The Political Odyssey of Reinhold Schairer, 1933–1955

Drawing upon archives in three countries, this article examines the career in exile of the German educator and statesman Reinhold Schairer and seeks to explain the importance of his work for the German resistance to Hitler. For a brief but crucial period before the outbreak of the Second World War, Schairer served as the principal external representative for Carl Goerdeler and became—sometimes with adverse consequences—his principal interlocutor with the British and American governments. As this article shows, Schairer’s failure to question many of the assumptions and statements made by his sources led to a rupture with his British backers and helped reinforce British doubts about the effectiveness of any internal opposition to Hitler. Although unsuccessful as a political leader, and perhaps ill-suited for such a role, Reinhold Schairer made genuine contributions to postwar planning. With extensive support from the Rockefeller Foundation and leading American educators, Schairer helped prepare the strong foundations for postwar exchange programmes in Germany and the United States and played an important role in the reconstruction of postwar German educational and philanthropic institutions. A critical examination of Schairer’s career sheds important new light on the failure of the German resistance to garner external support at crucial junctures before and just after the outbreak of war, while at the same time this study helps connect the work of political exiles such as Schairer with the development of new institutions in the Federal Republic

Archaeology · Economic history · German · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Principal (computer security) · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · World War II · European history and politics · Historical Education Studies Worldwide · History · Law