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The German word ‘Wehrwissenschaften’ does not have a good English equivalent. ‘Military sciences’, ‘military disciplines’ or ‘defence studies’ are all too generic; they mask the historical connotations of the German word, the deep roots of the Wehrwissenschaften in the German radical Right during the interwar period. Frank Reichherzer’s dissertation makes this point clear. It provides a detailed account of the background, institutional origins and remarkable career of efforts to focus German academic disciplines ‘comprehensively on war’ (p. 15). The word seems to have first been employed in 1926 in a military journal. The idea that German universities should compensate for the absence of conscription by providing instruction in war-related fields of study then became popular in student organizations, particularly among the student fraternities (Burschenschaften). By the end of the decade they were calling for professorial chairs in the Wehrwissenschaften and sponsoring war-related sporting events and lectures. The army encouraged these projects, paying retired officers to lecture at the universities on military history and other pertinent subjects. The Nazi seizure of power then opened the gates to those who believed that the academic curriculum should be reformed to accommodate the lessons of the Great War, which, they believed, demonstrated that war had become an all-encompassing undertaking that bore directly on virtually all fields of human knowledge. With moral and material support from the war ministry, the education ministry and other agencies of the new government, academic courses, seminars, institutes and professorships were established to accommodate this principle. The discipline of history, which now broadened to include regular offerings in military history, was a principal target of these enticements; it was joined by economics, geography, political science, medicine, chemistry and physics, where scholars likewise sought to develop war-related instruction. Although they encountered resistance from members of the regular faculties, the advocates of the Wehrwissenschaften registered important successes at universities in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Cologne, at the technical university in Hanover and in Berlin, where both the university and the technical university offered programmes in war-related disciplines. After 1933 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wehrpolitik und Wehrwissenschaften, which was also funded by the army, organized scholars into a think-tank that prepared confidential studies for official agencies on aspects of mobilization, as well as a series of its own publications for a broader audience.
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