Otto Hefler’s Theory of Germanic Warrior Männerbünde in the Third Reich

Abstract

In the article, the authors deal with the works which were published by the Austrian Germanist Otto Höfler in the Third Reich and which were more or less dedicated to the Germanic warrior Männerbünde. The focus of their analysis is the book The Secret Cult Associations of the Germans (1934), derived from Höfler's habilitation thesis. In their opinion, Höfler expressed his fundamental scientific and ideological views in the second volume of this book, which he most likely wrote in 1934 and which he never published because it was most closely associated with the SA, while it was headed by Ernst Röhm. Therefore, the authors reject both the position that Höfler’s scientific work was in the service of the SS and the opposite position that he remained immune to the ideology of National Socialism. Since it is certain that Höfler was a member of the SA until 1928 and that it is quite possible that he remained connected with the Vienna Gau even after he moved to Uppsala, where he wrote The Secret Cult Associations of the Germans, the “sociological” part of the second volume of this book was, as far as our knowledge of it extends today, anchored in that part of the ideological spectrum of National Socialism. Based on Hefler’s announcements in the first volume of this book, it can be concluded that at that time, for him, the only real “historical continuity” between the old and the modern Germans lay in the warrior Männerbünde, whose violence resembled natural disasters, who brutally dealt with (“distributed justice on”) anyone who happened to be in their way and who had a special cult of the dead.