Published on 13 September 2016
Wilhelm Weizsäcker was a very capable legal historian at the German University in Prague. However, his profile is stained by the fact that he lent his erudition to the services of the Nazi totalitarian regime. He specialized in the legal history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially mining law, ordinances, Landrecht and feudal and colonial laws. He linked his scholarly research with his political beliefs concerning the rights of the German population in the Czech lands and the role of Germans in the legal and cultural development of Bohemia. As a convinced national socialist, he saw the Munich Pact as very positive. Even after 1945 he regarded Czech history as being German, and the creation of a unified German state based on national and racial values remained the highest ideal for him. This idea is also contained in his book Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen und Mähren (The History of Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, published in 1950), which had an influence on the way the Germans expelled from the Sudetenland viewed historical events.
Wilhelm Karl Rudolf Wiezsäcker was born on 2 November 1886 in Prague to the family of a trader, Rudolf Weizsäcker, and his wife Pauline, nee Kretschmer. He was an Evangelical Christian. He received his secondary education at the German grammar school in his native town, on Na Příkopech street. After his graduation in 1904, he registered at the Faculty of Law of the German University in Prague. During his studies, between 1904 and 1908, he was greatly influenced by the legal historians Adolf Zych and Guido Kisch. In 1907 he won a special award for his seminar paper Darstellung des bäuerlichen Kolonialrechtes in Böhmen und Mähren, which he later expanded and published in 1913 as his first science publication: Das deutsche Recht der deutschen bäuerlichen Kolonisten in Böhmen und Mähren im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert. In the academic year 1908/09 he attended lectures at the Philosophical Faculty of the German University. In 1909 he received his doctorate in legal and state science (he graduated on 16 March 1909) and began to work in the judiciary. After training at the High Regional Court in Prague, he was placed as a judicial trainee at the district court in Bílina, where he later (1919) became a district judge.
On 7 May 1912, he married Marie, nee Ostermannovou (born 21 May 1884), the daughter of the headmaster of the grammar school in Prague, Hugo Ostermann. The couple had three children.
In 1922 he started to teach as a private associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the German University in Prague, which aided his transfer from Bílina to the capital, to work in the Commercial Court. In 1927 he was appointed an associate professor at the Faculty of Law for history, teaching legal history in the Czechoslovak Republic (having been suggested for the post the previous year). He finished his career at the court in the same year, at official rank VII, with the title counsellor of the provincial court. He was appointed a full professor in 1930.
Weizsäcker was a very prolific author – he wrote over a hundred major works. Two examples from the early years of his academic career are Sächsisches Bergrecht in Böhmen (1928) and System des tschechoslowakischen Bergrechtes (1933).
In addition to his teaching and research activities, he rose in the academic community and participated increasingly in the organization of the German University. He was actively involved in Czech-German disputes about the university, which started in 1920 (with the passing of the "lex Mareš" law) and dragged on well into the late 1930s. Concerning these matters, Wiezsäcker frequently came into conflict with Václav Vojtíšek.
In 1930 he became a member and later chairman of the disciplinary commission of the faculty of law. In 1932 he was elected a dean and and an examiner for judicial examination at the High Provincial Court in Prague. In 1934 he became an examiner for the public and private law of Central Europe and the canon law; two years later he was promoted to the post of vice president of the state examination board.
Weizsäcker was a regular member of the German Society of Science and Art in Prague (Deutsche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und Künste für die Tschechoslowakische Republik). He was elected as its treasurer in 1936. He was also active along with his closest colleagues in the Vereinigung Deutscher Rechtshistoriker (Association of German Legal Historians). His activities were noticed by the Germans in Brno, and in 1936 he became an honorary member of Deutscher Verein für Geschichte Mährens und Schlesiens in Brno. A year later he was elected as a full member of the Historical Commission for Silesia in Wrocław (Historische Kommission für Schlesien). Moreover, he was a member of the committee Verein für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen, and in 1936 he was a member of the conciliation court of the Deutsche Kulturverband in Prague. In 1937 he joined the Academic Senate of the German University in Prague. Before Munich, he was involved in the legal department Sudetendeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which formed as a scientific centre of Sudeten Germans.
Although he did not have any close contact with Czechs - not even with Czech legal historians (in his address book, there is only the name of Václav Vaněčka) - and he did not maintain good relations with them, he accepted Jan Kapras's invitation (supported by Jaroslav Bidl and Gustav Friedrich) to take up associate membership in the Czech Royal Society of Sciences. His knowledge of Czech was most likely passive.
Weizsäcker was active not only in professional circles; in 1935, he joined the Sudetendeutsche Partai (SdP) and represented this party in the electorial court. Four years later, he was admitted to the ranks of the NSDAP, and from 1939 he achieved the rank of Obersturmführer in the SA.
Like many other German scientists working in Czechoslovakia, he spent the period preceding the signing of the Munich Pact abroad, fearing attacks by Czechs. Weizsäcker did not go to Munich, like many others, but to Vienna. Soon, however, he returned to Bohemia, where a great career awaited him after the establishment of Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In 1940 the Reich Protector again appointed him as the Dean of the Faculty of Law of the German Charles University (the official name from 1 September 1939 on was Deutsche Karls-Universität). Here, he headed the Institute of Mining Law. After the closure of the Czech University in Prague, he took over the management of the Faculty of Law in the position of Commissary and was responsible for many changes in the teaching staff and the curriculum of the Faculty of Law of the German University.
His disputes with the rector Wilhlem Saur concerning his university policy towards the domestic Germans (he preferred those from the Reich) resulted in Weizsäcker leaving Prague and relocating to Vienna. Between 1941 and 1943 he lectured at the local university. After Saur’s dismissal from the post of rector, he accepted without hesitation an invitation to return to the university in Prague. He might have been attracted by the offer of a leading position in the planned research institute, the Reinhard-Heydrich Stiftung foundation. Allegedly, together with Alfred Buntru and Hans Hoachim Beyer, Reinhard Heydrich himself chose Weizsäcker as a perfect person for reorganizing the academic life in Prague according to the ideals of the SS. The Reinhard-Heydrich-Stiftung foundation Reichsanstalt für wissenschaftliche Forschung was founded in June 1942 and opened a year later (4 June 1943). It was led by the fanatical Nazi and SS member Hans Joachim Beyer. As Weizsäcker and Beyer got along really well, nothing stood in the way of Weizsäcker becoming its managing director. The organization headed eight institutes; Weizsäcker, together with Franz Laufke, led the Institute of German Law in the East (Institut für Deutsches Recht in Ostmitteleuropa). He played a major role in the transformation of the German Academy of Sciences in Prague (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Prag). Besides being a regular member, he even held the position of vice president here from 1941.
From 1941 he was also a member of the editorial committee led by Wilhelm Wostry for the purpose of preparing for the publication of a book in 1948 to mark the 600th anniversary of the establishment of Prague University. Weizsäcker was assigned the task of preparing the chapter on the university’s legal and economic development. He was also chosen to be a member of the commitee that was to create a new history textbook for colleges.
“Weizsäcker played a marginal role: He did not become a national-socialist politician like the historian Josef Pfitzner, or a fanatic like Hans Joachim Beyer, who preferred militant methods to serious science. Together with Heinz Zatschke, Weizsäcker represents the type of an extremely politicized scientist who, despite remaining in the field of traditional science, has left aside its objective principles.” As early as the 1930s he gave public lectures in which he supported the objectives of Sudeten Germans. During World War II he broadened these activities. After all, the popularization of science was in line with the spirit of the Third Reich.
Outside the university, he took part in the Germanization of Bohemia by, among other things, collaborating in the creation of a list of municipalities for the needs of the management of the Protectorate. On 1 October 1938, he was awarded a Commemorative Medal for his active work for the Reich, and Adolf Hitler himself presented him with the War Merit Cross second class without swords.
The convinced Nazi did not want to leave Prague even after the outbreak of the Prague Uprising. According to one of his students, he was among the last to leave the German Charles University and its Faculty of Law, where the headquarters of the Waffen-SS were situated: “…fearless and aware of his duties until the last moment, the dean left his post only when the mob stormed the university. He managed to escape by the side entrance.” On 8 May 1945, the day World War II ended, he fled into American captivity, together with many other German soldiers. Only a month later (9 June) he managed to escape the American detention camp (in a Plzeň brewery) and reach Munich.
Weizsäcker avoided post-war investigations. Actually, only one lecturer from the German University in Prague, Josef Pfitzner, was prosecuted. However, he was found guilty not because of his activities within the academic community, but for his activities for the Prague council. In 1946/1947 the Ministry of the Interior dealt with the complaint that Weizsäcker, as director of the Institute of German Law in the East and managing director of the Reinhard Heydrich foundation, “fought tenaciously against the Czechoslovak Republic regarding the issue of the Sudetenland.“ However, the regional office of the StB answered that between 1939 and 1945 he was not politically active, and although an NSDAP and SA member, he did not hold any high position and “no activity in the sense of the retribution decree was found.“
Until 1949 he worked in the Bavarian capital in an office for refugees, where he mostly looked after the Sudeten Germans. In 1950 he moved to Heidelberg, where he became an honorary professor at the local university. He participated in the preparation of the German Legal Dictionary. He returned to teaching and publishing, and his main object of interest became the Sudeten Germans expelled from Bohemia. Besides the book mentioned in the introduction, he published the first part of The Books of Sources for the History of the Sudetenland. While staying in Munich in 1947, he co-founded the Adalbert-Stifter-Verein. He was also a member of the J. G. Herder Forschungsrat and the Historische Kommission der Sudetenländer, vice president of the Ostdeutscher Kulturrat and a member of the Collegium Carolinum.
He died on 19 July 1961 at the age of almost eighty five, an emeritus professor in Heidelberg. The documents Weizsäck left in Bohemia were confiscated after the war by the National Cultural Committee and deposited at the State Historical Institute under the care of František Roubík.