Friedrich Benesch, Anthroposophist and Nazi
Von Peter Staudenmaier
This post is about the life and legacy of the prominent anthroposophist
Friedrich Benesch, whose Nazi past and its unexpected revelation by
non-anthroposophists presents a case study in how Steiner’s followers deal with
their own history.
Friedrich Benesch (1907-1991) was a leading figure in the Christian Community,
the forthrightly religious arm of anthroposophy. For thirty years, beginning in
the 1950s, he was the head of the seminary in Stuttgart that trains the
Christian Community’s priests. A very large proportion of all Christian
Community pastors alive today were trained directly by Benesch. He appears to be
popular with English-speaking anthroposophists as well; his book Reverse Ritual:
Spiritual Knowledge is True Communion, for example, was published by the
Anthroposophic Press in 2001, and there’s a plug for several other publications
by Benesch currently at the website of the Christian Community in Australia and
New Zealand.
In German-speaking Europe, meanwhile, Benesch is a generally revered figure in
anthroposophical circles. The quasi-official biography of him celebrates his
contributions to religious renewal (see the entry on Benesch in Bodo von Plato,
ed., Anthroposophie im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Kulturimpuls in biografischen
Portäts, Dornach 2003). Not long after this biographical description was
published, anthroposophists became aware of Benesch’s Nazi past through an
article by historian Johan Böhm, who aside from being a specialist on the region
where Benesch lived until the end of WWII also happened to be one of Benesch’s
pupils in the high school where Benesch taught in the early 1940s.
Since 2004, when Böhm’s supposedly new revelations (which I’ll survey in a
moment) were published, some of Benesch’s former colleagues and admirers have
been trying to account for the fact that nobody in the anthroposophical movement
seems to have noticed the rather high-profile former Nazi in their midst. What’s
more, Benesch’s extensive period as a militant Nazi did not come before he
embraced anthroposophy, but after, and indeed during his intensive engagement
with ‘spiritual science’. Several on-line anthroposophical sources (including a
brief appendix added to the internet version of the biography cited above) now
address the matter in decidedly anguished tones.
The article that broke this unwelcome news within the anthroposophical community
is Johan Böhm, “Friedrich Benesch: Naturwissenschaftler, Anthropologe, Theologe
und Politiker” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und
Politik, vol. 16 no. 1 (May 2004), pp. 108-119. Böhm here reviews Benesch’s
early career as a radical Nazi activist in the ethnic German community in
Romania. His research shows that from 1934 to 1945 Benesch was a leader in the
more extremist wing of the regional Nazi party, the DVR, which opposed the more
‘moderate’ elements in the Romanian-German Nazi movement. Benesch's Nazi
activities continued even while he worked as a pastor (though not yet a
Christian Community pastor) and conducted graduate studies with Professor Hans
Hahne and his colleagues in Halle, where Benesch focused on racial ethnography.
According to Böhm's very thorough account, during the 1930s Benesch was not
merely a member of the ultra-Nazi DVR, he was one of its principal figures.
While Böhm dates Benesch's involvement in Nazi politics to 1934, Benesch himself
gave a considerably earlier date in his 1941 dissertation at the Univeristy of
Halle. Here Benesch writes: "Since 1928 I have been a member of the National
Socialist movement for renewal among the Germans in Romania." (Friedrich
Benesch, Die Festung Hutberg: Eine jungnordische Mischsiedlung, Halle 1941,
"Lebenslauf")
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Böhm’s 2004 article is his personal
testimony about the content of Benesch’s classes in the Romanian-German high
school in the early 1940s. According to Böhm, Benesch placed racial theory at
the center of his teaching, and emphatically propagated National Socialism to
the pupils. (These parts of Böhm’s article are not mentioned in anthroposophist
responses.) This is consistent with other historical evidence about Benesch’s
activities at the time. For instance, at a 1936 DVR gathering that Benesch
organized, he gave a lecture on the “racial history of the Teutons”. And in 1939
he applied to work with the SS research institute, the Ahnenerbe, on a project
about “Trees and forests in Aryan-Germanic spiritual and cultural history”.
The records of the Ahnenerbe, housed at the German Federal Archives in Berlin,
contain a substantial file regarding Benesch, which I read through last week.
(The archival signature is Bundesarchiv Berlin, DS / G113: 457-492.) Among other
things, these documents show that Benesch joined the SS in July 1939. (Both
recent anthroposophist sources and the Böhm article say he joined the Waffen-SS,
but in fact the files refer to the regular SS.) In 1941 he was appointed head of
the Nazi party organization in his home county in Romania. It was Böhm’s 2004
article that first brought these records to the attention of anthroposophists
and Christian Community officials.
Among the more intriguing questions surrounding this sordid affair is: Why did
it take this long for Benesch’s friends, co-workers, students and admirers to
find out basic information about his early career? His SS files, for example,
have been available for decades through the Berlin Document Center and later the
Federal Archives, and are by no means difficult to track down. Moreover, Böhm’s
2004 article was hardly his first mention of Benesch’s Nazi activities. Two of
Böhm’s earlier books – standard works on the community in which Benesch lived
and worked in the Nazi era – discuss Benesch’s role as a militant Nazi in
detail; see Johan Böhm, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die Deutsche
Volksgruppe in Rumänien 1936-1944: Das Verhältnis der Deutschen Volksgruppe zum
Dritten Reich und zum rumänischen Staat sowie der interne Widerstreit zwischen
den politischen Gruppen (Frankfurt 1985), pp. 41-42, 53, 138-139; and Böhm, Die
Deuteschen in Rumänien und das Dritte
Reich 1933-1940 (Frankfurt 1999), pp. 149, 272-273. These works contain
extensive information on Benesch’s position within the DVR and so forth.
In addition, it was no secret that Benesch was married to Sunhilt Hahne,
daughter of Nazi academic Hans Hahne, who was also Benesch’s initial doctoral
advisor. As my previous post pointed out, the history of Hahne’s intense
engagement with anthroposophical doctrines has been readily accessible for
years. Furthermore, Benesch’s own 1941 dissertation not only employs Nazi racial
terminology but openly declares Benesch’s commitment to Nazism in the brief
autobiographical notice at the conclusion of the text. This dissertation was not
hidden away in some university vault; a copy of it has been publicly available
at the state library here in Berlin all along.
But even anthroposophist sources noted Benesch’s far-right political
inclinations long before 2004, without however making an effort to look very far
into their extent and character. In an Afterword to a collection of Benesch’s
lectures published by the Christian Community publishing house in 1993 under the
title Leben mit der Erde, Christian Community leader Hans-Werner Schroeder
discussed Benesch’s past at some length, including his early involvement in the
radical nationalist and racist völkisch youth movement; his fondness for the
‘Nordic-Germanic’ nonsense of Nazi race theorist Herman Wirth, founding director
of the Ahnenerbe; his work with and personal relationship with Hans Hahne; and
his participation in the Artamanen, the infamous “blood and soil” group that
produced several later Nazi leaders, including Himmler, Darré, and Auschwitz
commandant Rudolf Höß.
It is hard to tell whether Schroeder, writing not long after Benesch’s death,
considered these merely run of the mill political commitments for a young
anthroposophist, or if he was completely unaware of what these groups stood for.
An equally puzzling conundrum is just what anthroposophist readers of
Schroeder’s account made of these biographical facts, and why none of them
bothered to inquire further into the matter. Schroeder’s Afterword, by the way,
also makes entirely clear that Benesch’s dedication to anthroposophy was central
to all of his engagements throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
The lesson to be learned here may not be so much that anthroposophists could
easily be Nazis and Nazis could easily be anthroposophists; there are dozens of
other examples of that particular circumstance. Nor is Benesch’s own post-war
silence and denial especially surprising. What is perhaps more interesting in
this case is the blindness of latter-day anthroposophists to the history of
their own colleagues, indeed their own celebrities, their remarkable disinterest
in examining this history through commonly available sources, and their pained
surprise when the suppressed past finally rises to their attention. In light of
these dynamics, the obvious question is how many other Friedrich Benesches are
lurking within the ranks of twentieth century anthroposophy.
___________
Peter Staudenmaier
postet in: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/