Otto Huth

Otto Huth (9 May 1906 – 1998) was a German historian of religion and folklorist who was a member of the Ahnenerbe and held a professorial position at the Nazi Reichsuniversität Straßburg.

Early life and education Huth was the son of a neurologist who was a friend of the völkisch publisher Eugen Diederichs. His sister later married , who headed the Ahnenerbe division of African studies. Born and educated in Bonn, he earned his PhD in 1932 from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Carl Clemen, with a dissertation on the Roman god Janus, and his habilitation in 1939 from the University of Tübingen after the intervention of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.

Career In 1929, while studying at the University of Marburg, Huth met Herman Wirth, who in July 1935 founded the SS-affiliated research organisation, the Ahnenerbe. After completing his doctorate, he became Wirth's assistant and helped with the organisation of his 1933 exhibition, Der Heilbringer, on the supposed ancient spiritual heritage of the Nordic culture. The Strasbourg institute was tasked with bolstering the case for Alsace's being culturally a part of Germany, and beginning in 1943, Huth also worked with Hans-Ernst Schneider in the Germanischer Wissenschaftseinsatz, a wartime SS programme to strengthen "Germanic" worldviews in other so-called Nordic countries under German occupation, such as the Netherlands and Norway. For example, he participated as a re-education speaker with Walther Wüst at an SS camp near Strasbourg in an abortive attempt to persuade deported students from the University of Oslo to become collaborators.

Huth was among faculty and staff of the Strasbourg university who fled to Tübingen in advance of the Allies retaking the city in late 1944. After the war, he claimed that the Ahnenerbe stood outside the politics of the Third Reich and that its research was humanistic and its publications fostered "spiritual resistance". Barred from teaching, he worked in the University of Tübingen library as a specialist in theology and religious studies until his retirement in 1971. He died in Tübingen in 1998. In addition to his books, he published almost 30 articles and numerous reviews between 1933 and 1945 in the Ahnenerbe journal Germanien.