Reinhard Höhn

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Reinhard Höhn (29 July 1904 – 14 May 2000) was a German jurist, historian, and leading political ideologue during the National Socialist era. In the postwar period, Höhn created the Harzburg Model.

Biography

Early life and education

He was born in Gräfenthal, the son of a district attorney. Höhn became a member of the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation in 1922 and studied law from 1923. In 1929, Höhn received his doctorate from the University of Jena with the thesis Stellung des Strafrichters in den Gesetzen der französischen Revolutionszeit ("Position of the criminal judge in the laws of the French Revolutionary period").

Politics and academic life

Between 1923 and 1932, Höhn was a member of the Young German Order and a close associate of Artur Mahraun, about whom he published a book in 1929: Artur Mahraun, der Wegweiser der Nation ("Artur Mahraun, the guide of the nation").

In July 1933, Höhn joined the NSDAP and in December of the same year the SS. From 1933 to 1935, he was head of department in the SD-Main Office. His direct superior was Reinhard Heydrich.

Höhn quickly made a career for himself. As assistant to Franz Wilhelm Jerusalem, he was instrumental in organizing and conducting a sociologists' meeting in Jena in 1934, at which Ferdinand Tönnies was ousted as president and Leopold von Wiese as executive director of the German Sociological Association in order to pursue the Gleichschaltung of the sociologists' association.

Höhn habilitated at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg before October 1934 with the thesis Der individualistische Staatsbegriff und die juristische Staatsperson in der Juristischen Fakultät ("The Individualistic Concept of the State and the Legal State Person in the Faculty of Law"), which was published extended under this title by in 1935. The preface of the published monograph is dated "October 1934." In the preface, Höhn thanked only Roger Diener by name, who had "provided him with valuable assistance, especially in the investigations of natural law." The rectorate of the University of Heidelberg had already invited to Höhn's "public inaugural lecture" for May 12, 1934.

Together with other intellectuals such as Werner Best, Höhn ensured the end of Carl Schmitt's career in the Third Reich in 1936. They accused Schmitt, among other things, of criminally neglecting völkisch thought with its categories of blood, race, and people in his edifice of thought.[1]

From 1936, Höhn was a member of the National Socialist Academy for German Law and vice-chairman of the Committee on Police Law, the committee chairman being Werner Best.[2] In 1936, he attempted a legal philosophical justification of the "leader principle", writing: "The judge has no right of review over Führer decisions that are clothed in the form of a law or a decree." In 1938, he submitted an extensive treatise on the relationship between the military and the state in the Vormärz period.

War years

In 1939, Höhn became a department head in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).[3] Between 1939 and 1945, he was director of the Institute for State Research at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In May 1942, he was appointed scientific director of the International Academy for State and Administrative Sciences.

From 1941 to 1944, he supervised the publication of the journal Reich - Volksordnung - Lebensraum. Zeitschrift für völkische Verfassung und Verwaltung, of which 6 issues were printed by L. C. Wittich Verlag Darmstadt, a geopolitical organ of the SS for higher cadres. The editorial board included State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior and SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Stuckart, with whom Höhn was a personal friend, and SS-Gruppenführer Gerhard Klopfer, State Secretary in the Party Chancellery. Other editors were Werner Best and Rudolf Lehmann, head of the legal department in the OKW. Authors of the paper included Friedrich Berber, Viktor Bruns, Theodor Maunz, Gustav Adolf Walz, Paul Ritterbusch, Werner Daitz, and Heinrich Muth.

In 1942, Höhn received the War Merit Cross 2nd Class without swords. In the SS hierarchy, Höhn was promoted to SS-Standartenführer in 1939, to SS-Oberführer in 1944, and he received the honorary sword of the Reichsführer-SS.

Höhn, a student of Mahraun, rejected the liberal constitutional state and democracy and defended a legal and philosophical theory for the "Volksgemeinschaft as a kind of community of the people" and the "Führerstaat" (one-man rule). Toward the end of the war, he also advocated harsh criminal law against non-Germans and, in 1944, took the view that the oath to Adolf Hitler was valid even after his death. He was one of the most prominent National Socialist scholars of law and political science and pursued a particularly radical dissolution of constitutional principles, even by National Socialist standards.

Career after 1945

After the war, Höhn obtained false papers under the name Rudolf Haeberlein and escaped denazification. He had his daughters call him "Uncle Rudi" and went to work as a healing practitioner in Lippstadt. From 1950, he practiced under his civil name and got into trouble with the authorities because he ran his non-medical practice under the title "Prof. Dr.". In 1958, he was fined 12,000 DM by a West Berlin court for his activities during the National Socialist era. Several of Höhn's writings were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated in the Soviet Occupation Zone and in the German Democratic Republic.

In 1953, Höhn became a director in the German Economic Society, which was founded in 1946. In 1956, he founded the Academy for Business Executives in Bad Harzburg. In 1962, Höhn presented his management system, the Harzburg Model, which determined corporate management in Germany in the following decades. The model was embedded in the Harzburg Education Network, of which the Academy for Business Executives was the best-known component.

In 1965, the GDR propaganda magazine Braunbuch devoted two pages to Höhn. When the journalist Bernt Engelmann published an article in the SPD newspaper Vorwärts in December 1971 under the title Schmiede der Elite. Wo Bosse kommandieren lernen. Im Harzburger „Führer“-Hauptquartier lehrt Ex-General Höhn Planspiele gegen die Demokratie ("Forge of the Elite. Where bosses learn to command. At the "Führer" headquarters in Harzburg, ex-General Höhn teaches business games against democracy"), the public debate that followed led Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt to end the Bundeswehr's cooperation with the Harzburg Academy in March 1972.

In the 1980s, Höhn's management model was replaced by management by objectives in the Federal Republic.

Works

  • Artur Mahraun, der Wegweiser zur Nation. Sein politischer Weg aus seinen Reden und Aufsätzen (1929)
  • Der bürgerliche Rechtsstaat und die neue Front. Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage einer Volksbewegung (1929)
  • Die Staatswissenschaft und der Jungdeutsche Staatsvorschlag (1929)
  • Allgemeines Schuldrecht (1934)
  • Die Wandlung im staatsrechtlichen Denken (1934)
  • Vom Wesen der Gemeinschaft. Vortrag, gehalten auf der Landesführerschule des deutschen Arbeitsdienstes (1934)
  • Der individualistische Staatsbegriff und die juristische Staatsperson (1935)
  • Rechtsgemeinschaft und Volksgemeinschaft (1935)
  • Otto von Gierkes Staatslehre und unsere Zeit, zugleich eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Rechtssystem des 19. Jahrhunderts (1936)
  • Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (1938; with Theodor Maunz and Ernst Swoboda)
  • Verfassungskampf und Heereseid. Der Kampf des Bürgertums um das Heer (1815–1850) (1938)
  • Das ausländische Verwaltungsrecht der Gegenwart. Wesen, Aufgabe und Stellung der Verwaltung in Italien, Frankreich, Großbritannien und USA (1940; editor)
  • Frankreichs demokratische Mission in Europa und ihr Ende (1940)
  • Verfassungs-, Verwaltungs- und Wirtschaftsgesetze Norwegens. Sammlung der wichtigsten Gesetze, Verordnungen und Erlasse (1942; with Wilhelm Stuckart and Herbert Schneider)
  • Die englische Ideologie vom Volksaufstand in Europa (1944)
  • Revolution, Heer, Kriegsbild (1944)
  • Scharnhorsts Vermächtnis (1952)
  • Die Führung mit Stäben in der Wirtschaft (1961)
  • Menschenführung im Handel (1962; with Gisela Böhme)
  • Die Armee als Erziehungsschule der Nation. Das Ende einer Idee (1963)
  • Die Stellvertretung im Betrieb. Ein Führungs- und Organisationsproblem im modernen Unternehmen (1964)
  • Führungsbrevier der Wirtschaft (1966; with Gisela Böhme)
  • Das tägliche Brot des Management (1978)

Notes

  1. ↑ Herbert, Ulrich (1996). Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989. Bonn: Dietz, p. 274, 601.
  2. ↑ Herbert (1996), p. 177.
  3. ↑ Klee, Ernest (2005). Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt: Fischer, p. 261.

References

External links

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