Karl Astel

From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
Jump to: navigation, search
Karl Astel
Born (1898-02-26)26 February 1898
Schweinfurt, German Empire
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Jena, Nazi Germany
Suicide
Nationality German
Fields Sports medicine, Racial science
Alma mater University of Würzburg
Known for Rector of the University of Jena,
Anti-tobacco movement,
Nazi eugenics

Karl Astel (26 February 1898 – 4 April 1945) was a German physician, Alter Kämpfer, rector of the University of Jena, racial scientist, and politician.

Biography

Karl Astel was born in Schweinfurt. In his youth, Astel was influenced by his father, a security commissioner and chief of the Schweinfurt municipal police. During World War I, he served in the Bavarian Army (1916–1918). He came into contact with the National Socialist movement at an early age. While studying medicine in Würzburg, he was a co-founder of the German University Guild Bergfried and of the local group of the Young National League in Schweinfurt.[1] Astel was a member of the Freikorps Epp in 1919 and of the Bund Oberland in 1920; he took part in operations against the Munich soviet republic and participated in the Kapp Putsch as well as in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in 1923. A commited National Socialist, he was frequently involved in street fighting. Astel was a member of the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation and the Militant League for German Culture. On July 1, 1930, he joined the NSDAP; membership in the SS followed in 1934.

Astel earning his PhD around 1930 he was educated and then approved as a sports teacher in March 1926. Astel was employed by the Technical University Munich as a sports advisor. In 1932, he became head of the "Hereditary health center" in the Race and Settlement section of the SS Main Office (RuSHA). At the same time, he was also head of the Racial Hygiene Office of the Reichsführer School of the SA in Munich. In July 1933, he became president of the Thuringian State Office for Racial Affairs in Weimar, founded on July 15 of the same year, and was responsible for thousands of forced sterilizations from 1933 to 1945. In a secondary office, he was a judge at the Hereditary Health Court in Jena.

Astel was appointed full professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Jena on June 1, 1934 by his Freikorp comrade Fritz Sauckel, to whom he already owed his appointment as head of the State Office for Racial Affairs, without habilitation and without a regular appointment procedure. Here Astel was given his own institute, first called the "Institute for Human Genetics and Hereditary Research" and from 1935 the "Institute for Human Genetics and Racial Policy" (also called the University Institute for Human Genetics, Population Science and Racial Policy).[2] The inaugural lecture of the now promoted SS-Hauptscharführer was entitled Rassendämmerung und ihre Meisterung durch Geist und Tat als Schicksalsfrage der weißen Völker ("Racial Dawn and its Mastery by Spirit and Deed as a Question of Fate for the White Peoples"). In 1936, he additionally became head of the "Health and Welfare Department of Thuringia".

He was also involved in the anti-tobacco movement. After Karl Astel became rector of the University of Jena in 1939 he tried to form the ideal SS-university ("SS-Muster-Universität").

In 1940 he became a state councilor in the state government of Thuringia, which was practically meaningless after the Gleichschaltung. From 1942 to 1945, he also served as Gaudozentenbundführer[3] of Thuringia. In 1942, Astel was appointed SS-Standartenführer. With the support of the SS, Astel developed the University of Jena into an influential Nazi research association with a "race and life law" orientation. In this, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler supported him. He was co-editor of the journal Volk und Rasse. Astel was more influential in the SS field as a race theorist than Hans F. K. Günther.

On 4 April 1945, Karl Astel shot himself in a hospital[4] (that was headed by the rheumatologist Wolfgang Veil). His son was the lyricist Arnfrid Astel.

Research

Astel was one of the leading National Socialist "race researchers" or race biologists. For Astel the "racial quality" of the Germans was in decay, because the laws of nature were misunderstood, which are absolutely valid "not only for plants and animals, but for all living beings including man". The laws of nature, thus conceived, become principles of design of state and society.

While many generations chased after illusions and tried in vain to improve the weak, the sick, the unfit, the infirm, the criminal, the alien by external measures, they contributed to the sensitive racial decay, even if for the most part unintentionally. The people accumulated considerable masses of the unfit for life and of all kinds of inadequates by straining all the vital forces of the healthy and capable. These burdened and still burden the people's life outrageously in cultural as well as in economic respects.[5]

He called upon "noble breeds of all countries",

to remove together [...] the unfortunate life unworthy of life, which has accumulated in their peoples during the rule of the inferiors, for the salvation of all. This is the good news which National Socialism has to proclaim to the suffering and hoping humanity.[6]

For this purpose he made use of the work of Ernst Haeckel. Astel and his colleagues in Jena, including Heinz Brücher, Gerhard Heberer, Victor Julius Franz, Johann von Leers and Lothar Stengel-von Rutkowski, saw Haeckel as the champion of a biologistic conception of the state. Thus Astel invoked this tradition in a programmatic speech, Die Aufgabe, which he delivered at the opening of the winter semester 1936/37. He called for the establishment of a model SS university in Jena.

Major publications

  • Rassendämmerung und ihre Meisterung durch Geist und Tat als Schicksalsfrage der weißen Völker (1935; reprinted in: Walter Wuttke-Gronenberg, Medizin im Nationalsozialismus, 1980, 1982)
  • Rassekurs in Egendorf. Ein rassenhygienischer Lehrgang des Thüringischen Landesamts für Rassewesen (1935)
  • "Die Praxis der Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Rede auf der 1. Wissenschaftlichen Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Hygiene, Berlin, 5.–6. Oktober 1938". In: Reichsgesundheitsblatt 13 (1938), No. 52, pp. 65–70.
  • Die unterschiedliche Fortpflanzung. Untersuchung über die Fortpflanzung von 12000 Beamten und Angestellten der Thüringischen Staatsverwaltung (1939; with Erna Weber)
  • „Heraus aus dem Engpaß!“ Reden des Reichsverteidigungskommissars des Wehrkreises IV, Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter F. Sauckel und des Rektors der Universität Jena, Staatsrat Prof. Dr. K. Astel (1941)
  • Die Kinderzahl der 29000 politischen Leiter des Gaues Thüringen der NSDAP und die Ursachen der ermittelten Fortpflanzungshäufigkeit. 4. Untersuchung über die unterschiedliche Fortpflanzung in Thüringen (1943; with Erna Weber)

See also

Notes

  1. Paul Weindling, "„Mustergau“ Thüringen. Rassenhygiene zwischen Ideologie und Machtpolitik". In: Norbert Frei, ed., Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik in der NS-Zeit. München: R. Oldenbourg (1991), p. 86.
  2. Thomas Etzemüller, Auf der Suche nach dem Nordischen Menschen. Die deutsche Rassenanthropologie in der modernen Welt. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag (2015), p. 124.
  3. Regional university teachers' leader.
  4. Uwe Hoßfeld, Institute, Geld, Intrigen. Rassenwahn in Thüringen, 1930 bis 1945. Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen (2014), p. 64.
  5. Walter Wuttke-Gronenberg, Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Tübingen: Schwäbische Verlagsgesellschaft (1980), p. 285.
  6. The inaugural speech was published in the Völkischer Beobachter on January 24, 1935, marking its high status for the NS, and in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, the functionary journal.

External links