Hans Schwerte

Hans Ernst Schneider (15 December 1909 – 18 December 1999), was a German professor of literature under his alias Hans Schwerte. His real identity as a former SS officer was revealed in April 1995.

Early life and Nazi years Hans Ernst Schneider was born in Königsberg on 15 December 1909. He studied in Königsberg (1928), Berlin (1929), again in Königsberg (1930) and in Vienna (1932). In 1932 he joined the National Socialist German Students' League. In 1933 he did voluntary work with the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (a precursor of the Reichsarbeitsdienst) in Jedwilleiten at the Neman River delta and joined the SA. In 1935 he received his doctorate from Königsberg University for an unpublished dissertation on Turgenev and German literature. He was examined by Paul Hankamer in literature, Wilhelm Worringer in art history, and Hans Heyse in philosophy. He was editor of Weltliteratur, an SS journal on world literature. In 1945 Schneider fled from Berlin to Lübeck, where he used his contacts in the SD (intelligence service) to obtain a new identity as Hans Schwerte, born in Hildesheim on 3 October 1910. Schwerte studied again, now at the University of Hamburg and the University of Erlangen, where he received his doctorate in 1948 for a dissertation about Rainer Maria Rilke's notion of time. His referees were Helmut Prang, Hans-Joachim Schoeps and his adviser Heinz Otto Burger. In 1958, he received his habilitation in recent history of German literature, for his celebrated work on Faustian ideology in Germany. From 1964, he was an extraordinary professor at the University of Erlangen, where he directed the theatre studies department of the seminar of German literature. In 1965, he moved to Aachen, where he became professor of contemporary German literature at RWTH Aachen University. Already at Erlangen university Schwerte expressed his sympathy with the anti-fascist student movement that sprung up in 1967 after the assassination of Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg by a West Berlin policeman who was an informer of the East German Stasi. From 1976 to 1981 Schwerte was commissioner for the relations between the universities of North Rhine-Westphalia and those of the Netherlands and of Belgium. He retired in 1978, and in 1983 he received the Federal Cross of Merit for his commitment to academic relations with the two neighbouring countries. In the resulting scandal, Schwerte lost the Federal Cross of Merit, his title as professor, his habilitation and his pension. However, as there was no proof that he knew about their intended use, the investigations were soon discontinued. Schwerte himself commented: "I do not know who Schneider is, but I will have to take responsibility for him." He died in Marquartstein on 18 December 1999, three days after his 90th birthday.

The case was widely discussed in Germany and became the subject of several books. Commentators were generally intrigued by the close parallels between Schneider/Schwerte's two lives, and wondered whether Schwerte had become a genuine antifascist in the 1960s or had merely taken the dissimulation to extremes, and what exactly it was that took him to the locations of his Nazi past. In spite of its unusual features the case is often regarded as symptomatic for the way in which West German universities dealt with the past, given the incomplete nature of denazification and the general continuity in their staff.