Ziegler Konrat

Ziegler, Konrat Konrat Julius Fürchtegott Ziegler was born into a family of businessmen in Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland) in 1884, the third of seven siblings. In 1902, he began a long and distinguished academic career, studying classical philology at the local university, where he took his doctorate in 1905. After only five years, he was appointed to the academic staff at the age of 26. During WWI, he was drafted into the army for three and a half years, serving most of the time as an interpreter in Bulgaria and during the last half year as press attaché in the German legation in Sophia. Returning to his alma mater after the war, he was promoted in 1920 to the rank of associate professor. In 1923, he accepted the offer of a full professorship from the Greifswald University, where he was to remain until his forced retirement in 1933. He continued to climb up the academic ladder very rapidly, becoming dean of the faculty of philosophy in 1926 and university rector in 1928. From the beginning, Ziegler stood out from most of his nationalistically minded contemporaries and academic peers by his passionate commitment to the values of liberalism and tolerance and his unwavering support of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic. He was a model of the politically engaged intellectual, joining the German Democratic Party (DDP) early on, becoming a member of the self-defense association Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and the German Peace Society, and serving on the board of the Association for the Defense Against Antisemitism. As early as August 1924 he became embroiled in the “Greifwald flag dispute”, in which he took part in protesting the action of the Nazi deputy rector Theodor Vahlen in removing the black-red-and-gold flag of the republic from the roof of the university's main building. Already targeted by the Nazis on account of his political activity before 1933, he was one of the first “Aryan” lecturers to be suspended in May 1933 by the Nazi Ministerof Education Rust. On September 21, he was officially retired in accordance with Section 4 of the “Law on the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933 on account of “political unreliability”. Banished from his academic post and forced to maintain his family on an income that had been effectively cut by 50 percent, Ziegler moved in autumn 1933 to the bigger city of Berlin, where he was able to augment his income by giving private lessons. He continued at the same time to work on his two lifelong scientific interests: a new edition of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, the multi-volume reference work on the ancient world. However, on January 5, 1939 he was arrested for helping a Jewish banker's family smuggle its property abroad. The banker's son, Wolfgang Schwabe, had been taking private lessons from Ziegler for some time. Ziegler was consigned for eight months to the Moabit prison for interrogation. In the ensuing trial, he claimed that he had not realized the full import of what he had been asked to do. Be that as it may, the one and a half year prison term to which he was sentenced in May 1940 constituted under the circumstances an astonishingly mild punishment. The judges reasoned that Ziegler had not been motivated by a positive wish to subvert the state, but rather by his “excessive naivety coupled with an extraordinary readiness to help”. With the deduction of the eight months that he had already served in the Moabit prison during his pre-trial interrogation and another part of the sentence commuted to a period on probation, he only had to serve four months in the Tegel prison at the end of 1940. Likewise, the separate disciplinary proceedings that were instituted against him in November 1941 were waived by a pardon. In late 1943, Ziegler, whose house in Berlin had been completely destroyed in an air raid, moved with his family to the small town of Osterode amHarz to stay with his sisters. His entire library and research papers accumulated over many years were lost in the raid. The destruction of his home and scientific work and the traumatic encounter with Nazi justice - the interrogations, the two trials, the 12 months in prison - left their toll on Ziegler, by now sixty years old. This, however, did not deter him from taking even further risks by helping a persecuted Jewish friend. Kurt Latte, a professor of classics at the university of Göttingen from 1931 to 1935 who had been Ziegler’s colleague at Greifswald during the 1920’s. Ziegler urged him repeatedly to come to Osterode, which was comparatively safe from air raids. It was, however, very dangerous to travel without proper identity papers and Latte kept hesitating for a long time. Only at the end of February 1945, did he finally decide to risk the journey to Osterode. Ziegler did not actually shelter him in his own house but was instrumental in finding him a safe lodging in the nearby village of Freiheit. The area was liberated in April 1945. On December 12, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Konrat Ziegler as Righteous Among the Nations.