Stadt- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Südwestdeutschlands. Festschrift für Erich Maschke Volume 75. Geburtstag. Stuttgart 1975.
• Barbara Schneider: Geschichtswissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus – Das Wirken Erich Maschkes in Jena. In: Tobias Kaiser, Steffen Kaudelka, Matthias Steinbach: Historisches Denken und gesellschaftlicher Wandel. Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen Kaiserreich und deutscher Zweistaatlichkeit. Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-23-9, pp. 91–114.
• Eckart Schremmer: Erich Maschke (2 March 1900 – 11 February 1982). In: Historische Zeitschrift, Volume 235 (1982), pp. 251–255.
• Michael Schröders: Eine Revolution unseres gesamten Geschichtsbildes? Erich Maschke, die NS-Geschichtsideologie und die politische Schulung in Ordensburgen der NSDAP. In: Nationalsozialismus im Kreis Euskirchen. Band 3: Kultur, Wirtschaft, Tourismus. Editors. vom Geschichtsverein des Kreises Euskirchen. Euskirchen 2011 ISBN 978-3-941037-83-0, pp. 341–415. Präsentation/Kurzfassung bei: Recensio.net, 2011