80 Facts About Gerhard Ritter

Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter was a nationalist-conservative German historian, who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956.

Gerhard Ritter was an honorary member of the American Historical Association from 1959.

Gerhard Ritter's studies were continued at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig.

Gerhard Ritter regarded the German defeat of 1918 as a great disaster.

Gerhard Ritter subscribed to the 19th-century view of history as a form of political education for the elite, and contemporary politics were always a pressing concern for him.

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In 1925, Gerhard Ritter published a sympathetic biography of Martin Luther that made his reputation as a historian.

Gerhard Ritter treated his subject as an excellent example of the "eternal German".

Gerhard Ritter argued against the view of Luther as an opportunist, promoted by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, and instead contended that Luther was a man of faith who possessed the ability to expose what Gerhard Ritter regarded as grave flaws in the Catholic Church.

Gerhard Ritter argued that Luther inspired his followers to have the self-confidence to improve the world.

In particular, Gerhard Ritter agreed with Luther's argument that the moral values of Christianity were relevant to only the individual, not the state.

In 1931, Gerhard Ritter wrote the biography of the Prussian statesmen Karl vom Stein.

Gerhard Ritter argued that Bismarck was the ultimate power politician and that Stein was the ultimate anti-power politician.

Gerhard Ritter argued that Stein's success as a politician was limited by his moralism but contended that despite his lack of political sense was nonetheless successful because of his strong moral character.

Gerhard Ritter publicly referred to the Nazi Reich as the "peaceful center of Europe" that would form a "bulwark against Bolshevism", and he praised the German Anschluss with Austria.

Gerhard Ritter was a staunch German nationalist who belonged to a political movement generally known to historians as national conservatism.

Gerhard Ritter identified with the idea of an authoritarian government in Germany that would make his country Europe's foremost power.

Deep belief which Gerhard Ritter had in a Rechtsstaat made him increasingly concerned at Nazi violations of legal codes.

Gerhard Ritter's biography was designed as a challenge to Nazi ideology which said there was a continuity between Frederick and Hitler.

Gerhard Ritter was a devout Lutheran and became a member of the Confessing Church, a group of dissenting Lutherans who resisted the Nazi inspired and Nazi imposed "Aryan Christianity" in the 1930s.

In 1938, Gerhard Ritter was the only faculty member at Freiburg to attend the funeral of Edmund Husserl, considered the founder of the modern philosophical school of phenomenology.

In 1938, Gerhard Ritter delivered a series of lectures in Jena attacking Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1938, Gerhard Ritter became involved in a major debate with Friedrich Meinecke over "historism".

Gerhard Ritter attacked this position, arguing that without universal notions of values of good and evil and judging all historical phenomenon by its own standards was to abandon all ideas of morality applicable to all times and places.

Later, Gerhard Ritter worked as an advisor to the German conservative politician Carl Goerdeler.

Gerhard Ritter argued that because Great Britain was an island, this provided a degree of security that allows democracy.

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Gerhard Ritter declares that Germany had to follow the realism of Machiavelli because of the security requirements of its geographic position.

Gerhard Ritter describes two sorts of values as generated by two different types of polities: one traditionally Anglo-Saxon and the other continental, as personified by More and Machiavelli.

Gerhard Ritter praised Machiavelli as the ideal thinker who understood the "paradox of power"; namely, state power to be effective always involves the use of or threat of violence.

Weeks has argued that if Gerhard Ritter was no Nazi, certainly he was a German nationalist who wished to see Germany as the world's great power.

Gerhard Ritter appeared to disavow part of his original work of 1940 by the addition of a footnote to the third edition of Machstaat und Utopie published in 1943.

The historian Klaus Schwabe observes that Gerhard Ritter's disapproval of the term "friend-foe" was a not-so-veiled criticism of Carl Schmitt, who had popularized the term a decade before.

Censorship prevented the book from being published during the war and, after 1945, Gerhard Ritter revised his work to publish it as a four-volume study of German militarism.

Gerhard Ritter was involved in the 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg assassination plot.

Gerhard Ritter was one of the few conspirators not liquidated by the Nazis.

Gerhard Ritter, who belonged to the conservative German opposition to the Nazis, was imprisoned in late 1944 for the rest of the war.

Gerhard Ritter argued, "National Socialism is not an originally German growth, but the German form of a European phenomenon: the one-party or Fuhrer state", which was the result of "modern industrial society with its uniform mass humanity".

Gerhard Ritter argued that throughout the 19th century, there had been worrisome signs in Germany and the rest of Europe caused by the entry of masses into politics, but that it was World War I that marked the decisive turning point.

Gerhard Ritter argued that the democratic republic left the German state open to being hijacked by the appeals of rabble-rousing extremists.

Gerhard Ritter argued that the precursors of Hitler were "neither Frederick the Great, Bismarck nor Wilhelm II, but the demagogues and Caesars of modern history from Danton to Lenin to Mussolini".

Gerhard Ritter saw his main task after 1945 of seeking to restore German nationalism against what he regarded as unjust slurs.

Gerhard Ritter argued that Germans needed a positive view of their past but warned against the appeal of "false concepts of honor and national power".

Gerhard Ritter belonged to group of German historians who rejected reconciliation with victim of Nazi German aggression in favor of Germany pursuing national interests.

Gerhard Ritter railed against the fact that the Allies occupational authorities had confiscated German archives at the end of World War II and had begun to publish a critical edition of German foreign policy records without the participation of German historians.

Gerhard Ritter used his official position as the first postwar head of the German Historical Association to demand the return of the records and held the opinion that their absence hurt his own research projects the most.

For Gerhard Ritter, Goerdeler was a patriot while the men and women of the Rote Kapelle spy network were traitors.

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Gerhard Ritter wrote that those involved in the Rote Kapelle were not part of the "German Resistance, but stood in the service of the enemy abroad" and fully deserved to be executed.

Besides defending German nationalism, Gerhard Ritter became active in the ecumenical movement after 1945 and urged conservative Catholics and Protestants to come together in the Christian Democratic Union, arguing that based on his experience in Nazi Germany, Christians regardless of their church needed to work together against totalitarianism.

Gerhard Ritter came to the conclusion that whatever differences divided Lutherans, Catholics and Calvinists, member of three churches had more in common, to unite them against the Nazis.

In 1954, Gerhard Ritter published an acclaimed biography of Carl Goerdeler, a close friend, a conservative politician who was executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Gerhard Ritter always drew a sharp distinction between what he regarded as the Machtpolitik of Bismarck where military policy was subjected to carefully limited political goals and the endless expansionism motivated by militarism and bizarre racial theories of the Nazis.

Gerhard Ritter was well known for his assertions denying that there was a uniquely aggressive German version of militarism.

For Gerhard Ritter, militarism was the "one-sided determination of political decisions on the basis of technical military considerations", and foreign expansionism, and had nothing to do with values of a society.

Gerhard Ritter maintained that militarism first appeared during the French Revolution, when the revolutionary French state, later to be followed by Napoleon I's regime, began the total mobilization of society to seek "the total destruction of the enemy".

Likewise, Gerhard Ritter contended that Otto von Bismarck was a Kabinettspolitker, not a militarist, who ensured that political considerations were always placed ahead of military considerations.

In Volume 2 of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Gerhard Ritter commented that it was only after Bismarck's sacking in 1890 that militarism first appeared in Germany.

Gerhard Ritter, it was the radicalizing experience of the First World War that had finally led to the triumph of militarism in Germany, especially after 1916, when Erich Ludendorff established his "silent dictatorship", which Gerhard Ritter believed was a huge break with Prussian-German traditions.

In 1962, Gerhard Ritter wrote that he found it "almost unbearable" that the "will of a single madman" had unnecessarily caused World War II.

In 1953, Gerhard Ritter found a copy of the "Great Memorandum" relating to German military planning written by General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905.

The following year, Gerhard Ritter published the "Great Memorandum" together with his observations about the Schlieffen Plan as Der Schlieffen-Plan: Kritik Eines Mythos.

Gerhard Ritter fiercely rejected Fischer's arguments that Germany was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.

Gerhard Ritter claimed that Germany did not start a war of aggression in 1914 but admitted that the situation of the German government had required a foreign policy that contained the immediate risk of war.

Counter to Fischer's thesis, Gerhard Ritter maintained that the Chancellor Dr Theobald von Bethmann-Hollwegresisted the demands by General Ludendorff for wide-ranging annexations as a war aim.

Gerhard Ritter claimed that the significance that Fischer attached to the highly bellicose advice about waging a "preventive war" in the Balkans offered in July 1914 to the Chief of Cabinet of the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry, Count Alexander Hoyos by the German journalist Viktor Naumann was unwarranted.

Gerhard Ritter charged that Naumann was speaking as a private individual, and not as Fischer claimed on behalf of the German government.

Likewise, Gerhard Ritter felt that Fischer had been dishonest in his portrayal of Austro-German relations in July 1914.

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Gerhard Ritter charged that Germany had not pressured a reluctant Austria-Hungary into attacking Serbia.

Gerhard Ritter argued that the main impetus for war within Austria-Hungary came from domestic politics and was internally driven.

Gerhard Ritter felt that in retrospect, it was not necessary for Germany to maintain Austria-Hungary as a great power but claimed that at the time, most Germans regarded the Dual Monarchy as a "brother empire" and viewed the prospect of the Balkans being in the Russian sphere of influence as an unacceptable threat.

Gerhard Ritter accused Fischer of manufacturing the quote he attributed to the German general Moltke, Chief of the General Staff, during a meeting with the Austro-Hungarian War Minister, Field Marshal Conrad von Hotzendorf, about the necessity of a "speedy attack" on Serbia.

Gerhard Ritter claimed the importance that Fischer attached to the report of the German Army's Quartermaster that the Army was "ready" for war in 1914 was simply mistaken since the Quartermaster always reported every year that the Army was "ready" for war.

Likewise, in reference to the order by Bethmann Hollweg to Siegfried von Roedern, the State Secretary for Alsace-Lorraine, to end Francophobic remarks in the German-language press in Alsace, Gerhard Ritter claimed it was proof of Germany's desire not to have a wider war in 1914; Gerhard Ritter accordingly claimed that Fischer's contrary interpretation of Bethmann Hollweg's order was not supported by the facts.

Contrary to Fisher's interpretation, Gerhard Ritter maintained that Bethmann Hollweg's warnings to Vienna were meant to stop a war and were not window dressing that was intended to distract historical attention from German responsibility for the war.

Gerhard Ritter claimed that Fisher's interpretation of Bethmann Hollweg's meeting with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, was mistaken since in Gerhard Ritter's opinion, if Bethmann Hollweg was serious about securing British neutrality, it made no sense to express the German war aims to Goschen that Fischer attributes to him.

Gerhard Ritter strongly disagreed with Fischer's interpretation of the meeting of Moltke, Bethmann Hollweg and General Erich von Falkenhayn on 30 July 1914.

Rather than a conscious decision to wage an aggressive war, as Fischer argued, Gerhard Ritter's claim was that news of Russia's mobilization led the German generals into persuading a reluctant Bethmann Hollweg to activate the Schlieffen Plan.

Gerhard Ritter argued there were no lines of continuity between the German Empire and Nazi Germany and considered the Sonderweg view of German history to be a myth.

Gerhard Ritter clearly denied Fischer's arguments that both world wars were "wars for hegemony" on Germany's part.

In 1964, Gerhard Ritter successfully lobbied the West German Foreign Ministry to cancel the travel funds that had been allocated for Fischer to visit the United States; in Gerhard Ritter's opinion, giving Fischer a chance to express his "anti-German" views would be a "national tragedy" and so Fischer should not be allowed to have the government funds for his trip to America.

In 1959, Gerhard Ritter was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association in recognition of what the Association described as Gerhard Ritter's struggle with totalitarianism.

Gerhard Ritter was the fifth German historian to be so honored by the AHA, one of the last historians of the traditional German idealist school, considered history as an art.