31 Facts About Hans Rothfels

Hans Rothfels supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours.

Hans Rothfels was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kassel, Hesse-Nassau.

Hans Rothfels was studying history and philosophy at Heidelberg University when World War I broke out in 1914.

Hans Rothfels served in the German Army as a reserve officer and was badly wounded near Soissons.

Hans Rothfels lost one of his legs and was in a hospital until 1917.

Hans Rothfels defended Bismarck's Germanization policies against Poles claiming they were "defensive".

Between 1924 and 1926, Hans Rothfels taught at the University of Berlin.

Hans Rothfels advocated German domination of Eastern Europe and making its population into serfs.

Hans Rothfels promoted an idea of race classification based on readiness of non-German ethnic groups in Eastern Europe to submit themselves to rule of German Third Reich.

Together with his wife and their three children, Hans Rothfels left for the United Kingdom, where he hastily began to learn English, a language that he subsequently mastered.

Hans Rothfels defended German hegemony over this "outpost of Western Europe and Western civilization" and complained about resettlement of Germans there due to Soviet-Nazi treaties.

Hans Rothfels left for the United States, where he stayed until 1951, and took US citizenship.

Hans Rothfels taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois where he became a professor.

Hans Rothfels argued that it was inappropriate to view Clausewitz in the context of later events; instead Hans Rothfels insisted on understanding Clausewitz and his theory of war in the context of the Napoleonic Wars and on understanding the Clausewitz the man as the key to understanding Clausewitz the military thinker.

Hans Rothfels maintained Clausewitz's personality, social background, war experience, and his schooling all needed to be understood to properly appreciate his theories about war.

In 1948, Hans Rothfels published his most famous book, The German Opposition To Hitler, which celebrated those conservatives who attempted the 20 July plot of 1944, which was based upon a lecture given at the University of Chicago in 1947.

Hans Rothfels, who remained a steadfast German nationalist all his life, saw the conspirators against the National Socialist regime as representative of all that was best about German life and argued that the actions of the conspirators had restored Germany's honour from the disgrace the Nazis had brought upon it.

Hans Rothfels saw Nazism as a type of totalitarianism, and often argued that there was no moral difference between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; in his view, the Cold War was merely a continuation of the struggle between what he called the "conservative freedom movement" and totalitarian forces.

In particular, Hans Rothfels was opposed to any sort of Sonderweg interpretation of German history, and argued that Nazism was the result of the general problems of modern civilization, which Hans Rothfels saw as based on a set of values that were overtly materialistic, secular, and dehumanizing, and which had reduced most people to a mindless mass.

Hans Rothfels wrote "In many respects, Nationals can be considered as the final summit of an extreme consequence of the secularization movement of the nineteenth century".

The German Opposition to Hitler ended with a call for people all over the West to embrace what Hans Rothfels regarded as the noble ideas of the conservative opponents of Nazism, which Hans Rothfels saw as leading to back to the higher values of the West.

The German Opposition To Hitler was a controversial book because Hans Rothfels focused his attention largely on anti-Nazis on the Right and for the most part ignored anti-Nazis on the Left.

Hans Rothfels was determined that Germans should see them as heroes, not villains.

In 1951, Hans Rothfels returned to West Germany, where he taught at the University of Tubingen.

Hans Rothfels worked hard for the rest of his life to exonerate German nationalism from the taint of Nazism.

In particular, Hans Rothfels called for historians working in the field of contemporary history to approach matters in an objective and neutral matter while keeping in mind the moral questions.

Later, in 1961, Hans Rothfels took a strong stand against the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan who claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to an Anglo-Polish conspiracy against Germany.

Also in 1961, Hans Rothfels assisted Weinberg with the publication of Adolf Hitler's Zweites Buch which Weinberg had discovered in 1958, and for which Hans Rothfels wrote the introduction.

The historian Heinrich August Winkler has strongly criticized Haar, who had erroneously used a radio address Hans Rothfels gave in 1930 praising Friedrich Ebert, Gustav Stresemann, and Paul von Hindenburg as great German leaders as a proof for Hans Rothfels' support of Hitler.

Hans Rothfels's critics contend that his planned 1933 radio address was too little, too late.

Whereas Hans Rothfels had to emigrate, Schieder and Conze joined the NSDAP.