Walter Kuhn

Walter Kuhn (27 September 1903 – 5 August 1983), was a was a Nazi party member, nationalist historian and Ostforschung researcher interested in linguistics and German minorities outside Germany, particularly in the area of Ukraine. During the war he was involved with Nazi re-settlement policies aimed at Jews, Poles and Germans. As a historian he was intoxicated with the idea of politically engaged scholarship and bereft of any criticism, while demonstrating anti-Polish prejudices. He worked together with Theodor Schieder, another Nazi researcher who developed ethnic cleansing plans regarding Poland and its Polish and Jewish population. Kuhn continued to work post-war in West Germany.

Kuhn was born in 1903 in the town of Bielitz (Bielsko). According to Kuhn's own statements, his father was a supporter of political movement led by Georg Ritter von Schönerer; Schönerer's ideas featured elements of violent anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, anti-Catholicism, authoritarianism, popular solidarism, nationalism, and Pan-Germanism. Young Walter Kuhn was distributing flowers to German youths fighting Poles already at the age of eleven While he initially studied electrical engineering in Graz till 1927, he later attended universities in Vienna and Tübingen

In 1926 Kuhn went to Ukraine where he studied German communities and praised "the strength and beauty of German volkstum". Kuhn wandered the Ukraine dressed in Wandervogel costume trying to instil in the offspring of Ukrainian peasants-who despite often speaking Polish and being poor were seen as biologically superior-a sense of ethnic nationalism, even if his listeners were more interested in just improving their living conditions. In his work Kuhn tried to determine "biological strength" of German peasants and pointed out the "weakness" of "intermarrying with Slavs" which could lead to "de-Germanisation". Kuhn viewed himself and his colleagues as "bearers of civilization" and his goal as "to transform the instinctive feeling of superiority and pride towards the surrounding peoples(...)into a true national consciousness". He also published works regarding Poland which were aimed at presenting its western territories as German

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