Werner Conze

Who was Werner Conze?

Werner Conze was a German historian in Nazi Germany and in post-World War II Germany. He was a member of the Schieder commission.

Werner Conze was a doctoral student of Hans Rothfels in Königsberg under the Nazis, where he claimed in his research that Germans had a positive role in development of eastern Europe. With the Nazis taking power, Conze, together with Schieder and Rothfels, helped to institutionalize racial ethnic research in the Third Reich. According to German historian Ingo Haar, "the Nazis made use of racialist scholarship, which lent itself gladly". He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1934. While working for German espionage, in 1936, Conze prepared a document which portrayed Poland as backward and in need of German order and which recommended the exclusion of Jews from the legal system as Conze considered them outside the law. In further work issued in 1938 Conze continued in similar vein, blaming lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination" Between 1937 and 1940 in a series of articles Conze proposed "dejewification" of Eastern Europe, particularly Lithuania and Belarus.

Conze envisioned a social policy based on racialist principles in German "Lebensraum"; he demonstrated his concepts on Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he accused Polish peasants and their "petty peasant instincts" of revolting against "German order". In doing so Conze mixed his deprecating views with empirical results and transferred racialist concept of society to agrarian situation in Central and Eastern Europe. He viewed Polish population as "degenerated" and engaged in "vegetative reproduction", and blamed lack of social progress of rural population on Jews