Scholars and scientists from the University of Cologne research, explore and experience the city. They are interested the flora, fauna and last but not least the inhabitants of the city – past and present. In this section, they report on things that are interesting, quirky, typical or less familiar. Professor Dr Hans-Peter Ullmann, Emeritus Professor of the Department of History, on a dark chapter in the history of our university.
On 25 June 1938, an impressive procession formed Cologne’s Schlageterplatz, named after Leo Schlageter, a Nazi ‘martyr’. The procession was headed by the university’s pedells with the Rector’s batons, followed by the Rector and Vice-Rector, the four Deans and numerous guests of honour. They marched to the university’s main building at what was then known as ‘Langemarckplatz’. The organizers had actually wanted to celebrate the 550th anniversary of their university, but had to be told by the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture that a university in Cologne had by no means existed without interruption and therefore only a ‘commemorative celebration’ of its foundation in 1388 was an option. This did not stop the organizers from sticking to their original plan. In a decadent celebration lasting several days, they evoked the medieval university as their origin. This invented tradition served to reassure the university and was intended to stabilize it as an institution.
As a result of the pressure exerted by the National Socialists, the University of Cologne was the first German university to bring itself into line with the party’s politics and elected men to its leadership who wanted to cooperate with the new regime. In their speeches and actions, they more or less strongly supported the National Socialists’ goals and thus promoted the Nazification of the university. There was no resistance to the purges of Jewish and politically ‘unacceptable’ professors and students.
Nevertheless, the regime remained highly suspicious of the University of Cologne. Founded by the city of Cologne in 1919, the university was considered a product of the reviled ‘Weimar system’ and a stronghold of the Catholic Centre Party. The university barely managed to avoid being shut down. Plans to relocate parts of the Faculty of Medicine to Bonn and to downsize the Faculty of Law were eventually abandoned.
All the more did the university need a symbolic revaluation, which the commemoration in 1938 seemed to offer. But it had to pay a high price for this. The ministry intervened decisively in the organization of the festivities, which showed how much autonomy the university had already lost. Above all, the Reich Minister of Science, Education and National Culture, Bernhard Rust, wrote that research and teaching had to be based on the ‘spirit of National Socialism’ and that the ‘concept of race’ was of decisive importance. The University of Cologne would have the ‘right to exist’ only if it followed these guidelines. The effects of the celebration were ambivalent. On the one hand, the university stabilized. On the other hand, it became even more deeply entangled in the Nazi system and supported it to the end, not least during World War II.
The ‘Schlageterplatz’ has been called Rudolfplatz again since 1945, and the ‘Langemarkplatz’ was named after Albertus Magnus. However, the memory of the University of Cologne’s history under National Socialism remains.