Peter Scheibert, Historian of Eastern Europe
Notes on an Inadequate Biography
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Since the end of the 1990s, German historians and social scientists have been debating the entanglement of former professional colleagues in the National-Socialist system of rule and its policies of conquest and annihilation in Central and Eastern Europe. A recently published biography is devoted to Peter Scheibert (1915-1995), who served in the Foreign Office and in Special Commando Künsberg, a unit that carried out the state-sponsored theft of art and cultural property in the occupied countries. The book provides hardly any indication of Scheibert’s personal activities and his political views during the years before 1945. Scheibert’s political and moral convictions are analysed with reference to questionable concepts. A thorough, critical examination of his intellectual and political development, his role as a university teacher in Marburg, and his academic work remain desiderata.
(Osteuropa 1-2/2017, pp. 27–59)