Enigmas wrapped in riddles #2: Prof. Dr. Kurt Huber
Few of the White Rose friends are revered as much as Prof. Dr. Kurt Huber. And yet. His life - and death - present more questions than answers. How *do* we define resistance?
If Josef Söhngen confuses our brilliantly black-and-white world, Professor Kurt Huber riddles us beyond belief.
Born October 24, 1893 in Chur, Switzerland, Curt Theodor Ivo Huber struggled merely to live the first nine years of his life. His parents moved from Chur to Stuttgart, Germany when he was three. It is unclear whether Huber developed the double whammy of diphtheria and rickets in Chur or in Stuttgart.
Both diseases were epidemic in nineteenth century Europe, primarily caused by poor nutrition and unsanitary living conditions. Rickets (Germans call it “the English childhood disease”) results from severe vitamin D deficiency – lack of exposure to sunlight or a diet containing vitamin D. Children with the disease usually develop bowed legs or leg fractures, and growth is stunted.
In contrast, diphtheria – a bacterial infection often mistaken for a cold at the beginning – is spread by close human contact. The sick person’s throat is covered by a membrane that can strangle him. (Because of the high mortality rate, when the American Pediatric Society was formed in the late 1800s, diphtheria was one of the first infections they studied in depth.)
When Kurt Huber contracted these two illnesses – first rickets, followed by diphtheria – diphtheria vaccines were just being developed, and doctors had not figured out how to administer vitamin D to combat rickets. Neither would be considered life-threatening in the 21st century. But Kurt Huber came through the first nine years of life with paralysis of his left foot, right hand, and the muscles in his face. He was very short (5’ 6-1/2” as an adult), with an unsightly goiter on his neck.
What Huber lacked physically, his parents made up for academically. Illness kept him from attending elementary school in Stuttgart, so his parents home-schooled him. Although Kurt Huber’s father Theodor was a teacher, they apparently brought in instructors to keep him current on class work.
Despite his physical handicap, Huber went to the Eberhard Ludwig Gymnasium in Stuttgart from 1902 to 1911. Like Josef Söhngen, the same year that Kurt Huber graduated from high school, his father died. Unlike Söhngen, Huber passed the Abitur and entered the University of Munich in 1912 (his mother followed him to Munich).
It was clear that neither disease had impaired Kurt Huber’s mental prowess. With double majors in musicology and philosophy and minors in natural sciences and folklore, Huber graduated summa cum laude with a degree in musicology in 1917. Four years later, he qualified as a university lecturer in both philosophy and psychology.[1]
Huber’s first forays into politics came around this time. His father had been a member of the Liberal Party and was outspokenly nationalistic. Huber recognized that his father’s attitudes formed the basis for his own political outlook. The nationalistic part, that is, because Huber’s politics leaned much further to the right.
When World War I ended in 1918 (Huber had been exempted from serving in the military because of his disabilities), Kurt Huber – freshly graduated from university – joined the newly-formed Bavarian People’s Party. The Bayerische Volkspartei or BVP splintered off from the traditional Catholic Center Party (Zentrumspartei) in 1918. They wanted a political party for Bavaria and spilled much ink ranting against the evils of Prussiandom. In the eyes of the BVP, the Prussians – not home folk in Munich – had brought about Germany’s defeat in the World War.
The BVP also championed federalism. The right wing of the party even joined forces with anti-republican elements of the government that was becoming the Weimar Republic. That was the side Kurt Huber felt most comfortable with. Above all, he did not wish for the Bavarian People’s Party to become the Center Party in Lederhosen. He hoped the BVP would break with its Catholic roots.[2]
By 1920, when Kurt Huber comprehended that the BVP had not only moved to the center, but had also assumed a very Catholic mantel, he discontinued his membership. Soon he and his wife-to-be Klara Schlickenrieder had been swept up in the emerging National Socialist Party. Both signed the NSDAP’s protest against the Dawes Plan to end Germany’s hyperinflationary period and convert Germany’s reparation payments to a more businesslike arrangement. The Dawes Plan was great for Germany, but disaster for the NSDAP since the National Socialists depended on political and economic instability for survival.
Kurt Huber became Professor Kurt Huber in 1926, an associate professor to be precise. He started teaching experimental psychology, speech psychology, music psychology, and the psychology of folk music. Folk music became an ever-greater part of his work. From 1925 to 1937, he transcribed German folk music for the German Academy, traveling to countries in Europe that had pockets of German settlers.
Every year seemed to bring him new accolades. His stature had increased so much that he was one of the former BVP members heavily recruited by the Nazi Party. After all, he believed in their causes, associated with their members. The next logical step would be membership. And in 1927, the temptation was great.
Yet Professor Huber could not shake his discomfort with Hitler’s antagonism towards the Catholic Church. Hardly a devout man, Huber did not want the Church to run the country. But neither did he want to return to the days of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (cultural war) when religion – and especially the Catholic Church – was not allowed to have a voice.
So while Professor Huber continued to work for Nazi causes, he declined membership in the NSDAP. And he repeatedly declined appointments to Catholic-related teaching institutions, because he thought they were unbearable. Klara Schlickenrieder was perhaps the only person in the late 1920s who understood this complex man. He married her in 1929.
In 1930, Kurt Huber had a life-changing experience that thrust him forever into the spotlight. For years, his work with the German Academy had brought him into contact with the folk musician Paul Kiem, known throughout Bavaria as Kiem Pauli. The Bavarian writer Ludwig Thoma had given Kiem his extensive collection of folk music shortly before his death, and Kiem turned the gift into a lifelong obsession.
Two members of the Bavarian royal family adopted Kiem’s project – he never worried about a shortage of money – and Bavarian radio sponsored the fledgling concerts as early as 1926. By 1930, Kiem Pauli’s little experiment had grown to phenomenal proportions, and he needed help. Enter Kurt Huber.
Huber and Kiem joined forces to conduct a folk music festival the likes of which had never been seen. When Kiem Pauli’s announcement hit the press, he received over seven hundred applicants for the gala, seven hundred contestants that had to be whittled down to forty by March 29, 1930.
Professor Huber undertook the “scholarly” side of the affair, writing an academic treatise about Bavarian folk music for the radio’s programming magazine (similar to TV Guide). Both the live concerts and the radio broadcast attracted huge audiences and significant positive feedback. Officially sponsored by the German Academy, even radio stations in Zurich Switzerland carried the feed.
Karl Alexander von Müller lent his powerful endorsement to the show. He described everything that balmy March night as “blue and white”: The sky, the flags, the songs, and our hearts. In his critique (if lavish praise can be called critique) of the Burda singing group, von Müller said: “It seems to me that whoever did not hear the first notes those four voices sang missed something for the rest of his life.”
He continued, “And suddenly the scales fell from our eyes, and we knew once and for all what was real and what was not.”
Paul Kiem and Kurt Huber published a collection of Upper Bavarian folk songs that same year (1930). It was to be their last joint publication, although Kiem went on to publish an even more comprehensive collection of Bavarian folk music alone. The second volume – Kiem’s solo work – is still available, as it has been continually reprinted since 1934.
The Huber / Kiem anthology may not have had the staying power of Kiem’s 1934 work, but it was more than enough to propel the serious young professor into the public eye. Even with the death of Huber’s mother in 1931, his star continued to rise.
From 1931 to 1938, Kurt Huber became a favorite guest lecturer – speech impediment and all – on the German Academy circuit. Wherever foreign German language teachers met to discuss pedagogy and educational psychology, he was sure to be found. They consistently graded his lectures as the most effective ones of the respective conference. The Academy estimated that because of his fame, at least two thousand foreign German scholars came to Germany from all around the world.
Huber also represented Germany at the International Congress for Folk Music in Barcelona in 1936, where he was named chairman of the international section for folk music. And in 1937, the German government commissioned him to record Bosnian folk songs in Sarajevo in conjunction with the Serbian Academy of Science.
By 1937, he no longer had to be content with musical transcription for the German Academy. Kurt Huber was appointed provisional Department Head of the National Institute for German Music Research in Berlin.
His publisher’s assessment of his intellect said it all: “Even if one does not consider his other excellent cultural significance, Huber is irreplaceable in the field of German and European folk song research. He possesses several gifts that one rarely finds in this combination any longer: Philosophy, psychology, music, and music history. He has this extraordinary gift combined with a certain psychological encumbrance as is often found with geniuses. That gift has primarily served the field of folk music research. At least in Germany, he is the best expert in the field of international folk music and the sole expert regarding European folk music. He is also well known for this abroad.
“… Without a doubt, Huber is to German folk music what the Grimm brothers were to German fairy tales.”
Everything may have been going well, but the forty-four year-old professor still went through a midlife crisis, one likely connected directly to his celebrity. Either immediately before or shortly after leaving Munich for Berlin, Kurt Huber had an affair. His oldest child with Klara was already five or six years old. The affair resulted in a child born in 1937. Neither child’s nor mother’s name is known as of January 2002.
Huber’s Berlin transfer marked a critical crossroads for the wildly popular scholar. His other siblings had settled into nice lives enriched by National Socialism. Brother Otto Richard Huber, a year older than Kurt, had become an ear, nose, and throat specialist, serving as Chief Medical Officer with the army in Passau. Older sister (and oldest sibling) worked for Bruckmann Publishers in Munich, a publishing house whose owner had been one of Hitler’s earliest and most generous supporters. Younger sister was headmaster of a girls’ school in Eichstätt.
And since 1923 – now fourteen long years past – Kurt Huber had agreed with every single tenet of the National Socialist platform, yet had not reaped any of the benefits that would come from joining the Party.
New friends in Berlin convinced him that if he were to join, he would be able to align himself with the more conservative wing of the Party that was struggling to end its leftward shift. They – and Huber – wanted the Party to go back to its roots and do what it had initially set out to do. In 1938, Professor Kurt Huber filed an official application for Party membership – in Berlin.
The two years Kurt Huber was in Berlin, he apparently put aside (for the moment) his old anti-Prussian sentiments and focused on learning more about National Socialism. He read Mein Kampf and parts of Rosenberg’s Mythos. Huber began to study newspapers and press more closely – not more critically, but as one who wishes to know everything about a new homeland. He regularly read the National Socialist Deutschlands Erneuerung (Germany’s Renewal), the Party vehicle for presenting National Socialism as a “people’s” movement.
Huber also published articles about folk music in National Socialist publications that were overtly Brown, including one entitled Educator in a Brown Shirt.
His years of plenty did not last forever. In 1939, Kurt Huber’s request for a permanent transfer to Berlin was turned down. He had to return to Munich – to the same teaching position he had held since 1926 when he was an unknown – and start over.[3]
That also pertained to his application for Party membership. Since association was location-specific, Huber had to reapply once he was back home in Gräfelfing. He did. By now, Party membership apparently had begun to mean something to him.
Even when Huber’s membership was approved, he did not lose sight of his original reason for joining. His heavy teaching load – nine lectures a week, each one before 250+ students – kept him from participating in local precinct meetings. But he increasingly sought out the company of Munich’s highest ranking intellectual Nazis, such as Karl Alexander von Müller and Max Dingler.
They – especially Huber and von Müller – often discussed Professor Huber’s criticisms regarding the evolution of the Party. Huber believed in the National Socialist form of government (including what he thought should be a benign dictatorship under a single Führer), but in his opinion, it had gone too far by stripping churches and professors of freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.
Huber also acknowledged the military and economic services the Reich provided, but he postulated that it was not handling the Eastern campaign well, because Hitler required too much bloodshed without thinking strategy through. He wanted a Europe conquered and led by Germany, but not enslaved by it.
With regards to religion, Kurt Huber had long ago decided that both Catholic and Lutheran church leaders were out of line with their censure of National Socialism (the ones who had spoken out, that is). Yet he, the pragmatic agnostic, could not escape the feeling that a healthy German nation could not be built without the cooperation of “Christian thinking” members of government.
With regards to the so-called Jewish question? Kurt Huber had no problems with the National Socialist platform and practice in those matters. Hans Scholl said of his professor: “He is a great nationalist. He regards bolshevism as the destroyer of European culture. He holds strong antisemitic views.”
Hans Scholl’s statement is supported by Kurt Huber’s association with Karl Alexander von Müller. In the early days when Adolf Hitler was still an informant, spying on the German Worker’s Party on behalf of the army, he enrolled in a history class for army propagandists at the University of Munich. Karl Alexander von Müller taught the course. Von Müller is usually credited as the person who recognized Hitler’s oratorical skills and encouraged him to pursue them – and introduced him to money people in Munich who could make it happen.
The Führer rewarded his loyal subject by filling many of the top intellectual positions with von Müller’s PhD candidates, and of course giving von Müller the plum job. When the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany was formed in 1935, von Müller landed the titular position of president of the research division for the “Jewish question.” Dr. Wilhelm Grau handled day-to-day operations. Grau had gotten his PhD with von Müller on the dissertation topic of “Antisemitism in the Middle Ages.” Dr. Walter Frank ran the parent Institute. He too had been a doctoral student under von Müller.
These three men set about “scientifically” proving National Socialist doctrine regarding Jews. They were the ones (they and the hand-picked scholars they employed) largely responsible for fleshing out the theories of Jewish responsibility for the losses in World War I, for the “Weimar Traitor Republic,” and naturally for the economic disasters of the 1920s. Von Müller and his students lent intellectual credence to Hitler’s blatant and irrational hatred of Jews.
To do so, they amassed one of the most extensive libraries of antisemitic literature ever assembled. Seed money allocated by the Führer himself amounted to 138,000 RM ($1,104,000). Within five years, von Müller’s collection had grown from zero to more than 27,000 books.
And Karl Alexander von Müller was the person Kurt Huber turned to when he faced knotty political or philosophical questions. Von Müller was not the kind of Nazi who would turn a fellow scholar in for asking questions. Brown intelligentsia did not read Julius Streicher’s Stürmer. They read Das Reich, the weekly National Socialist newspaper by and for Germany’s elite. Huber noted that he especially kept up with it, though perhaps not as thoroughly as he should have.
Beginning in 1937, Kurt Huber had begun to suspect that he had “opponents.” It is unclear whether this was a case of unfounded paranoia, or the cold hard facts of life for a university professor who had reached the pinnacle of his career (and whom younger lecturers likely wished to topple). It is equally unclear whether he faced on-the-job hostility due to his success, because of his political candor (not every professor read Das Reich), or merely because people did not like him.
By 1942, Professor Huber was still in demand as a guest lecturer abroad. Leading German scholars in Sofia, Bulgaria had invited him to speak in 1942. But his currency at his home institution had dwindled significantly. He was demoted to – “re-categorized as” – adjunct professor and stripped of his on-campus office.
When Summer Semester rolled around in May 1942, Professor Kurt Huber had become an angry man. In the face of public humiliation before his peers and in light of his ongoing struggle to find a political safe haven, life would have been unbearable – except for his friend Karl Alexander von Müller.
Indeed, when first confronted with the words of the Leaflets of the White Rose, Kurt Huber discussed his thoughts and doubts… with Karl Alexander von Müller.
If you are curious about supporting documents for any of these Substack posts, check out our White Rose Histories (Volume I, 1/1933-4/30/1942, and Volume 2, 5/1/1942-10/12/1943), along with primary source materials. As always, if you have questions or private comments, please contact us. If you find errors, please contact us, or post a comment below.
Huber’s interrogations are available here:
This post is an excerpt from Chapter 3, White Rose History: Volume II — Journey to Freedom. May 1, 1942 - October 12, 1943. © 2002. That chapter is fully footnoted and supported by fact. Please contact Exclamation! Publishers for permission to quote.
[1] NJ1704 Vol. 7, undated (March 1943) C.V. written by Professor Huber. Note that during his 2/27/43 interrogation, Huber gave conflicting information about his education. There he said he graduated summa cum laude in 1918 with a degree in musicology, and that he qualified as a university lecturer in philosophy (only) in 1923. (NJ1704 Vol. 7, 2/27/43 interrogation of Kurt Huber.)
[2] NJ1704 Vol. 7, 2/27/43 interrogation of Kurt Huber. Huber supporters may decry use of his Gestapo interrogation transcripts to corroborate information about his pro-Nazi, anti-Hitler stance. Indeed, it took years before I was willing to do so. The words of the sixth leaflet are just too beautiful. I want to believe that he was unequivocally “good.”
But a few factors speak to the authenticity of his pro-Nazi words. 1) The friendships Professor Huber formed with leading Nazi academics were not inconsequential. 2) The articles he contributed to overtly Nazi publications. 3) His insistence he was telling the truth. Unlike others in the White Rose (Falk Harnack comes to mind) who attempted to get off by lying about their political convictions at every turn, Kurt Huber clearly stated that he was telling the truth because he wanted Adolf Hitler to read his transcripts and hopefully turn Germany back to the original pathway of National Socialism. This last point is the most troubling, because Huber was not attempting to escape a death sentence. He understood that if his request for an audience with Hitler was denied, his words would convict him.
[3] There is no specific reason given for not approving Huber’s transfer application. Wittenstein said that Huber was denied the position because they could only have professors who could also serve as officers. (George J. Wittenstein, “The White Rose,” World War II Conference, Siena College, June 1993.) Reliability of that statement is in doubt, because Wittenstein also claimed in the same paragraph that Huber therefore “subsisted” on a salary of 300 Marks or $2,400 per month, whereas in reality Huber earned 640 RM or $5,120 net of taxes.
One of my favorite posts so far! Professor Huber was certainly a complex and enigmatic figure.