Walter Bussmann ( German: Walter Bußmann ; January 14, 1914 , Hildesheim - April 20, 1993 , Karlsruhe ) is a German historiographer . During World War II, Bussman played an important role in the management of the occupied territories in the east.
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Content
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Before World War II
- 1.2 Participation in the war and Holocaust awareness
- 1.3 Post-war career
- 2 notes
- 3 References
Biography
Before World War 2
Bussman came from a Protestant family of civil servants. From 1933 to 1939 he studied history, German, philosophy and English in Heidelberg and Göttingen . Among his teachers were the philosopher Karl Jaspers , historians Percy Ernst Schramm, Karl Brandi and Siegfried A. Köhler. In 1938, he passed the state exam for the post of top-level teacher (Höhere Lehramt) in Göttingen, in 1939 he defended his doctoral dissertation. His supervisor was Siegfried A. Köhler, the topic of the dissertation was “ Worldview standards of liberalism” .
Participation in the war and Holocaust awareness
From 1939 to 1945, Busmann, as an Wehrmacht officer, participated in the Second World War . In particular, he was an employee of the Qu 4 B Division under the Quartermaster General of the High Command of the Land Forces E. Wagner . During the Wehrmacht attack on the Soviet Union, Bussman kept a journal of military operations . [1] As part of his activities, he also collected information about the mass killings committed by the SS Einsatzgruppe , which he had to regularly report to his boss Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, Quartermaster General Wagner and Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder . Bussman's task also included written and verbal communications between the Quartermaster General and civil authorities, such as the General Directorate of Imperial Security and the Imperial Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories . Thus, he was one of the most informed army officers on military policy and military command in the rear regions, as well as on the elimination of the Jewish population . [2]
In a report by Boussman to the Qu 4 B “On Karaites,” which he himself published in the post-war years, he in particular reported that the SD “completely eliminated by the beginning of December 1941 the Krymchaks , numbering about 6,000, together with all Jews and Gypsies in Crimea ". [3]
Post-War Career
After the war, Bussman became an assistant professor at the Department of History at the University of Gottingen . In 1949, he defended a dissertation in Göttingen, “ Heinrich von Treichke . His worldview and historical views. "
Bussmann was appointed to the German School of Political Science in Berlin in 1955, and in 1960 he succeeded Hans Herzfeld, professor of modern history at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of the Free University of Berlin . In 1966, he entered the University of Munich as a successor to Franz Schnabel at the Department of Modern History. In 1970, Busmann finally moved to the University of Karlsruhe and headed the department of modern history.
Bussmann was a member of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, where he served as head of the department of German historical sources of the 19th and 20th centuries and editor-in-chief of the New German Biography . He was also a member of the Commission on the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties and the Historical Commission of Berlin. Since March 1977, he was editor-in-chief of Materials on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945.
From 1959 to 1977, he was a member of the advisory board of the Frederick Naumann Freedom Foundation .
Notes
- ↑ Walter Bußmann: “Notizen” aus der Abteilung Kriegsverwaltung beim Generalquartiermeister (1941/42) , in: Deutsche Frage und europäisches Gleichgewicht.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Walter Bußmann und Percy Ernst Schramm: Historiker an der Front und in den Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht und des Heeres.
- ↑ Walter Bußmann: “Notizen” aus der Abteilung Kriegsverwaltung beim Generalquartiermeister (1941/42) , in: Deutsche Frage und europäisches Gleichgewicht.
Links
- Bussman, Walter at the German National Library .