Hello all,

last month Roger asked about a list of anthroposophists who were also Nazis.
The German anthroposophist periodical Info3 recently published a brief text
of mine listing several dozen such cases from my current research in the
German Federal Archives. For those who read German, the original is here:

http://www.info3.de/ycms/artikel_1775.shtml

The print version is in the July-August 2007 issue of Info3, pp. 42-43
(Peter Staudenmaier, "Anthroposophen und Nationalsozialismus - Neue
Erkenntnisse").

I'll give the same list here in English, minus the archival citations. It
includes people who were actively involved in anthroposophical organizations
and who were also members of the Nazi party, the SS, or the SA (the
so-called storm troopers of the Nazis, also known as the brownshirts).

The list is not comprehensive; these are cases that I came across in the
course of my research, not ones that I sought systematically (I did not, for
example, consult the main Nazi party membership rolls, much less the
Anthroposophical Society's records). The cases that appear here are ones
that happened to have generated some sort of correspondence or some sort of
separate documentation during the Nazi era itself. Thus what appears here is
a cross-section, not a full account.

As part of my agreement with the anthroposophical magazine that published
the list, I restricted myself to basic memberships and general biographic
data, without context or historical interpretation. Since context and
interpretation are crucial to understanding subjects like anthroposophy's
intertwinement with Nazism, however, I am happy to try to respond to any
questions that others might have about this list of names or its
significance.

Without further ado, then, here is the list:


Ernst Harmstorf was a prominent spokesman for anthroposophical medicine,
particularly after 1945, and an early and active participant in the
anthroposophical movement, since the beginning of the 1920s (he took part in
the famous "Christmas Conference" in 1923, for example). Harmstorf joined
both the Nazi party and the SA in 1933.

Anni Müller-Link was a member of the Anthroposophical Society from 1920
onward. In 1936 she joined the Nazi party via its foreign section (she lived
in Switzerland) and took an official position in the local Nazi women's
organization.

Harald Kabisch was a regional official of the biodynamic farmers' league,
the Reichsverband für Biologisch-Dynamische Wirtschaftsweise. He joined the
Nazi party in 1941.

Max Babl was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of
Erfurt. He joined the Nazi party in 1933.

Hermann Pöschel was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the
city of Plauen from 1927 onward. He joined the Nazi party in 1933.

Otto Feyh was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of
Schweinfurt. He joined the Nazi party in 1940.

Hans Pohlmann was the head of one of the Anthroposophical Society branches
in Hamburg, founder of the Waldorf school in Hamburg-Wandsbek, and chairman
of the local Waldorf school association. He was also a Nazi party member.

Friedrich Mahling was a member of the Anthroposophical Society and, in his
own words, "an active participant in the National Socialist movement since
1932"; he joined the Nazi party in 1933.

Dr. Ernst Charrois, a member of the Anthroposophical Society in Nuremberg,
joined the Nazi party in 1933.

Alfred Köhler, a member of the Anthroposophical Society in Nuremberg, joined
the Nazi party in 1928.

Hans Merkel was an anthroposophist who became one of the leading advocates
for biodynamic agriculture within the Nazi government. He held a high
position on the staff of Richard Walther Darre, the Nazi minister of
agriculture, and published extensively on Nazi agricultural policy. Merkel
was an SS officer and a leading figure in the SS Main Office for Race and
Settlement (his official title was Führer beim Stab des Rasse- und
Siedlungshauptamts der SS).

Carl Grund was a prominent activist in the biodynamic movement and an
anthroposophist since the 1920s. In the 1930s he worked as an official of
the biodynamic farmers league and was one of the foremost spokesmen for
biodynamic agriculture in Germany. Grund joined the Nazi party in May 1933,
and joined the SA in November 1933. In 1942 he was made an SS officer, and
was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer in 1943. Within the SS he was a
specialist for agricultural questions.

Albert Friehe was another official of the biodynamic farmers league in the
1930s and an associate of Erhard Bartsch, the leader of the biodynamic
movement and one of the leading anthroposophists in Nazi Germany. Friehe
joined the Nazi party in 1925 and was particularly active in the areas of
racial policy and agriculture. In 1932 he was a Nazi candidate for the
elections to the Reichstag.

The anthroposophical author Oskar Franz Wienert joined the SS in 1944.

Carl Fritz was a member of the Anthroposophical Society and a member of the
Nazi party.

Dr. Hugo Kalbe was a member of the Anthroposophical Society and an SA
member.

Clara Remer was a member of the Anthroposophical Society who joined the Nazi
party in 1932.

Heimo Rau was a well-known anthroposophist after WWII, the son of
anthroposophists, and a Waldorf teacher from 1946 onward. He was also a Nazi
party member.

Gotthold Hegele was a prominent anthroposophical physician after 1945.
During his time as a medical student in Tübingen in 1937-38, Hegele was a
high-profile student leader. According to his standard anthroposophical
biography, Hegele was already an anthroposophist at this time, and
explicitly brought anthroposophy into his student activism. What the
biography doesn't mention is that Hegele was also a Nazi student leader at
the very same time and a member of the SA; in 1937-1938 he was the head of
the Office of Political Education of the National Socialist Student League
in Tübingen.

The Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Gotha had two co-chairmen
in the 1930s, Dr. Josef Schulz and Otto Thorwirth. Thorwirth was
simultaneously a member of the Nazi party, and remained a party member
throughout the Third Reich.

Josef Schulz applied to join the Nazi party in 1938. Although both the local
Nazi party branch and the regional Nazi authorities endorsed his membership,
he was turned down by the provincial party court because of his previous
anthroposophical activities.

There are further instances of anthroposophists who were Nazi party members
but were eventually expelled from the party after the anti-anthroposophical
faction of the Nazis won the upper hand; one example is Wolfgang
Schuchhardt, Nazi party member from 1938 to 1943. And there are quite a few
other active anthroposophists who applied to join the Nazi party after the
Anthroposophical Society was banned by the Gestapo in late 1935 but were
turned down because of their anthroposophical involvements; these include
Johannes Bertram-Pingel, Ernst Blümel, Herman Weidelener, Paul Reiss,
Friedrich Böhnlein, Gotthilf Ackermann, Max Rodi, and August Wegfraß.

There are in addition several cases of individuals who became well-known in
anthroposophical circles after 1945 and who were active Nazis before 1945;
in these cases it isn't clear if the individuals were already involved in
anthroposophical activities during the Nazi era, but their Nazi memberships
are confirmed in the archival documents. Such cases include several
anthroposophical physicians, for example Werner Voigt, SA member from 1933
onward and SS member from 1936 onward, or Udo Renzenbrink, who joined the SS
in 1933 and was also a Nazi party member. Other anthroposophists who
belonged to the SA include Friedrich Kipp and Rudolf Kreutzer.

It is important to keep in mind that Nazi party membership alone is by no
means the sole indication of active and enthusiastic participation in the
Nazi movement. One of the more striking instances of this is the case of
anthroposophist Georg Halbe. Halbe was a member of the Anthroposophical
Society who did not join the Nazi party, as far as can be determined from
the available documents. He was nevertheless a dedicated Nazi: From 1935 to
1942 Halbe was part of Darre's staff in the Nazi agricultural apparatus,
where he was particularly active in promoting biodynamic agriculture. His
tasks included overseeing the "Blood and Soil" publishing house and helping
produce the Nazi journal "Odal", the chief mouthpiece for Darre's blood and
soil ideology. Halbe wrote extensively for other Nazi publications as well,
including the Nationalsozialistische Landpost (National Socialist Rural
Press), the journal Wille und Macht: Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen
Jugend (Will and Power, a periodical of the Nazi youth movement), and the SS
journal Das schwarze Korps. After Darre was replaced by his
anti-anthroposophist rival Backe in 1942, Halbe transferred to the Reich
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and then in March 1944 he
moved to Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry, where he continued to work until the
end of the war and the destruction of the Nazi state.


That's it for my list of anthroposophist Nazis. For the sake of
thoroughness, I'll add here a brief list of other anthroposophist Nazis that
have been publically known previously, some of which we've discussed before.
These include:


Dr. Hanns Rascher, longtime anthroposophist and member of the Nazi party
from 1931 onward. Rascher was a prominent figure in anthroposophist
negotiations with Nazi officials after 1933.

Friedrich Benesch, anthroposophist and after the war a leading figure in the
Christian Community, was an active member of both the Nazi party and the SS;
we discussed Benesch fairly thoroughly a few months ago.

Franz Lippert, anthroposophist and SS officer, former head gardener at
Weleda and overseer of the SS biodynamic plantation at Dachau.

Otto Julius Hartmann, anthroposophist academic and member of the Nazi party
from January 1934 until November 1940.

Els Moll, Waldorf activist from Stuttgart (she taught briefly at the
original Waldorf school) and fervent Nazi.

Eugen and Margarete Link, anthroposophists since the 1920s, advocates for
Waldorf after 1933 and longtime members of the Nazi party.

Werner Georg Haverbeck, prominent Nazi youth official and after the war the
major figure on the far-right end of the anthroposophical spectrum in
Germany.


In addition to these individuals, there are a range of other Nazi
authorities who had extensive connections to and involvement in various
anthroposophical activities, some of whom are sometimes considered
anthroposophists themselves. These include the following:

Alwin Seifert, a high-profile figure in Nazi environmental protection (one
of his titles was "Reich Advocate for the Countryside") and a major
proponent of biodynamic agriculture; whether Seifert should be classified as
an anthroposophist or as an anthroposophist sympathizer remains a
controversial question among both historians and anthroposophists. Seifert's
very active and very friendly connections with anthroposophists were
extremely extensive, both during and after the Nazi era -- much more so
than, for example, Albert Friehe from my list above.

A variety of other important figures in Nazi agricultural policy were also
active supporters of biodynamics during the Third Reich; the most important
examples include two Nazi Reichstag members, Hermann Schneider and Rudi
Peuckert, as well as Hermann Reischle, one of Darre's chief staff members;
also significant in this regard are several very high-ranking SS leaders,
especially Günther Pancke and Oswald Pohl.

There were also a range of Nazi health officials who strongly supported
various anthroposophical endeavors, from anthroposophical medicine (which
was officially endorsed by the Nazi authorities in 1934 and incorporated
into the Nazi natural therapy movement) to biodynamic nutrition; probably
the most important of these was H. G. Müller, an official of the
Reichsleitung, the Reich leadership of the Nazi party.

Then there are the three most contested individuals as far as
anthroposophical-Nazi connections go: Otto Ohlendorf, Rudolf Hess, and
Richard Walther Darre. Ohlendorf was a very powerful SS leader and a major
Nazi war criminal; his brother was an anthroposophist, his doctor was an
anthroposophist, and he consistently supported anthroposophical projects
during the Third Reich; after he was convicted at Nuremberg and executed by
the allies in 1951, his funeral was conducted by Haverbeck as Christian
Community priest. In my view, however, Ohlendorf should probably be viewed
as a sympathizer of anthroposophy rather than an anthroposophist.

I now think the same of Hess, though I have previously argued that he was an
anthroposophist, based on the extent to which he structured his personal
dietary and health choices around anthroposophical beliefs; my current view
is that Hess's occult interests were too nebulous to be specifically
identified as anthroposophical, and that he is better seen as a sympathizer
of anthroposophy and the major sponsor of anthroposophical activities during
the Nazi era, but not as an anthroposophist himself.

That leaves Darre, who was initially skeptical of biodynamics but became an
tenacious promoter of biodynamic agriculture after the start of WWII, and
remained a supporter of biodynamics until his death in 1953. Darre seems to
have begun to take other aspects of anthroposophy seriously only after his
fall from power in 1942; during his imprisonment by the allies after his
Nuremberg trial, for example, he read Steiner extensively and took copious
notes; anthroposophical works appear to have provided Darre a sort of
spiritual sustenance while in prison. But his initial access to
anthroposophy was though biodynamics, and even during his phase of active
support for biodynamic projects while he was still Nazi minister of
agriculture, Darre kept his distance from the more esoteric aspects of
anthroposophy and sometime criticized anthroposophists as sectarians. It is
important to keep in mind the role of his anthroposophical staff members
such as Halbe and especially Merkel (who was Darre's defense attorney at
Nuremberg and a close associate until Darre's death); Nazi authorities who
employed and supported anthroposophists do not, however, thereby become
anthroposophists themselves.

I am leaving out all of the other important anthroposophists who cultivated
good relations with various Nazi authorities during the Third Reich but were
not party members or SS or SA members themselves, as far as I know; people
such as Rene Maikowski or Elisabeth Klein for the Waldorf movement or Erhard
Bartsch or Franz Dreidax for the biodynamic movement or Friedrich Husemann
for anthroposophical medicine, not to mention figures like Richard Karutz,
prominent anthroposophical author and Waldorf advocate and supporter of
Nazism. I am also leaving out the myriad high-level Nazis who supported
specific anthroposophical endeavors at various times, from Wilhelm Frick to
Robert Ley to Alfred Baeumler to Julius Streicher; all of these figures, in
my view, call for a good deal more contextualization than I can provide at
the moment.

I hope that this list is a little bit helpful in clarifying the complex
relationships between anthroposophy and Nazism, and I encourage critical
commentary and questions. I will have spotty internet access for a while,
but I'll do my best to keep up with any discussion that might ensue.
Greetings to all,


Peter Staudenmaier

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