Description

The prominenthistorian Karl Bosl, who during World War II had been a high school teacher inAnsbach, Franconia, intimated that he had been critical of the Nazis andasserted that he had belonged to a small group that engaged in activeresistance; one of its members, Robert Limpert, was apprehended by the Nazisand brutally put to death just hours before the Americans arrived. The presentstudy, based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents,records Bosl’s manifold links to the Nazi regime and reveals that as late asDecember 1944 he delivered a stirring lecture before Ansbach’s Nazi leadershipin which he extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler’s GreaterGerman Reich; yet as early as September 1945 he vigorously condemned Nazism ata ceremony at Limpert’s grave. The documents attest also to how Bosl succeededin persuading Ansbach’s Denazification Tribunal that he had risked his lifeopposing the Nazis. An unpublished account allows for a detailed reconstructionof the daring, little-known activities of young Limpert and his threeclassmates.

In an excellent pieceof detective work, Benjamin Kedar and Peter Herde provide a fascinating andforensic demolition of the story which Karl Bosl, one of Bavaria’s mostprominent historians of the postwar era, created for himself to establish hisanti-Nazi credentials.

Professor Sir Ian Kershaw