VON LEERS: As a Student Functionary on the International Stage / Hermann Wirth
Biography of Johann von Leers, Trans. by Dan Rouse, 2026
Biography of von Leers
Part 15, Serialized by the Translator
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Representation: As a Student Functionary on the International Stage
The tumultuous debate Johann von Leers had provoked at the writers’ congress in Ragusa, despite his absence, was triggered above all by the pamphlet Juden sehen Dich an (“Jews Look at You”), which had appeared shortly before. The excitement among the PEN delegates was probably also fueled by a scandal that erupted almost simultaneously around his tract Forderung der Stunde: Juden raus! (“The Demand of the Hour: Jews Out”), which thrust him into the headlines far beyond the borders of the German Reich. As leader of a delegation of the National Socialist German Students’ League, of which he had been Reichsschulungsleiter since 1932, Johann von Leers had been attacked in an unusually sharp fashion and publicly exposed at an event at Leiden University (the Netherlands) in early April.
This had been arranged by the rector of the university, Johan Huizinga (1872–1945). The renowned cultural historian was said to be “a rather apolitical scholar.” Yet whenever Huizinga considered it necessary, he did not shy away from taking clear positions. He felt compelled to do precisely that during an International Student Service event that had begun at his university on April 7. Even in his opening address, in his capacity as “honorary chair” of the conference, Huizinga had complained about the wave of nationalism that had been observed in recent times—an allusion to the National Socialist seizure of power. Confirmation of this came in a “memorandum” prepared by the German participants. The “national revolution” under Hitler was warmly welcomed in it, while “Bolshevism” was condemned as a destructive force of “international Jewry.” The delegation also expressed its attitude in a discussion two days later on the “Jewish question.” Speaking for the group he led, Johann von Leers outlined the National Socialist position on the “racial question,” according to which the Nordic race was superior to all others and the Jews, who held a dominant position in many areas of society, had to be regarded as the true “cancerous tumor.” Despite the tense atmosphere created by such remarks, the program initially proceeded as planned. The confrontation with Huizinga occurred only on April 11, immediately before the event ended.
After the rector learned of the ritual-murder propaganda in the pamphlet The Demand of the Hour: Jews Out, the hastily convened senate authorized him to confront Johann von Leers. Should the latter confirm the allegation during the conversation, the senate was to express its public outrage and expel the author from the university. The conversation did in fact take place. Johann von Leers initially claimed that he could no longer remember any details of the text, which had been written some time earlier. When Huizinga confronted him with the disputed passages, however, he admitted the statements. His rejoinder that the accusation of ritual murder rested on true historical events then led Huizinga to resort to the sharpest measure at his disposal. After expressing both his “abhorrence” and his “contempt,” he withdrew, “politely but firmly,” as a later press report noted, the “hospitality” of the university from Johann von Leers and refused to shake his hand “in farewell.” The German delegation, whose leader had thereby been placed under what amounted to a Hausverbot (lit: house ban), broke off its stay in view of this “anti-German affront” and departed in outrage. The scandal, which had meanwhile caused diplomatic ripples, also had consequences for Huizinga. Instead of defending him, the university’s board of trustees, which a member of the German delegation had asked to demand an apology from Huizinga, stabbed the scholar in the back. Huizinga’s conduct, the chair of the board declared a few days later, had to be regarded as “unjustified,” since Johann von Leers had not expressed himself “inappropriately” at the conference. At the same time, it was questioned whether Huizinga, in his capacity as rector, had even been authorized to make such a serious decision. What followed was a grueling dispute. Beyond that, however, Huizinga had become, “as it were, overnight, a non-person.”
Johann von Leers promptly and publicly accused him of being the henchman in an intrigue whose real instigators, he claimed, must be considered “dishonorable Jewish provocateurs.” He also sought to spread his version of the incident in journal articles. According to this account, the prevailing mood against the delegates from the German Reich was not a reaction to the repressive policies of the Nazi rulers but rather the result of foreign atrocity baiting. Through his interventions, however, he had ensured that “an ever greater understanding of the German situation” was awakened, especially with regard to the “Jewish problem.” He also mentioned the conversation with the rector, but presented its course differently: Huizinga’s supposed criticism of the policies of National Socialist Germany had so offended the German delegation that a further stay by them could not be expected. At a meeting convened for this purpose, Johann von Leers claimed, he had therefore thanked them for the hospitality shown so far while at the same time proposing that the conference be broken off. An invitation thereby connected to a continuation in Germany had been greeted with great applause. The event had finally ended in a tumult in which, if one believes Johann von Leers, other delegations had also sharply criticized Huizinga and expressed understanding for the stance of the German participants. The affair, moreover, found an unexpected sequel in the Historische Zeitschrift (“Historical Journal”, HZ), whose editors Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) and Albert Brackmann (1871–1952) felt compelled to take an unusual step. Their behavior revealed how far-reaching an influence Johann von Leers was attributed to have in this phase. After Huizinga had delivered a guest lecture at Berlin University at the end of January 1933, only a few days before power was handed over to Hitler, his lecture text was to appear in the next issue of the HZ. The radical upheavals since the beginning of February, which had quickly placed the editorial board in a “difficult situation,” and above all the incident in Leiden, which had become known to the editors, nevertheless made it seem advisable to Meinecke and Brackmann to distance themselves from Huizinga in an editorial note. Had the editorial board “had timely knowledge of this incident,” readers were informed, it “would not have printed the essay.” That it was nevertheless published was due solely to the fact that “almost the entire rest of the issue had already been printed.” In a letter to Huizinga, Meinecke and Brackmann regretted that their decision on this question of “national honor and dignity” could be based only on a presentation “that we received from official quarters.” This referred to the Foreign Office, which had initially attempted to prevent the publication. The obviously intimidated editors made at most a partial correction of their questionable position, which did not remain without repercussions even in the “scientific community,” by publishing in the same volume of the journal the essay of the medievalist Hans Liebeschütz, who later emigrated, which contained a “very positive review” of an academy monograph by Huizinga.
Collection Movements
Johann von Leers did not, however, distinguish himself solely as an expert in synchronization and as a representative of the National Socialist movement abroad. Equally significant was his activism as a co-initiator and driving force behind völkisch-religious and antisemitically oriented unifying movements, which interpreted the National Socialists’ seizure of power as a sign of a new beginning and now hoped for recognition of their convictions.
“Ideological Battle over Herman Wirth”
This became clear in the ideological battle over Herman Wirth (1885–1981), whose writings likewise served as a formative awakening for Johann von Leers in the early 1930s. The eccentric private scholar, who interpreted the present as a fundamental social and cultural crisis and called for the inner liberation and awakening of the great “German” people, is today regarded above all as a precursor of an Ahnenerbe (lit: “ancestral heritage”) association, with which Heinrich Himmler pursued his cultural-political goals and research-policy ambitions from 1935 onward. Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to see in the “historian of primeval intellectual history” solely the later cue-giver of the Reichsführer-SS, even if the latter may have been enthusiastic about Wirth’s research, as Gesine von Leers still claimed decades later. Although an “outsider” in scholarship, to whom academic recognition remained denied until the end of his life, the völkisch visionary nevertheless counted among “the most popular lay researchers of his time,” a “charismatic speaker” who could gather a large following and even enjoyed the reputation of a “founder of a religion.” Cultural pessimists, völkisch visionaries, those weary of civilization, and adherents of the life-reform movement—who had often lost their economic foundation and ideological orientation through war and inflation—represented a broad spectrum that Wirth, in a “time of intellectual, spiritual, and economic decline of broad sections of the people,” as one of his early critics noted, was able to win over “with his expositions on the awakening and rebirth of the Nordic race.”
What kind of awakening his followers hoped for and in what diverse circles the barefoot runner from Eresburg exerted influence are underscored by the surviving correspondence of the Herman Wirth Society, founded in 1929. The physician Georg Boehncke (1869–1946) from Springe an der Deister, for example, longed for a true renewal of our existence, which is so deeply degenerate today. The completely impoverished medical officer Georg Bonne (1859–1945) from the vicinity of Lüneburg was convinced that he had found in Wirth’s writings the scientific foundation for the spiritual reconstruction of all humanity after it had suffered spiritual bankruptcy through the war. The life-reformer Karl Strünckmann (1872–1953), who preached a “new humanity” in his Harz sanatorium, used Wirth as intellectual equipment for the Blankenburger Biologische Wochen (“Blankenburg Biological Weeks”), planned around the turn of the year 1929–1930 under the title Deutsch sein heißt: Lichtträger sein! (“To Be German Means: To Be a Bearer of Light!”). Numerous lectures were accordingly to deal with the “rebirth of the German human being” through the “religious rebirth of the Occident” and a “biological turn of the people.” The planned program was to be built entirely on Herman Wirth’s lines of thought, as he stated in an invitation. The co-founder of the Medical-Biological Society, the Berlin medical officer and publicist Franz Bachmann (1856–1931), who was also editor of monthly Der Gesunde Mensch (“The Healthy Human”) for members of the health-insurance fund of the Volksheilbewegung (lit: “people’s healing movement”), wished to work with Wirth toward a new culture based on a nature religion as well as classical culture. Strünckmann, who published in Wilhelm Schwaner’s Der Volkserzieher (“The People’s Educator”) in the early 1930s and maintained connections to Otto Strasser, as well as Bachmann, belonged to a “consolidated grouping of biological and naturopathic physicians who were imbued with the vision of a New German Medicine on the basis of völkisch-national thought.”
Despite this large following, Herman Wirth nevertheless lived in financially precarious circumstances. A change in this situation was brought about by a support society named after him that, as Wirth formulated it, “friends of my research” had founded in 1929. The impetus for this came, among others, from the Stuttgart paint and varnish manufacturer Christian Wilhelm Mack (1861–1936), who had joined the National Socialists early on and provided Wirth with one of the first larger sums, but above all from the publisher Eugen Diederichs (1867–1930). The actual initiators, however, can be considered to be Gesine von Leers (1891–1974) and her first husband, Walther Fischer (born 1885), both from Berlin. They too belonged to those seekers who longed for intellectual and spiritual renewal and hoped for the purification of Germany, above all, for the reawakening of its former spiritual and intellectual forces. In Herman Wirth, they had found their prophet, whom they henceforth supported to the best of their ability to help spread his high ethical ideas among the entire people. The Herman Wirth Society, Gesine Fischer later repeatedly claimed, had been founded by me alone. Not least, her energy earned Wirth, in the coming years, a good part of his public perception and considerable financial contributions.
The impetus for this undoubtedly came from Wirth’s monumental work Der Aufgang der Menschheit (“The Rise of Humanity”), which, after multiple announcements, appeared in 1928 from the publishing house of the elder Eugen Diederichs and summarized his Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der atlantisch-nordischen Rasse (“Investigations into the History of Religion, Symbolism, and Writing of the Atlantic-Nordic Race”). After Gesine Fischer became aware of the work, she established written contact through its publisher and thereby came to know Herman Wirth personally. It can be assumed that this occurred at the latest in May 1929, during a meeting of the friends of Germanic prehistory in Detmold. That Wirth also interpreted this as a fateful providence is evident from his joy that I was now allowed to find you and Walther, as he reported shortly thereafter. You will know from our encounter and personal contact that we are kindred spirits, he added after visiting his new friends in Berlin. The Fischer couple subsequently paid their respects to him several times in Marburg.
It was precisely these encounters that strengthened Gesine Fischer’s zealous and enthusiastic commitment to Wirth and his great and beautiful cause, which she saw as in harmony with her völkisch-religious views and esoteric inclinations. She claimed, as she declared in the mid-1950s, to have kept her distance from the NSDAP and never to have joined the party. Nevertheless, she admitted to mourning National Socialism as a wonderful idea and to having been enthusiastically attached to the party until 1933. As a race-conscious person, she had striven to cast off Christian ballast in order to find the great divine order, for which the Christian denominations had to be overcome. Without religion, she declared to a companion, no people can exist, and without God nothing can prosper. But she thought nothing of the churches. What her own creed consisted of, she had explained in 1934 to a Protestant pastor, so that it should be quoted at greater length: Christ has never meant anything to me and will never mean anything to me, even if he was a decent missionary. I do not feel in need of redemption, nor do I hold anything of grace, nor anything of a force from outside. Above all, the whole concept of sin, which constantly makes people inferior, is deeply hated in my soul. We want to devote all our strength to drawing the veil of mist from the German soul, to putting a stop to the Judaization of souls; we want no Jewish God from a foreign land; we want to lay bare the sanctuaries of our homeland and demand as the first and holiest commandment love for one’s own people and reverence for the great pure faith and the culture of our forefathers, not of the patriarchs of Jewish stock. She saw an alternative instead in border sciences such as astrology, which—as a pious heathen and enemy of Christianity—she considered one of the most interesting sciences, which she had learned and studied early on, and which gave her orientation throughout her life.
She received equal support from her husband at the time, who in the coming years decisively steered the association through his business management and leadership. The lawyer and former government councilor had voluntarily left the Prussian civil service in 1919 because of his antisemitism and contempt for the November Democracy, and had joined the Association of Berlin Metal Industrialists as syndic. At the latest since 1927, he maintained intensive contacts with the NSDAP in Berlin. Although he, as far as could be ascertained, never belonged to the party, he gave legal advice and, as he later attested, supplied it with valuable material for combating the corruption of the time, especially for the equally energetic and factually unassailable struggle against the Sklarek brothers and their backers. For Der Angriff (“The Attack”), he allegedly wrote at least 500 articles until 1933, thereby serving the newspaper in line with the National Socialist objective. He even claimed to have helped develop the Völkischer Beobachter (“Völkish Observer”), only to have been its permanent contributor from 1926 to 1932. Like his wife, Fischer was not only inclined toward astrology but also convinced of Wirth’s mission: He firmly believed in the great task assigned to him by God to widen the horizon of the Atlanteans and to save the sinking Nordic soul, as Fischer revealed to Wirth around the turn of the year 1930–1931.
To achieve this goal, however, it was necessary to place Wirth’s existence on a more solid foundation. Fundraising was, from the outset, the actual goal of the Herman Wirth Society, which sought to finance the misunderstood researcher’s unconventional lifestyle. This man required a great deal of money not only for a number of assistants, including a private secretary, an assistant, and a famulus, but also for the scientific aids during his extensive research trips. It speaks to Wirth’s unrealistic self-image that he took all this for granted as his due. Only in this way, however, did he believe he could sustain the allegedly unequal struggle against a front of ideologically alien and hostile powers. At the same time, Wirth saw himself exposed to the deadly enmity of an overpowering guild representation, against which he had to enter the fray without an official basis of existence and with nothing but modest gifts. That he had therefore accepted and begged for money from Jews, as a pastor close to the German Christians later reproached him, thus seemed to Wirth and Gesine Fischer a venial transgression. After all, they countered, this money had previously been swindled from us Germans. To set the flow of money in motion, the Herman Wirth Society proceeded in two stages.
To lend Wirth and his research the necessary reputation, an Appeal was drafted in the summer of 1929 and circulated for signatures from as many prominent supporters as possible in academic circles. Financial support was not necessarily tied to it. Their public confession to Wirth, however, was intended to persuade more solvent personalities to contribute. According to the authors of the Appeal, which underwent various revisions until the winter of 1929, Wirth was a controversial yet serious researcher whose views were on the verge of a breakthrough. The growing acceptance of his methods and findings, which had caused a stir in “lay circles,” was evident in the fact that, at least among the younger generation in “scholarship,” the “reserve” was being abandoned. The authors attributed this to the fact that Wirth’s theory, despite the “greatness and novelty of the factual material,” was also based on “precise knowledge of foreign specialist literature.” The objection that “some views” of his work, glorified into a “synthesis of today’s humanities,” “appear fantastic at first glance” was brushed aside with the remark that these could invoke “scientific predecessors” who were not always known to the “specialists.” Established academic research was thereby accused of remaining within the narrow confines of its respective disciplines. The authors of the Appeal then summarized Wirth’s central statements about the “path of the ascent of humanity first from west to east,” outlined the planned research program, and finally came to their actual concern: at least three years of economically free existence were required to enable the misunderstood researcher to write another work on “the primeval faith of humanity,” which “might have a decisive influence on the chaotic fragmentation of our time.” The long-announced picture atlas was also to be created during this time. The missionary character of the Herman Wirth Society was revealed in the concluding remarks, in which its namesake appeared as a bringer of salvation of epochal significance: A comparable personality would “hardly arise again in German scholarship for decades to come” if it did not now receive all help. He was confronting his “great task” at a time when “Germany […] in various ways stands at a turning point of its destiny,” which it was necessary to take “consciously and energetically” in hand. But to fulfill his “future tasks” through “intellectual peak achievements in the scientific field,” which would “again secure world standing” for him, “patronage” was required that, “as a result of the impoverishment of Germany […] must be shaped collectively.” Wirth’s economic existence could therefore be secured through “membership” in the newly founded Herman Wirth Society, which could be effected by a one-time donation of 500–1,000 marks or regular contributions to an account administered by Walther Fischer as “trustee.” In addition, members, especially outside Berlin, were called upon to organize “public lectures on Wirth’s research results.” In return, they could obtain Wirth’s writings at a reduced price.
With the Appeal, the initiators approached numerous supporters in the following weeks to win them as publicly effective figureheads of the “committee.” Already here, however, initial differences made themselves felt. There was no agreement on the exact composition. A dispute arose over whether party representatives should also be approached. Gesine Fischer expressed herself reservedly, insisting that they must absolutely be eliminated from the outset, especially if only politicians of one direction are represented. Walther Fischer also declared that any political tendency must be eliminated, and that the neutral stance of the Herman Wirth Society was a prerequisite for raising money in all camps. In that sense, it could not be right to ask only socialist ministers for their signature, as Gesine Fischer remarked, because that would block very many sources of money. This was, above all, a dig at the Bremen patron Ludwig Roselius (1874–1943), who had obviously recommended Social Democrats he knew as representatives of the left. No less conflict-ridden was the question of whether Jews should also be won for signatures. Gesine Fischer and her husband considered them undesirable: they made clear to Wirth that they had agreed that the committee should remain free of Jews, while Wirth pursued a pragmatic course, insofar as he could count on financial support. However, with his demand that a Jew known to him, who had behaved impeccably and in a humanly distinguished manner toward him, be given the opportunity to sign, he did not prevail. The neutrality demanded by Walther Fischer thus remained only a declaration of intent. Nor could there be any question of an impartial, let alone supra-partisan, character in view of the personalities who ultimately signed the Appeal. Five women and 27 men represented a heterogeneous spectrum, yet they also revealed the close connection of the Herman Wirth Society to the völkisch and Nordic movement as well as to nationalist and radical-right circles.
This can be seen, for example, in the group of members presented as “writers”: They adhered, like the chemist Hanns Fischer (1888–1947), to the bizarre Welteislehre (“Cosmic Ice Theory”) of Hanns Hörbiger (1860–1931); they came, like the völkisch publicist Lenore Kühn (1878–1955), from the radical right wing of the DNVP (German National People’s Party); they had, like Kurt Liebmann (1897–1981) from Dresden, who was inspired by Expressionism and Nietzsche, turned to writing out of unemployment; or they had, like Johannes Schlaf (1862–1941) from Weimar, who was influenced by Naturalism, already early on entered “ideological proximity to National Socialism.” The author Margarete Danneel (dates of life unknown) can also be counted among them, a radical nationalist who, in the mid-1920s, was active on the board of the Ring Nationaler Frauen, which acted as an umbrella organization.
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