On 17 October 1931, folklorists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland officially founded the ‘Working Group for South-East German Research’, which was renamed the ‘South-East German Research Association’ (SOFG) in the spring of 1933. The founding members all came from the German nationalist spectrum and pursued the ‘Greater German ideal’, that is, the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. In addition to research into ‘Germanness’ in South-Eastern Europe, it was the SOFG’s aim from the outset to destabilise the fledgling states of South-Eastern Europe by means of propaganda and the ‘strengthening of national consciousness’ amongst the German-speaking minorities. The SOFG provided the relevant research to serve as a legitimising basis for the implementation of the National Socialists’ racially based ‘ethnic group law’ and for the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’, thereby assuming a leading role in the preparation and implementation of National Socialist population policy in South-Eastern Europe. The SOFG and its staff can be regarded as a classic example of the interplay between academia and politics, in the course of which‘Eastern researchers’in particular established themselves as part of a functional elite tasked with supporting and implementing Nazi population policy.

When the SOFG was founded, its research initially focused on the state and national identity, society and the people, and the ‘Greater German idea’; the SOFG, together with the ‘Alpine Research Association’, as the successor to the ‘Leipzig Foundation for Research into German Ethnic and Cultural Territories’, which had already developed a racially homogeneous concept of ‘ethnic territory’ in the 1920s in favour of German-speaking settlers in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Geographically, the SOFG was responsible for the successor states of the Habsburg Empire, with Czechoslovakia being covered proportionally by both the SOFG and the ‘North and East German Research Association’ (NOFG). In the wake of the Balkan and Russian campaigns, the geographical area of responsibility was extended to cover the entire Balkans and as far as the Caucasus. Owing to overlaps in remit with the Munich South-East Institute, an agreement was reached to cooperate in order to avoid duplication of work. In addition, the SOFG cooperated closely with the universities of Graz, Prague, Munich and Vienna, as well as a number of other research institutes.

The studies produced in the early years of the SOFG initially aimed to describe the socio-economic situation of German-speaking minorities in South-Eastern Europe through regional research, and to attribute any deterioration in their circumstances to the respective national governments. The concluding demand of these studies called for the strengthening of ‘ethnic group rights’ based solely on ethnic differentiation, and thus for an improvement in the position of the German-speaking inhabitants living in the respective states. This was, in effect, an ‘ethnopolitical programme’ designed to strengthen the German Reich’s influence over the respective ethnic groups whilst simultaneously destabilising the states in question. Furthermore, until 1938, the SOFG’s main tasks consisted of compiling a bibliography of ongoing research and dissertations by both German and non-German scholars in South-Eastern Europe, publishing a linguistic map, and establishing an intelligence translation service as well as a South-Eastern Europe library.

From the late 1930s onwards, the SOFG’s main remit included assisting in the establishment of National Socialist structures following the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria, as well as the political training of party cadres there. From 1940 onwards, this was supplemented by intelligence-gathering in collaboration with the Wehrmacht, the Security Service and the Secret State Police as a preparatory measure in connection with the Balkan campaign.

With the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria, the SOFG also began to (re-)organise the various German ethnic groups in South-Eastern Europe, for example by supporting their journals and providing editorial guidance. To produce settlement and administrative maps, SOFG contacts in the respective countries collaborated with the leadership of the ethnic groups; in addition, from 1941 onwards, the SOFG had branches in Prague/Praha, Novi Sad/Újvidék, Budapest, Bratislava/Pozsony, Belgrade/Beograd and Sibiu/Hermannstadt. On the one hand, the maps produced served as a basis for German government agencies in preparing the Second Vienna Award of 1940 on the rectification of the border between Hungary and Romania, which was linked to the medium-term objective of homogenising the population in the affected areas through‘resettlements’as well as the isolation of the Jews living there. On the other hand, the Wehrmacht used the material to prepare for the German invasion of the Balkan countries in the spring of 1941, through which the SOFG actively participated in the Nazi war of conquest. SOFG staff members such as Viktor Paulsen (1913–1987) also took part in the looting of the Military Geographical Institute and the Statistical Office in Belgrade, where important cartographic material was seized. Furthermore, SOFG members were part of the commandos that looted Jewish bookshops and second-hand bookshops in Budapest in early May 1944. The Vienna Publications Office (P-Stelle), produced information materials for such operations as well as for other political and military purposes, based on statistical and cartographic analyses, whilst the SOFG increasingly concentrated ‘on supporting and coordinating research’, which nevertheless pursued the same objectives. The deputy head of the Vienna P-Stelle, Franz Ronneberger (1913–1999), who had held various posts within the NSDAP, the SS and the SD, organised the relocation of the P-Stelle in 1944, with the help of concentration camp prisoners, to the former Benedictine abbey of St Lambrecht, which the SS was using at that time as a satellite camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp and where extensive collections from book-looting operations were already being stored.

The SOFG was led by a four-member executive committee comprising Viktor von Geramb (1884–1956), Hans Hirsch (1878–1940), Fritz Machatschek (1876–1957) and Hugo Hassinger (1877–1952). Hassinger held the Chair until 1934; he was succeeded by Hans Hirsch and, from 1940, by Otto Brunner (1898–1982). A working committee of 17 members reviewed incoming funding applications and submitted its recommendations to the executive committee, which decided on financial support for projects. In addition to funding and publishing academic research, the SOFG published the journal *Deutsches Archiv für Landes- und Volksforschung* from 1937 to 1944.

The SOFG’s cooperation partners included, amongst others, the ‘Alpenländische Forschungsgemeinschaft’, the ‘Stiftung zur Erforschung des deutschen Volkstums im Süden und Südosten’ (Munich), the ‘Southeast Europe Society’ (SOEG) and the ‘Reinhard Heydrich Foundation’ (Prague). Furthermore, there were close contacts with the leadership of the ethnic groups and with the local research institutes maintained by those groups. There were also personnel links and collaborative arrangements with the SS, the Reich Security Main Office, various Reich ministries – foremost among them the Foreign Office – the ‘Operations Staff of Reichsleiter Rosenberg’ and the Wehrmacht.

Half of the SOFG’s staff and operating costs were borne by the Austrian State and the German-Austrian Scientific Aid Organisation, whilst the other half – amounting to a further approximately 1.2 million Reichsmark – was provided by ministries of the ‘Third Reich’. Around 20 per cent of the total funding for the ‘Volksdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaften’ (VFG) was allocated to the SOFG. In line with the expansion of its remit from 1939 onwards, the SOFG’s staff numbers rose considerably during the war years, particularly at the Vienna P-Stelle. In 1943, the Reich Security Main Office took over control of the VFG, which in turn exercised supervisory authority over the SOFG and the other five Eastern European research associations, thereby bringing the “instrumental deployment of ethnic German scholarship for the purpose of researching and annihilating the enemy […] reached its peak’.”

After the end of the war, former SOFG staff became involved in the Viennese ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft’ Ost, the predecessor of the ‘Austrian Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern Europe’, or were able – despite having been partly involved in war crimes – to find new fields of work for themselves in the Federal Republic of Germany.

• Michael Fahlbusch: Science in the Service of National Socialist Policy? The ‘Ethnic German Research Associations’ from 1931 to 1945. Baden-Baden 1999.
• Michael Fahlbusch: The ‘South-East German Research Association’. Political Consultancy and Nazi Ethnic Policy. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds.): German Historians under National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 241–264.
• Michael Fahlbusch: South-East German Research Association. In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (eds.): Handbook of ‘Völkische’ Sciences. Individuals – Institutions – Research programmes – foundations. Munich 2008, pp. 688–697.
• Christine Zippel: Hugo Hassinger. In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (eds.): Handbook of Ethnic Sciences. People – Institutions – Research Programs – Foundations. Munich 2008, pp. 226–230.

[1] Ingo Haar: Historians under National Socialism. German Historical Scholarship and the ‘Struggle of Nations’ in the East. Göttingen 2000 (Critical Studies in Historical Scholarship 143.), pp. 50–57.

[2] For a detailed account of research on South-Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna during the 1930s and 1940s, including in connection with the SOFG, see Petra Svatek: ‘Vienna as a Gateway to the South-East’ – The Contribution of Viennese Humanities Scholars to Research on South-Eastern Europe during the Nazi Era. In: Mitchell G. Ash, Wolfram Nieß, Ramon Pils (eds.): The Humanities under National Socialism. The Case of the University of Vienna. Göttingen 2010, pp. 111–139.

[3] Fahlbusch: Wissenschaft im Dienst, p. 263.

[4] Fahlbusch: Science in the Service, p. 630.

[5] Peer Heinelt: ‘Portrait of a Desk Criminal: Franz Ronneberger’. In: Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, Fritz Hausjell, Bernd Semrad (eds.): The Spiral of Silence. Dealing with Nazi-era Journalism Studies, 2nd ed. Vienna et al. 2004, pp. 193–217, here p. 207.