Erich Keyser

Erich Keyser (12 October 1893 – 21 February 1968) was a Nazi activist and far-right nationalist historian connected with the anti-Polish ideology of Ostforschung and the racist Volkisch movement. He supported German expansion in Central and Eastern Europe and was involved with the planning of ethnic cleansing by the Third Reich during the Second World War. After 1945 he exploited the Cold War to promote the interests of German nationalism and chauvinism in his historical writing.

Keyser studied history in Freiburg, Halle and Berlin. He published his doctoral thesis in 1918, which dealt with the earliest settlement and economic history of Danzig.

Keyser publicly espoused nationalist theories and hatred towards Poles.

In 1926 he created the State Regional Museum of Danzig History in Danzig-Oliva which he led until 1945. It was responsible for pursuing studies on direct requests from SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler.

Keyser also took part in writing the 1926 German Settlement Land in the East collection, which aimed to justify German claims to Eastern Europe and was part of "emotional" narrative writing that idealized the concept of Drang nach Osten.

Among Keyser's key views was the desire to classify the historical nature of the populations "according to physiological and psychological characteristics of racial make up of the population and its groups". In such works he included psychological study of national character traits which led him to support Rassenforschung (racial studies). He was especially interested in the "racial categorization of the current population of Germany and in the racial classification of psychological remains from the centuries of the past". He considered the Germans the only representatives of historical life in Prussia and supported the volkisch movement. Keyser imagined a racial and biological "essence" uniting Germans throughout history that supported irredentism of German nationalists. In his view the German "volk" needed to expand or perish. Like other historians from the volkisch movement he expressed overt racism and anti-semitism.

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