Gerhard Ritter facts for kids

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Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter (born April 6, 1888, died July 1, 1967) was an important German historian. He taught history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. Ritter was a Lutheran Christian and became famous for his 1925 book about Martin Luther. He was also a strong supporter of the old German Empire and believed in a king ruling the country (a monarchist).

Ritter did not like democracy (where people vote for their leaders) or totalitarianism (where the government has total control). Instead, he supported a strong, authoritarian government for Germany. He believed Germany should be the most powerful country in Europe. His view of history focused mainly on German interests. He was arrested by the Nazi regime in 1944 because he disagreed with them.

After World War II, Ritter worked to bring back German pride, but he wanted to separate it from Nazi ideas. He believed Germany should focus on its own interests rather than apologizing to countries it had harmed. Later in his career, he argued against the ideas of another German historian, Fritz Fischer. In 1959, Ritter became an honorary member of the American Historical Association.

Early Life and Education

Gerhard Ritter was born in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, a town in central Germany. His father was a Lutheran church leader. Young Gerhard went to a special high school called a gymnasium in Gütersloh.

University Studies and First Book

Ritter continued his studies at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. In 1912, he started working as a teacher. At Heidelberg, he was a research assistant for Professor Hermann Oncken, who greatly influenced him. Professor Oncken later opposed the Nazis and had to leave his job in 1935.

Ritter's first book, published in 1913, was called Die preußischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik. It was based on his PhD paper from 1911. In this book, Ritter looked at the disagreements between Otto von Bismarck and conservative landowners in Prussia (called Prussian Junkers) between 1858 and 1876. The Junkers felt that Bismarck's policies threatened their old privileges. This idea of how much people should support those in power became a common theme in Ritter's later writings.

First World War Experiences

Gerhard Ritter fought as a soldier in the First World War. He strongly wanted Germany to win. He didn't like extreme German nationalism, but he found it very hard to accept Germany's defeat in 1918.

He saw the German defeat as a huge disaster. Ritter believed that having a king (monarchy) was the best way to govern Germany. He thought the Weimar Republic (Germany's government after the war, where people voted for leaders) was a big mistake. This was because Germany didn't have a history of being a republic. Ritter believed history should teach leaders how to govern, and current politics were always important to him.

Family Life

In 1919, Gerhard Ritter married Gertrud Reichardt. They had three children together.

Working During the Weimar Republic

Ritter worked as a professor at Heidelberg University (1918–1923), Hamburg University (1923–1925), and Freiburg University (1925–1956).

Writing About Martin Luther

In 1925, Ritter published a book about Martin Luther that made him famous as a historian. He saw Luther as a great example of the "eternal German spirit." Ritter argued that Luther was a man of strong faith who showed the problems within the Catholic Church. He believed Luther inspired people to have confidence and improve the world.

Ritter wrote this book after Germany's defeat in 1918. He wanted to defend what he saw as Germany's unique spirit against what he felt was the corrupt way of thinking in Western countries. His Lutheran faith always influenced his writings.

Ritter believed, like Luther, that Christian moral values were for individuals, not for the state. He argued that the state needed power and could only be guided by the Christian values of its leaders. Ritter also thought that a state was like a living thing that needed to grow economically and geographically to survive. Using this idea, he said that Frederick the Great's invasion of Silesia in 1740 was necessary for Prussia to survive, even if it broke international laws.

Biography of Karl vom Stein

In the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ritter started focusing on more recent history and biographies of political leaders. In 1931, he wrote a two-volume book about the Prussian statesman Karl vom Stein. Ritter showed Stein as the opposite of Otto von Bismarck. He said Bismarck was focused on power, while Stein was focused on morals. Ritter believed Stein's success came from his strong moral character, even if he wasn't always politically smart.

His Thoughts Before the Nazis Took Power

On February 11, 1933, Ritter wrote a letter to a friend about his plans. He wanted to write books that would help create a new national political party in Germany. He hoped his historical writings would guide people and explain Germany's past to help them understand the present. He believed that historians had an important role in educating the nation.

Just a few weeks before this letter, on January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg had made Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, the new German chancellor.

Life Under the Nazi Regime

Initial Support and Concerns

At first, Ritter supported the Nazi government, even though he had serious doubts, especially about their attacks on churches. He decided not to openly criticize the government or its foreign policy. In 1940, he wrote that leaders in Europe needed to be ready for attack. He agreed with Benito Mussolini that "might is the precondition of all freedom," meaning power is needed for freedom.

Ritter publicly called Nazi Germany the "peaceful center of Europe" that would protect against communism. He praised Germany's union with Austria, called the Anschluss. He had supported the idea of a "Greater Germany" before 1933, so he initially defended the Nazi invasion as fulfilling German hopes. He called the Anschluss the "boldest and most successful foreign policy act of our new government."

National Conservative Views

Ritter was a strong German nationalist. He believed Germany should have a strong, authoritarian government and be the most powerful country in Europe. In an article from early 1933, he wrote that Germans needed a government with strong leadership that would earn people's trust by respecting justice and freedom.

Ritter deeply believed in a Rechtsstaat (a state based on law). This made him increasingly worried about the Nazis breaking laws. In 1935, he tried to defend his old mentor, Professor Oncken, from Nazi attacks. Nazi officials had criticized Oncken for suggesting that the Nazi revolution wasn't the greatest revolution ever.

Biography of Frederick the Great

Ritter's short book about Frederick the Great in 1936 is considered one of the best military biographies. Historians praised it as a great introduction to Frederick and warfare in his time.

Ritter wrote this book to challenge Nazi ideas that claimed a connection between Frederick and Hitler. The book was a brave, indirect criticism of Hitler's wild ideas, his extreme beliefs, and his endless desire for power. Ritter emphasized Frederick's limited war goals and his willingness to settle for less. This was seen as a quiet criticism of Adolf Hitler at the time. Ritter also highlighted the influence of the Age of Enlightenment and "orderly reason" on Frederick. He wanted to show that Hitler's claim to be Frederick's successor was wrong. Ritter was inspired to write the book after seeing Hitler try to connect himself to Prussian traditions in a way Ritter felt was historically inaccurate.

In March 1936, after seeing German soldiers re-enter the Rhineland, Ritter wrote to his mother that it was a "great and magnificent experience" for his children who had never seen German soldiers up close. He hoped it wouldn't lead to a "catastrophe."

Actions Against the Nazi Regime

Ritter was a devoted Lutheran and joined the Confessing Church. This group of Lutherans resisted the Nazi-influenced "Aryan Christianity" in the 1930s.

In 1938, Ritter was the only professor at Freiburg to attend the funeral of Edmund Husserl. Husserl was a famous philosopher who had been fired from the University of Freiburg in 1933 because he was Jewish. He was also forbidden from publishing his works.

Ritter's presence at Husserl's funeral is seen as a brave act of quiet protest against the Nazi regime. After the Kristallnacht (a violent attack against Jewish people and their property), Ritter wrote to his mother that it was "the most shameful and most dreadful thing that has happened for a long time."

In 1938, Ritter gave lectures attacking Friedrich Nietzsche. These lectures were another way for Ritter to indirectly protest the Nazi government.

The Freiburger Kreis

After the 1938 Kristallnacht attacks, Ritter became a founding member of the Freiburger Kreis. This was a group of anti-Nazi professors who discussed new economic policies.

Advisor to Carl Goerdeler

Later, Ritter became an advisor to the German conservative politician Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. They secretly worked together on plans for a new government after the Nazis were overthrown.

In a memo to Goerdeler in January 1943, Ritter wrote that "Hundreds of thousands of human beings have been systematically murdered solely because of their Jewish ancestry." He urged that the Holocaust (the mass murder of Jews) should be stopped immediately. However, in the same memo, Ritter suggested that in a future government, the rights of Jewish people should be limited.

Book on Power and Utopia

In 1940, Ritter published Machtstaat und Utopie (National Power and Utopia). In this book, he argued that democracy was a luxury only safe countries could afford. He said that because Britain is an island, it has security that allows democracy. But Germany, being in Central Europe, needed a strong, authoritarian government for its safety.

Ritter compared the ideal world ideas of Sir Thomas More with the realistic ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli. Ritter said Germany had to follow Machiavelli's realism because of its need for security. He praised Machiavelli for understanding that state power often involves using or threatening violence. Ritter believed society needed police and military power to function. He criticized More for not accepting that morality in politics sometimes needs force.

In 1943, Ritter added a footnote to his book, praising More for understanding the "demonic forces of power" and appealing to Christian morality. This was seen as an indirect criticism of Carl Schmitt, who supported the Nazis and used the idea of "friend-foe" in politics.

Censored Book on the Military

During World War II, Ritter worked on a study of how civilians and the military interacted in Germany. He wanted to criticize the idea of "total war" (where a whole society is involved in war) as a way to indirectly protest Nazi Germany. The book couldn't be published during the war due to censorship. After 1945, Ritter rewrote it as a four-volume study of German militarism.

Involvement in Assassination Plot

Ritter was involved in the Stauffenberg assassination plot on July 20, 1944, which aimed to kill Hitler. He was one of the few plotters who were not killed by the Nazis. His friend, Carl Goerdeler, was supposed to become the new leader if the coup succeeded. Goerdeler was executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Ritter, who was part of the conservative German opposition to the Nazis, was imprisoned in late 1944 and remained there until the end of the war.

Ideas After World War II

Explaining the Rise of Nazism

After 1945, Ritter focused on two main ideas in his writings. First, he tried to show that the German traditions from the time of Bismarck had nothing to do with Nazism. Second, he argued that the Nazi movement was caused by mass democracy, not by the old aristocratic conservative ideas. In his book Europa und die deutsche Frage (Europe and the German Question), Ritter said that Nazi Germany was not an unavoidable outcome of German history. Instead, he saw it as part of a general European trend towards totalitarianism that began with the French Revolution. He believed Germans should not be singled out for criticism.

Ritter thought that the roots of Nazism went back to the French Revolution and its ideas of the "general will" and the Jacobins. He argued that Nazism was not unique to Germany but was the German version of a European problem: the one-party state, which came from modern industrial society and its uniform masses.

Ritter believed that the First World War caused a general breakdown of moral values in the West. This led to a decline in Christianity, a rise in materialism, political corruption, and the growth of extreme politics, which then led to Nazism. In Ritter's view, the problem with the Weimar Republic was that it had too much democracy, which allowed extreme leaders to take over. He thought that if the German Empire had continued after 1918, there would have been no Nazi Germany.

Ritter argued that democracy was a necessary condition for totalitarianism because it created an opportunity for a strong leader to claim to represent the "popular will." He concluded that totalitarian dictatorship was not just a German thing but a natural result when "the direct rule of the people... is introduced." Ritter believed that Hitler's forerunners were not Frederick the Great, Bismarck, or Wilhelm II, but rather "demagogues and Caesars of modern history from Danton to Lenin to Mussolini."

Saving German Nationalism

Ritter saw his main job after 1945 as trying to restore German nationalism against what he felt were unfair criticisms. He argued that Germans needed a positive view of their past but warned against "false concepts of honor and national power." He was part of a group of German historians who did not support reconciliation with victims of Nazi aggression but instead wanted Germany to pursue its national interests.

He complained that the Allied authorities had taken German historical records after World War II and started publishing them without German historians. He used his position as the first head of the German Historical Association after the war to demand the return of these records.

When discussing the German Resistance, Ritter made a clear distinction. He separated those who worked with foreign powers to defeat Hitler from those like Carl Friedrich Goerdeler who wanted to overthrow the Nazis but still worked for Germany. For Ritter, Goerdeler was a patriot, but members of the Rote Kapelle spy network were traitors who deserved to be executed.

Working for Christian Unity

Besides defending German nationalism, Ritter became active in the movement for Christian unity after 1945. He urged conservative Catholics and Protestants to join together in the Christian Democratic Union. He believed that based on his experiences in Nazi Germany, Christians from all churches needed to work together against totalitarianism.

During the war, Ritter met many Catholic and Calvinist members of the German opposition through his secret work. This caused him to change his old negative views about Calvinists and Catholics. Ritter realized that despite their differences, members of all three churches had more in common to unite them against the Nazis.

Biography of Carl Goerdeler

In 1954, Ritter published a highly praised biography of Carl Goerdeler, his close friend and a conservative politician executed by the Nazis in 1945. Goerdeler was a devout Lutheran and the son of a conservative Prussian politician. Ritter pushed for his Goerdeler biography to be translated into English to counter another book that he felt unfairly criticized the German resistance.

Views on German Militarism

Ritter specialized in German political, military, and cultural history. He always made a clear difference between the "power politics" (Machtpolitik) of Bismarck, where military actions were carefully controlled by political goals, and the endless expansion and strange racial ideas of the Nazis.

Ritter was known for saying that there was no uniquely aggressive German version of militarism. For him, militarism was when military decisions controlled political ones and led to foreign expansion, and it had nothing to do with a society's values.

In a paper in 1953, Ritter argued that traditional Prussian leaders like Frederick the Great were "power politicians," not militarists. He believed Frederick wanted to create "a lasting order of laws and peace" and help general well-being, not just wage war.

Ritter claimed that militarism first appeared during the French Revolution, when the French state began to fully mobilize society to destroy enemies. Similarly, he said that Otto von Bismarck was a "Cabinet politician," not a militarist, and always put political goals before military ones. Ritter expanded on these ideas in his four-volume study Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk (translated as The Sword and the Scepter), published between 1954 and 1968. In this work, he looked at how militarism developed in Germany between 1890 and 1918.

In Volume 2 of his study, Ritter wrote that militarism only appeared in Germany after Bismarck was fired in 1890. He found it shocking to look back at the early 20th century, a time he remembered as bright in his youth, and see the deeper "shadows" that his generation had not noticed.

For Ritter, the difficult experiences of the First World War finally led to militarism winning in Germany, especially after 1916. He believed this was a huge break from Prussian and German traditions. The bad results of that war led to the "proletarian nationalism" of the Nazis gaining many followers and to the "militarism of the National Socialist mass movement" coming to power. Ritter also strongly emphasized the "Hitler factor" as a reason for Nazi Germany. In 1962, Ritter wrote that he found it "almost unbearable" that the "will of a single madman" had caused World War II unnecessarily.

Critical Views on German History

While many saw Ritter's work as defending German nationalism and conservatism, he sometimes criticized parts of Germany's past. He noted that while many nations had given in to false values, "the Germans accepted all of that with special ardor when it was now preached to them by National Socialism, and their nationalism had in general displayed from its beginning a particularly intense, combative quality."

At the first meeting of German historians in 1949, Ritter gave a speech. He warned that historians risked being seen as nationalists and being used by those with "blind nationalism." He stressed that their responsibility to Germany, Europe, and the world was greater than ever, and their path was dangerously narrow.

In 1953, Ritter found a copy of a military planning document written by General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905. The next year, Ritter published this document and his thoughts on the Schlieffen Plan as Der Schlieffen-Plan: Kritik Eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth).

Honored in America

In 1959, Ritter was made an honorary member of the American Historical Association. They recognized his fight against totalitarianism. He was one of the last historians of the traditional German idealist school, which saw history as an art. He focused on understanding his subjects, especially important men of the past, and mainly on political and military events.