The university, founded in 1492 by Duke Ludwig the Rich of Lower Bavaria-Landshut in Ingolstadt, moved by the – later – King Maximilian I to Landshut in 1800, and then by his son to the royal seat of Munich in 1826, is one of the best-known and largest universities in Europe. The main building on the Ludwigstrasse, which was planned by Friedrich von Gärtner, was completed in 1840.
The LMU, which was named after its founders, was, with its multitude of disciplines and subjects taught by famous academics, not to mention its constantly growing student body (1826: approx. 1000; 1900: approx. 4,600; 1914: approx. 7,000) very attractive. In the second half of the 19th century, the university attracted high-level scientists from all over Germany. Even after the First World War, many internationally regarded scientists taught at the LMU, including the Nobel Prize winners in physics, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and Wilhelm Wien; in chemistry, Adolf von Baeyer, Richard Willstätter, and Heinrich Wieland; also the thoracic surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the sociologist Max Weber, and the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin.
Long before 1933, there were examples of infiltration of the scientific disciplines, but also of the professorship and student body, with nationalist and racist ideas at the LMU. In 1923, Germany's first professorship for ‘racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene)’ was established at the University of Munich; Fritz Lenz occupied this chair. A professorship for ‘Aryan language and culture’ was also established, to which the later ‘Führer-president’ of the university, the Indologist and Sanskrit researcher Walther Wüst, was named. The Munich professoriat was, like that of other German universities, largely conservative, German-national, thoroughly anti-semitic and nationalistic, and therefore everything but democratic or liberal. However, only a few professors were members of the Nazi Party before 1933.
A clear commitment to the Weimar Republic and its legal state-democratic principles was something only a few Munich professors made: During his time as president in 1926-27, the scholar of Romance languages Karl Voßler had the black, red and gold flag of the republic hoisted at official ceremonies and festive events at the university and insisted that Jewish student fraternities also participate in the student corporations.
In 1926, the National Socialist German Students' League was founded in Munich. Although still small in number, the university group at the LMU, led by Baldur von Schirach, who later became the 'Reichsjugendführer' (Reich Youth Leader), was tightly knit and extremely active. It pushed for the exclusion of Jewish members from the student fraternities and corporations, staged a scandal around the constitutional lawyer Hans Nawiasky, who was of Jewish origin and of liberal conviction, and generally tried to open the doors to National Socialism at the LMU. On the evening of May 10, 1933, in the Lichthof of the LMU, students sympathetic to National Socialism organized a celebration of the handover of the new student law and then, accompanied by the SS, SA, and the fraternities, proceeded to the book burning organized throughout the Reich on Munich’s Königsplatz.
After the National Socialists seized power, there was a racist and politically-justified ‘cleansing’ of the teaching staff. The institutions were redesigned according to the ‘Führer principle’. As a result of the first wave of dismissals, 24 teachers had to leave the University of Munich, three for political reasons, including Hans Nawiasky, and 21 for so-called 'racial’ reasons. Dismissed or sent into retirement for ‘non-Aryan’ origins were the philosopher Richard Hönigswald, the human rights activist Hans Neumeyer, and the physician and later Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe. By the middle of 1937, a total of at least 45 professors and teachers had to leave the university for racist or political reasons.
The Nazi regime followed a similar policy with regard to students: By the beginning of July 1933, 16 oppositional students, mostly members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) were expelled from the university; 7 of them were prohibited for good from studying at a German university. In the winter semester 1934-35, a total of 106 so-called ‘non-Aryans’ were registered at the LMU; in the summer semester 1936, there were just 52. In addition, 183 people who had been awarded Ph.D.s by the LMU had their degrees revoked.
Due to the cleansing and regular retirements, approximately half the teaching positions at the Munich university were reassigned between 1933 and 1939. In the process, some people with Nazi sympathies but the necessary expertise were appointed as professors, as were some Nazi Party members who were completely unsuitable professionally, such as the philosopher Wolfgang Schultz and the eugenicist Lothar Tirala. Wilhelm Müller was only able to succeed the internationally renowned physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who retired in 1935, because he was a representative of so-called 'German physics,' which modern physics rejected as too theoretical and 'un-German'. However, despite considerable political pressure at the beginning, highly qualified scholars who were politically unremarkable could still be recruited in individual cases, such as the economist Fritz Terhalle, the legal historian Heinrich Mitteis, and the labor law expert Alfred Hueck.
The 1927 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Heinrich Wieland, was able to create space of another type with his great national and international renown, allowing so-called Jewish ‘half-breed’ students and employees to study and research at his institute. In the process, numerous research topics declared ‘vital to the war effort’ were examined, which at least in the short term were important for the concerns of the Wehrmacht and the four-year plan. Like Wieland, the zoologist Karl von Frisch had been a thorn in the side of the regime from the very beginning because he employed Jews, there were only a few fervent National Socialists among the many members of his institute, a larger-than-average proportion of women studied with him, and he was generally opposed to the Nazi regime.
Despite these cases, neither professors nor students in Munich, as at other German universities, put up any consistent and concerted resistance to the enforced conformity and Nazi infiltration of the university. Even rarer were the attempts by a few students and university teachers to go beyond purely university-related problems and point out the inhumane and murderous policies of the Nazi regime during the war and call for resistance against them, at the risk of personal danger. Only the student resistance organization the ‘White Rose’ and its mentor, the philosopher and musicologist Kurt Huber, did this. Their example of the resistance by students and a professor at the university of Munich is therefore unique within the German university landscape during the Third Reich.
After the end of the war, the denazification process ran in several shifts: Of the 345 professors employed in May 1945, by September 1945, 45 had been dismissed; by November 1946, 304, and thus 80% of the entire teaching staff. After the denazification trials and the activities of the so-called ‘cleansing committee’ of the LMU, some of the professors initially dismissed were reinstated. According to an examination by the corresponding department of the American military government OMGUS, in summer 1947, approximately 60% of the teaching staff (135 of 219) had been re-accepted and were teaching; 32 were still dismissed; and in 50 cases, the examination had not yet been concluded. The American military government said self-critically that its examination of the personnel was hasty, its methods superficial, and there were numerous errors and mistaken decisions.
