German Student Union

• 1. Introduction

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  The German Student Union, known by its German initials DSt, was born in 1919 as a democratic body meant to give university students a collective voice across Germany. It drew together the general student committees of every German university, including institutions in Danzig, Austria, and the former German universities in Czechoslovakia. What began as a representative organisation would, within less than two decades, become a vehicle for one of the most notorious acts of cultural destruction in modern history. How a student body went from democratic advocacy to directing attacks on libraries and burning tens of thousands of books is a story that runs through the heart of the Weimar Republic's collapse and the rise of National Socialism.

• 2. A Republic Divided

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  From its earliest years, the DSt was a battleground. The Weimar Republic's democratic ideals animated a minority within the organisation, but they faced a much larger völkisch wing whose nationalism ran far deeper than ordinary conservatism. The tension between these two camps produced serious internal conflicts in the early 1920s. The chairmen who led the DSt during this period came from a wide range of student fraternities and university towns. Otto Benecke from the Verband der Vereine Deutscher Studenten in Göttingen chaired in 1919-20, followed by Peter van Aubel from Cologne's Kath. Freie Vereinigung, then Franz Holzwarth from Göttingen again in 1921-22. Each handover reflected the contested ground of student politics, where fraternity affiliations signalled ideological leanings as much as personal loyalties. By the time Arthur Fritsch of the K.D.St.V. Winfridia Breslau took the chair in 1922-23, the organisation had already mapped out the fault lines that would define its next decade.

• 3. The Nazi Takeover

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  By 1931, the National Socialist German Students' League had gained enough strength to dominate the DSt entirely. Walter Lienau, who chaired that year and held membership in both the NSDStB and the Corps Isaria München, was the first chairman to straddle both worlds openly. Gerhard Krüger followed from 1931 to 1933, likewise a member of both the NSDStB and the Burschenschaft Arminia Greifswald. The pattern was clear: National Socialist students were not infiltrating the DSt from outside but rising through its own structure. Oskar Stäbel of the Landsmannschaft Suevia Karlsruhe chaired through 1933-34, then Andreas Feickert from Hamburg held the position from July 1934 through February 1936. The final consolidation came on the 5th of November 1936, when Gustav Adolf Scheel merged the NSDStB directly with the DSt, becoming Reichsstudentenführer and holding command of both bodies simultaneously until 1945.

• 4. The Attack on Knowledge

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  On the 6th of May 1933, members of the DSt launched an organised assault on the Institute of Sex Research, located in Berlin's Tiergarten area. The institute, which housed one of the most extensive collections of materials on human sexuality in existence, had no protection against what came next. A few days after the initial attack, the institute's library and archives were hauled out into the streets. At the Opernplatz, they were set on fire. Around 20,000 books and journals were destroyed in the flames, along with 5,000 images. The DSt's role in the broader Nazi book burnings of 1933 was not incidental: the organisation played a large part in that campaign of cultural erasure, and the attack on the Institute of Sex Research stands as one of its most documented and specific acts.

• 5. Dissolution and Legacy

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  Gustav Adolf Scheel presided over the DSt from February 1936 through to the end, holding the title of Reichsstudentenführer for both the student league and the student union simultaneously. The organisation that had once convened democratic student committees across dozens of universities ended its existence in 1945 as a formally designated Nazi organisation, banned alongside the structures of the regime it had served. The list of chairmen stretching from Otto Benecke in 1919 to Scheel's decade-long grip on the leadership maps the full arc of that transformation: from Göttingen's student halls to an office that commanded coordinated violence against a research institute whose library had stood for the study of human difference. The institute's destruction in May 1933 predated the more widely remembered mass book burnings by days, making the DSt's attack one of the earliest organised acts of that kind in the Nazi era.