Article

Journal of Contemporary History

2016, Vol. 51(1) 40–60
Engineering the ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0022009415582280

Volksgemeinschaft: Social jch.sagepub.com

Engineering, Pedagogy
and Fascism in the
case of the Swiss
Alfred Zander
Martin Gutmann
Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany

Abstract
This article examines transnational social engineering through a biographical study of
Alfred Zander, a Swiss member of a humanist and internationalist pedagogical move-
ment known as New Education and later a founding member of Swiss fascism and a
volunteer to the German Waffen-SS during the Second World War. The bridging con-
cept that allowed Zander’s seemingly contradictory transformation was his belief in the
necessity of a return in the classroom, as in politics, to a previously existing ‘organic’
state: a Volksgemeinschaft. Zander’s case suggests a broader view of social engineering
as his stated goal and methods relied little on data and science. Moreover his case
illustrates a unique directionality among transnational actors, that from a transnational
methodology and rationale toward a transnational goal.

Keywords
Alfred Zander, European fascism, New Education, social engineering, transnationalism,
Waffen-SS

Corresponding author:
Martin Gutmann, Department of History, Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Rempartstrasse 15, Freiburg,
79085, Germany.
Email: martin.gutmann@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de
Gutmann 41

One of the thousands of Europeans who attended the World Congress for Leisure
Time and Recreation in the summer of 1936, with which this JCH Introduction
opens, was the young Swiss teacher and scholar Dr. Alfred Zander.1 Whether
Zander made any substantive contributions to the event is unknown. For him
personally, however, the trip was part of a transformative decade, a step in his
progression from humanistic scholar and educator to fascist agitator. This contra-
dictory career is at first glance difficult to reconcile. A young teacher in the 1920s,
Zander was a committed member of an educational movement known as New
Education, which advocated a humanistic, individually-tailored and democratic
approach to education. He published widely on the movement’s pedagogical
value and earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the Swiss educational pioneer
Johann Pestalozzi. However, in 1930 Zander founded the first Swiss fascist party
and became known as the author of vitriolic attacks on Jews, socialists and free-
masons. A decade later Zander was serving in the military wing of Nazi Germany’s
SS, working to inculcate incoming recruits in Nazi ideology with the goal of creat-
ing a Greater Germanic Empire in place of what he believed were artificial national
boundaries. As the front drew closer to Germany, Zander fought against the
advancing Western Allies until his capture in the mountains of Bavaria. Upon
his release from Allied internment, Zander returned to his work as a teacher,
school director and scholar in the spirit of New Education.
This article will use Zander’s bizarre story to examine social engineering through
and toward a transnational ideal in the interwar period and the Second World War
in Europe. Zander’s case engages with manifold current historiographical debates,
foremost among these transnationalism and social engineering. In each of these
areas, as we will see, Zander is an odd man out, whose biographical details chal-
lenge tacit historiographical conclusions. Consider the cases of transnationalism2:
Zander was, by his very biographical path, a transnational social-engineer: as a
teacher, and later a fascist agitator and SS-man, he believed firmly that he was
shaping not only individuals but contributing to a reengineering of society. He
sought out a transnational community of teachers and ideologues with whom he
advanced a goal beyond the nation-state. Yet further details reveal that his example
stands in tension with more conventionally recounted transnational actors. It could
be argued that most successful transnational studies have followed, in the oft-cited
words of David Thelen, how a ‘phenomenon passed over the nation as a whole,
how it passed across the nation, seeing how it bumped over natural and manmade
features, or how it passed through’.3 The flow of commodities, pollution or, when

1 M. Näf, ‘Alfred Zander, 1905–1997: Pädagoge, Frontist, Landesverätter’, Traverse, 3 (2003),

144–59. This short article is the only previous work examining Zander’s career exclusively.
2 For recent discussions of transnational history, see K. Patel, ‘Transatlantische Perspektiven
Transnationaler Geschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29, 4 (2003), 625–47; J. Kocka,
‘Comparison and Beyond’, History and Theory, 42 (2003), 39–44; M. Hilton and R. Mitter,
‘Introduction’, Past and Present, 218, 8 (2013), 7–28; B. Struck et al., ‘Introduction: Space and Scale
in Transnational History’, The International History Review, 33, 4 (2011), 573–84.
3 D. Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, Journal
of American History, 86, 3 (1999).
42 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

the subject has been humans, groups of people outside of the scope of the state’s
control have been the most successful objects of inquiry.4 Zander stands in contra-
diction. As we will see, a noteworthy element in Zander’s story is that his ideo-
logical imperative lent itself not only to work across traditional national
boundaries but had as its very goal a utopian aim above the nation. Yet he
sought to implement these changes through one of the most powerful state insti-
tutions in modern Europe, Nazi Germany’s SS.
Beyond transnationalism and social engineering, the case of Zander can
serve as an individual testing-ground for contemporary debates regarding
Volksgemeinschaft – the Nazi belief in a ‘people’s community’ – and
Switzerland’s experience of the Second World War. With much literature, as we
will see, advancing broadly constructed and thus necessarily abstract conclusions
regarding the German and Swiss population’s accommodation with or hesitancy
toward the Nazi regime, the experience of one individual offers an opportunity to
reflect on such theories in extraordinary detail. Before doing so, this article will
examine Zander’s life in detail. This article begins by recounting the main tenets
and evolution of the New Education movement as Zander was, both by his own
admission and as gleaned from his prolific scholarly publications on pedagogy, a
life-long convinced New Educationalist. Second, it will examine Zander’s educa-
tion, early career as a teacher and transition into a prominent political figure of the
Swiss far right during the 1930s. Third, it examines Zander’s work once in the
service of the German SS during the Second World War. Finally, in a concluding
section, it speculates as to the causes and implications of Zander’s ideological and
methodological developments and constants. It will argue that the concept of
Volksgemeinschaft served as a bridge rectifying Zander’s seeming contradictions,
both within himself and vis-a-vis conventional historiographical tropes: a firm
believer in a pacifist, democratic educational movement, Zander participated
unhesitatingly in acts of organized violence; clearly a social engineer, Zander
eschewed the scientific methods advanced by his peers; an outspoken Swiss nation-
alist, he departed his home to join what many considered to be the enemy; working
within transnational channels, Zander was in the service of a powerful state agency.

Pedagogues in the first half of the twentieth century were exemplary ‘social engin-
eers’. In many ways, pedagogues were among the most ambitious engineers of all,
seeking perfection through the reformation of a nation’s young. Education, in the
German speaking countries as well as in the Western world as a whole, from the
second half of the nineteenth century onward developed in parallel with the growth
of state power, nationalism and citizenship, and sought to utilize the growing
canon of psychology and science in raising children for the benefit of state and soci-
ety. A majority of child rearing advice books in the Wilhelmine period in Germany

4 See, for example, S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York 2014).
Gutmann 43

sought to promote respect for authority and discipline as virtuous.5 Moreover,

nationally dictated education plans were conceived and implemented with the
expressed purpose of promoting nationalism and a patriotic citizenship. This
trend was especially exacerbated during the First World War.6 Pedagogues and
educational planners were thus at the forefront of social engineering as they held
that through applying scientific methods, a single, perfect educational plan could
be conceived of for each sought-after classroom goal.7
The trend toward a standardization and rationalization of education for the
benefit of obedience and nationalism did not go uncontested. The ‘New
Education’ or ‘Progressive Education’ movement in particular stands out as a cri-
tique of dominant educational theories and its positivist approach.8 New Education,
though having roots in the Enlightenment, was part of a broader current of recon-
ceptualizing education that gathered momentum during the Belle Epoch and
reached its peak in the interwar period. Exemplary of this movement was the
Swedish teacher Ellen Key whose 1900 book Barnets Århundrade envisioned a cen-
tury of education that placed the child at the centre.9 Her work was one of the most
read and translated books during the First World War period.10 Instead of rationally
structured lessons, emphasizing a teacher’s expertise, authority and central role, Key
and other New Education proponents sought to place each student and his or her
curiosity at the centre of learning. Instead of a focus on a ‘closed curriculum’ and
‘traditional disciplinary canons’, New Educators emphasized experiential learning
that allowed for cross-disciplinary thinking.11 In addition to advocating reform in
state-run schools, numerous New Education thinkers opened private boarding
schools, known as Landerziehungsheime, in which to put their theories into practice.
In Switzerland no fewer than 10 such schools were founded in the period 1902 to

5 On this, see most notably, C. Kay, ‘How Should We Raise Our Son Benjamin? Advice Literature
for Mothers in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in D. Schumann (ed.) Raising Citizens in the
‘Century of the Child’: the United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (New
York 2010), especially 113–16.
6 S. Michel, ‘Children and National Interest’, in Schumann (ed.), Raising Citizens, 44. See also A.
Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany,
1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA 2010).
7 An alternative strand which gained ground particularly in the postwar period was that of church-
run and emphasized education. See M. Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform
in Weimar Germany (New York, NY 2002), 69–103.
8 New Education is most commonly referred to as Reformpädagogik, ‘Reform Pedagogy’, in the
German-speaking world, though this term was not used until the post-Second World War period. There
is an abundance of literature on the movement. For good surveys of the movement in the German-
speaking world, see W. Böhm, Die Reformpädagogik: Montessori, Waldorf und andere Lehren (Munich
2012), W. Scheibe, Die reformpädagogische Bewegung 1900–1932: eine einführende Darstellung
(Weinheim 1999).
9 E. Key, Barnets Århundrade: studie (Stockholm 1900), 1.
10 H. Retter, ‘Reformpädagogik’, unpublished paper, 13. Available at https://www.tu-braunschweig.
de/.../reformpaedagogik (accessed 17 January 2014).
11 Ibid., 2.
44 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

1919.12 It was at one of these schools, the Hof Oberkirch, that Zander spent his
formative years as a young teacher from 1926 to 1928.
The New Education movement rejected both the nationalist aim as well as the
nationally-restricted culture of exchange among traditional educators. While the
interwar period saw a sharpening of national rhetoric in Switzerland, Germany,
France and England, Zander and other New Education Europeans and Americans
interacted through a variety of organizations and forums and developed many of
their ideas in collaboration and dialogue. Moreover, these educators saw in their
movement an alternative to the overt nationalism and violence seemingly inherent
in the modern state. Equality, internationalism and diversity were actively dis-
cussed at international gatherings. One of the most active organizations was the
New Education Fellowship, founded by the Swiss Elisabeth Rotten and Adolphe
Ferrière and the English Beatrice Ensor in 1921 with large international gatherings
at Montreux in 1923, Heidelberg in 1925, Locarno in 1927, Helsingør in 1929 and
Nizza in 1932. Similarly, the 1923 inaugural meeting of the World Federation of
Education Associations attracted 600 participants from 60 countries.13 Recent his-
torical scholarship has highlighted the extent to which such international inter-
actions were not just peripheral contacts in otherwise national movements.14
New Education was a transnational phenomenon rooted in a continual cross-
border dialogue. Zander’s pedagogical training and early experience then, too,
was in an environment that accepted international collaboration as paramount.
Despite its rejection of the two dominant themes of turn-of-the century educa-
tion – nationalism and an emphasis on the ‘scientific’ – New Education was none-
theless firmly anchored in the epoch’s tendency toward social engineering. Even the
Swiss Johann Pestalozzi, who most directly influenced Zander, wrote of education
in the early 1800s as ‘not a perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but
fitness for life; not the acquirement of habits of blind obedience and of prescribed
diligence, but a preparation for interdependent action’.15 Similarly, at the turn of
the century, Key wrote that:

Those who can see that the human has become what [she] is today through countless
developments, also realizes the potential to steer her future development in a way that
produces a higher form of human. It is the human will that has created new and higher
forms within the animal and plant world. In the realm of our family [släkte], in the
realm of raising the human being, of advancing the human races, potential still exists,
whether the potential for good or evil designs.16

12 H.-U. Grunder, ‘Privat oder staatlich? Alternative und öffentliche Institutionen’, in H. Badertscher
(ed.) Geschichte der Erziehung und Schule in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Bern 1997),
279–319.
13 S. Koslowski, Die New Era der New Education Fellowship. Ihr Beitrag zur Internationalität der
Reformpädagogik im 20. Jahrhundert (Bad Heilbrunn 2013), 15.
14 See, for example, ibid, especially 14–23, J. Clews, ‘The New Education Fellowship and the
Reconstruction of Education: 1945 to 1966’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (2009).
15 Quoted in R. Rusk, A History of Infant Education (London 1933), 28.
16 E. Key, Barnets Århundra, 2.
Gutmann 45

Rotten, co-founder of the New Education Fellowship and as a Swiss a direct influence
on Zander, wrote of the need for ‘an internal moral transformation in humans’ (innere
sittliche Wandlung der Menschen) to ensure ‘peace’.17 Zander and others inspired by
Pestalozzi, Key and Rotten would thus continually emphasize that New Education
was a response to rational, scientific developments in education, and simultaneously
embodied its own version of social engineering. As Key predicted, however, the
potential for using social engineering within education could be employed for the
peaceful betterment of humans, as well as for more nefarious designs.

Zander, as many other future influential SS officers, was born in the first decade of
the 1900s, in 1905, in a small town in central Switzerland. Like other Swiss and
German members of this generation, he was too young to have served in the war
but old enough for it to leave a lasting shadow over his understanding of humanity.
After completing his studies as a primary school teacher in 1923 he worked at a
Pestalozzi boarding institution, followed between 1926 and 1928 at the
Landerziehungsheim Hof Oberkirch. Zander’s recollections of this time, published
in 1929 as ‘Aufzeichnungen aus einer schweizerischen Versuchsschule’, offer a
detailed look into his pedagogical development. To Zander a ‘school’s spirit’
(Geist) was more important to cultivate than the adherence to strict methodological
principles. He wrote that:

I learned after only a brief time that it was my primary responsibility to cultivate a
fertile school spirit, a free atmosphere between students and teachers. Methodology is
peripheral. An old, perhaps cumbersome method in an atmosphere of joyful work and
understanding produces more internal and external gains than the smartest ‘scientific’
method in a paralyzing atmosphere . . . This was a call to ever deeper and living dis-
covery of relationships to my children. And what is that but an appeal to develop
myself, to work on myself?18

As Zander grew more experienced, so he recalled, his ‘voice became continually

quieter’ vis-a-vis his students’ inputs and his emphasis on punctuality gave way to
the quality of the interactions with his students.19 Zander’s experience as a teacher
in Switzerland was complimented by his frequent travels abroad, throughout con-
tinental Europe, to Scandinavia and North Africa.20
Zander’s approach to education seems at first glance irreconcilable with fas-
cism’s emphasis on authority, discipline and obedience. However, just one year
after publishing his recollections of his work at Hof Oberkirch, Zander, then aged
25, was one of the founders of the Swiss National Front, a party which was

17 D. Haubfleisch, ‘Elisabeth Rotten (1882–1964) – eine (fast) vergessene Reformpädagogin’, in Die

lebensgeschichtliche Dimension in der Pädagogik (Baltmannsweiler 1997), 114–131.
18 A. Zander, ‘Aufzeichnungen aus einer schweizerischen Versuchsschule’, Schweizerische
Pädagogische Zeitschrift, 39, 3-4 (1929), 90–9.
19 Ibid.
20 Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’.
46 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

described by a Swiss postwar inquiry as the ‘mother organization’ of Swiss fas-

cism.21 The party name had a deliberate militaristic implication, as one contem-
porary journalist explained, ‘it was a connection to the inner experience of
war . . . [which] of course none of the young or old Swiss of the 1930s have experi-
enced and thus wish to emphasize for Germans and Italians’.22 This movement
would inspire a panoply of fascist parties during the 1930s, whose members were
known collectively as Frontists.23 While growing into a movement garnering
national attention, especially as we will see during the 1935 referendum on rewrit-
ing the Swiss Constitution along authoritarian lines, the movement would suffer
from limited public support. Though winning mandates in limited local elections,
the movement failed to gain representation on the national stage, with the excep-
tion of one seat in the upper house of Parliament, the Ständerat.24 Moreover, while
claiming to represent all Swiss, the movement remained over-represented by
intellectuals.
Over the next four years, Zander continued parallel careers as one of
Switzerland’s leading political agitators and organizers of the far right and a com-
mitted pedagogue in the tradition of New Education. In 1931 Zander earned his
doctorate with a dissertation on Pestalozzi. He then took up a position as a fellow
at a prestigious anthropological institute in Lucerne. Throughout his increasingly
active – and radical – political career, Zander continued publishing on education.
Over the 1930s, however, his views on pedagogy took on an increasingly nationalist
tone. Already by 1933, Zander had reinterpreted his idol and forerunner of New
Education Johann Pestalozzi as a nationalist thinker, writing that, ‘everything
Pestalozzi wrote, he wrote for the Volk, for his Volk, for the Swiss Volk’.25
It is only with a certain amount of speculation that one can explain the devel-
opment of Zander from a humanist educator to a fascist agitator. Scholars of
fascism have highlighted the growing sentiment among Europeans in the interwar
period of a ‘temporal panic’, as Roger Griffin describes it, resulting in an ‘obsessive
preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by com-
pensatory cults of unity, energy and purity’, in the words of Robert Paxton.26

21 Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv [BAR], Bundesblatt No 1, Band 1, 4919, ‘Bericht des Bundesrates an

die Bundesversammlung über die antidemokratische Tätigkeit von Schweizern und Ausländern im
Zusammenhang mit dem Kriegsgeschehen 1939–1945 (Motion Boerlin)’, Erster Teil, 28 December
1945, 22.
22 Quoted in H. Zimmermann, Die Schweiz und Grossdeutschland (Munich 1980), 157.
23 On these movements, see B. Glaus, Die Nationale Front (Zürich 1969); K.-D. Zöberlein, Die
Anfänge des deutsch schweizerischen Frontismus: die Entwicklung der politischen Vereinigung Neue
Front und Nationale Front bis zu ihrem Zusammenschluss im Frühjahr 1933 (Marburg 1970); W.
Hagmann, Krisen- und Kriegsjahre im Werdenberg: Wirtschaftliche Not und politischer Wandel in
einem Bezirk des St.Galler Rheintals zwischen 1930 und 1945 (Zürich 2001).
24 S. Payne, A History of Fascism (Madison, WI 1995), 309. For a comprehensive study of the
National Front, see Glaus, especially 113–26.
25 A. Zander, ‘Pestalozzi und sein Volk’, Schweizer Monatsheft: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft,
Kultur, 13, 1 (1933–1934), 28.
26 R. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, NY 2004), 218. R. Griffin, ‘Withstanding the
Rush of Time: The Prescience of Mosse’s Anthropological View of Fascism’ in S. Payne et al. (eds),
What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (Madision, WI 2004) 110–33
Gutmann 47

Similarly, the contemporary Swiss historian Emil Dürr wrote already in 1928 of an
‘experience of a spiritual crisis’.27 Zander was not immune from these feelings. The
crisis he had perceived in education in his early years, ‘the massive insecurity, the
bad feelings, the fear and the worry over the future’, as he described it, had led him
to a passionate advocacy for New Education.28 By the turn of the decade, Zander
began writing of a general crisis of society regretting, for example, the ‘dangers of
machine work and the creation of large industrial working masses’.29 Just as a
rationalization and technicalization of education since the turn of the century
was threatening to unhinge learning, Jews, Marxists, Capitalists and other per-
ceived enemies were undoing a previously organic society. This sentiment was
echoed by most of his right-wing Swiss colleagues. Heinrich Bueler, a lawyer
from Zurich who would later fight alongside Zander in the Waffen-SS Division
Charlemagne spoke of ‘the current conditions which are chaotically crashing down
upon us’.30 To Zander and his colleagues then, humans had lost agency.
Bolshevism, liberalism, individualism and Jews were primarily to blame, Zander
wrote:

Should European culture be overwhelmed by the chaos (cultural-Bolshewism)? Should

we label Switzerland as a dying, powerless state-structure with a grand past but
unworthy present? Are these foreign voices correct who label the Swiss Volk as a
futureless Volk of traders, bankers and hoteliers? No, no a thousand times over!
Where danger is – the economic is but the least – large, a solution grows. We are
standing at the end of a mis-development, at the end of an age of individualism.31

While on the surface such utterings directly contradict Zander’s pedagogical beliefs
in the rights of each student, one key element in his world-view formed a bridge
between his pedagogical and political ideology. The concept of a Volksgemeinschaft
was at the root of both Zander’s pedagogy and his political ideas.32
Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’ carried cachet before the Nazi ascent
to power. Michael Wildt has most recently demonstrated that German Social

and R. Griffin, ‘Party Time: The Temporal Revolution in the Third Reich’, History Today (April 1999).
Zeev Sternhell has added ‘anti-materialism’ as a fascist goal, see Z. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist
Ideology (Princeton, NJ 1995), 36–8. This too is an element in Zander’s thinking as he often feared
Switzerland becoming a ‘consumers’ union’. See H. Zimmermann, Die Schweiz und Grossdeutschland:
das Verhältnis zwischen der Eidgenossenschaft, Österreich und Deutschland 1933–1945 (Munich 1980),
155.
27 Quoted in P. Gilg and E. Gruner, ‘Nationale Erneuerungsbewegungen in der Schweiz 1925–1940’,
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 14, 1 (1966), 1.
28 A. Zander, ‘Erziehung zur Volksgemeinschaft’, Schweizer Monatsheft: Zeitschrift für Politik,
Wirtschaft, Kultur, 13, 12 (1933), 599.
29 A. Zander, ‘Pestalozzi und sein Volk’, Schweizer Monatsheft: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft,
Kultur, 13, 1 (1933), 33.
30 Archiv für Zeitgeschichte, ETH Zürich [AfZ], NL Heinrich Büeler, 2.2 Ueber eidg. Sozialismus,
Rede Heinrich Büelers, 1.
31 A. Zander, ‘Erziehung zur Volksgemeinschaft’, in A. Zander and W. Brenner (eds), Erziehung,
Schule und Volksgemeinschaft (Zürich 1934), 6–7.
32 This connection has been identified by Martin Näf. See, Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’, 147.
48 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

Democrats used the term prodigiously during the Weimar period.33 For all who
used it, including the Nazis, the concept had a utopian edge – it described less the
present than a sought-after future condition of social harmony, though in the Nazi
case, of course, this could only be achieved through the removal of enemies.
Written off as mere propagandist window-dressing, discussions of the extent to
which the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft may have mobilized broad popular sup-
port for the Nazi regime has resurged in recent literature.34 Though Zander is
hardly representative of the Swiss or, more broadly constructed, the non-
German and non-Italian European population, his uninhibited acceptance and
promotion of the concept suggests it resonated beyond Hitler and Mussolini’s
direct grasp.
More than any other concept, the Volksgemeinschaft and later the European
Volksgemeinschaft would consistently appear in all of Zander’s writings from the
early 1930s onward. Zander, as we have seen, promoted the cultivation of a ‘school
spirit’ above all technical methods in education. An honest, open and – despite the
obvious difference in status and power between a student and teacher – equal
relationship was the key to promoting true growth and learning in a child. The
remedy for society was the same as in education, as Zander argued in ‘Education
for a Volksgemeinschaft’, published in 1933:

Wherever there are and have been people, they live in the original unions: humans
consistently live in societies, in families, tribe, peoples (Volk), nation. Humans do not
grow closer through clever schemes or through treaties, they are connected through
common blood, through a shared fate, through shared earth and shared history. The
individuals of a true community never believe that each is free to do as he wants, but
instead help each other, support each other and even die for each other.35

In line with National Socialist thinking across the border, Zander saw a
Volksgemeinschaft as a pure and natural form of relating to each other. To achieve
it, however, the tools of social engineering would have to be used, primary among
these education. ‘A school can only become a community when students and
teachers together work for a higher idea. In coming schools, this idea will be in
service to the Volksgemeinschaft’, he explained.36 Thus while a Volksgemeinschaft

33 M. Wildt, ‘Die Ungleichheit des Volkes. ‘‘Volksgemeinschaft’’ in der politischen Kommunikation

der Weimarer Republik’, in F. Bajohr and M. Wildt (eds), Volksgemeinschaft. Neue Forschungen zur
Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt 2009), 24–40.
34 See, for example, F. Bajohr and M. Wildt (eds), Volksgemeinschaft. Neue Forschungen zur
Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt 2009); B. Gotto and M. Steber (eds), A Nazi
Volksgemeinschaft? German Society in the Third Reich (Oxford 2013); D. Schmiechen-Ackermann
(ed.), ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im
‘Dritten Reich’? Zwischenbilanz einer kontroversen Debatte (Paderborn 2012); D. von Reeken and M.
Thießen (eds), ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ als soziale Praxis. Neue Forschungen zur NS-Gesellschaft vor Ort
(Paderborn 2013). Additionally, in the Italian case, see R. Pergher and G. Albanse (eds), In the Society
of Fascists. Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy (New York, NY 2012).
35 Zander, ‘Erziehung’, 601.
36 Ibid.
Gutmann 49

was the necessary cure both for education and society, the former was the best
chance of securing it in the latter. Zander explained, ‘Education means – put simply
– the incorporation and union of the younger generation in the communal [volk-
lichen], religious, spiritual and professional communities of the adults and in their
national and social working communities, succinctly: into the Volksgemeinschaft’.37
Though a fierce nationalist, the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft provided Zander with
a surprising openness to Switzerland’s neighbours, in particular Germany.
Throughout the 1930s, he travelled frequently to Germany, Austria and Italy par-
taking, among other things, in the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation.
Increasingly he came into contact with leading German Nazi officials.38 His writing
also betrays an increasing desire to see the Swiss Volksgemeinschaft naturally align-
ing itself with Germany’s. In his public statements, the wish for closer accommoda-
tion with Germany was initially muted. In the National Front’s party program of
1930, Zander and his co-authors addressed the issue in subtle terms. Switzerland
should focus above all on maintaining ‘the full right to self-determination’ and ‘an
active politics of neutrality’. The text proposes finally, however, that the ultimate
goal of Switzerland’s foreign policy should be the ‘understanding between and
cooperation between the European peoples [Völker]’.39 In contrast, in 1937 he pub-
lished Ein Schweizer über das Verhältnis der Eidgenossenschaft zum Reich in which he
advocated an organic alignment with Germany as ‘the national awakening of the
people of the Rhein means an end to the influence of the ideas of the romantic West
in this area and at the same time the creation of an appropriate Weltanschauung’.40
In this regard, Zander was exceptional vis-a-vis most Frontists, who maintained a
fiercely independent stance toward Nazi Germany.41 Unlike many of his fellow
Frontists, to Zander, Volksgemeinschaft could not stop at the Swiss–German
border and would eventually have to trump artificial political boundaries. He
believed, too, mistakenly as he would later find out, that most German National
Socialists would be open to this, writing that, ‘there can be no single decent German
who wishes to see National Socialism implemented solely in his own land’.42

At home, his political rhetoric and vitriolic attacks against Switzerland’s

‘enemies’ grew in intensity. By the end of 1933, Zander had already been forced
by the board of the Institute to choose between continuing his academic work and
giving up his political career or resigning his post at the Institute.43 In the intro-
duction to this issue Patel and Reichardt write that ‘social engineers do not stop at

37 Ibid, 596.
38 BAR E 4320 (B) 1970/25, 69, C.2.564 (Zander, Alfred/1938–53), ‘Verhörsprotokoll’, 1 December
1938.
39 ‘Eidgenössischer Sozialismus. Die 26 Punkte der Nationalen Front’ (Schaffhausen 1933), 15.
40 A. Zander, Eidgenossenschaft und Reich: Ein Schweizer über das Verhältnis der Eidgenossenschaft
zum Reich (Berlin 1942), 127.
41 T. Kaestli, Selbstbezogenheit und Offenheit - Die Schweiz in der Welt des 20. Jahrhunderts: Zur
politischen Geschichte eines neutralen Kleinstaats (Zürich 2005), 195.
42 Zander, ‘Erziehung zur Volksgemeinschaft’, 128.
43 Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’, 3.
50 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

writing advice literature, they seek connection with power’.44 Zander, though
clearly a passionate teacher, also relished the power to change, influence and motiv-
ate students. The end of this academic career coincided with the opportunity for
power at a higher level. It is thus little surprise that when faced with the choice
between continuing work at the anthropological Institute and professional politics,
Zander chose the latter.
Among other efforts, Zander focused on creating a ‘National Youth’ organiza-
tion within his movement. His prolific writing increasingly focused on politics, not
pedagogy, and his growing agitation against Freemasons, capitalists, Marxists and
Jews.45 It was against the latter group in particular that Zander unleashed his most
vitriolic attacks, becoming known as one of Switzerland’s most vocal antisemites.46
This included the contributing to and editing of several strongly antisemitic news-
papers in the 1930s. When a group of Frontist leaders were sued by the Swiss
Federation of Jewish Communities and the Bern Israeli Cultural Federation for
distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Zander was the only witness called
by the defendants to show up to testify to his belief in the document’s validity.47
To actualize his fascist agenda, Zander embarked on a host of strategies. In 1934,
members of Zander’s party bombed a socialist newspaper office in Zurich, causing
him to lose his post in the leadership. By 1935, Zander was back in the party. The
same year, the National Front proposed a national referendum to redraw the
Constitution according to fascist principles. Though the Front gathered enough
signatures to force a vote on the issue, it was soundly rejected by the voters.48
With the increasing realization that neither force nor political rhetoric would per-
suade most Swiss to follow the Frontists, Zander became increasingly convinced that
only with the help of National Socialist Germany would Switzerland turn right. With
his experience as a New Educationalist and thus international outlook, this is not
surprising. In addition to his many personal trips and connections to Germany,
under his leadership the National Front had frequently sent its members to
Germany for talks, meetings and propaganda tours. Moreover, the party even
opened branch offices in several German cities.49 As his movement was meeting
with no success, however, Zander increasingly adopted more direct methods of
recruiting Germany’s support for an intervention in Switzerland, whether politically
or militarily. In 1937 he started a self-termed ‘Nachrichtendienst’, intelligence service,
aimed at providing the German leadership with intelligence on Swiss government,
military and cultural developments. Zander and his cohort observed and reported on

44 Patel and Reichardt’s introduction, to be published in issue with this article.

45 See, for example, A. Zander, Dokumente zur Judenfrage in der Schweiz (Zurich 1935).
46 W. Wolf, ‘Zander, Alfred’, Historisches Lexicon der Schweiz. Available at http://www.hls-dhs-dss.
ch/textes/d/D43427.php (accessed 19 January 2014).
47 Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’, 98, J. Picard, Die Schweiz und die Juden. 1933–1945: schweizerischer
Antisemitismus, jüdische Abwehr und internationale Migrations- und Flüchtlingspolitik (Zurich 1994).
48 P. Stadler, ‘Die Diskussion um eine Totalrevision der schweizerischen Bundesverfassung 1933–
1935’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 19 (1969), 75–169.
49 P. Ofner, ‘Helvetofaschismus – Die Nationale Front’, unpublished paper, University of Vienna
(2002), 25.
Gutmann 51

Swiss officials and officers, German émigrés and consular staff of foreign govern-
ments.50 Following the German Anschluss with Austria, Zander left the National
Front to form a new party, the Bund treuer Eidgenossen nationalsozialistischer
Weltanschauung [BTE] thereby incorporating ‘National Socialism’ directly into his
movement’s label. This, the most radical of Swiss Frontist parties, required every
member to swear unconditional loyalty to Zander who was slated to become the
Swiss Führer following a successful ascension to power.51
Starting in 1938, the Swiss government moved decisively against the Frontist
movement, thereby ending Zander’s political career in Switzerland. Zander’s party
newspaper, the Schweizer Degen, was banned, Zander’s house searched and he was
arrested in November.52 In 1939 he was sentenced to a one-and-a-half year term in
prison.53 In 1940, after his release, Zander and other leading Frontists formed a
‘Sammelbund’, a united front, in response to the fall of France and the expected
collapse of the Swiss government with the hope of leading the country to a reorgan-
ization based on the Führer-principle and to integrate itself into the Nazi New
Order. This organization, too, was banned by the government.54 In 1941, Zander
committed his final political act in Switzerland, an open letter co-authored with
other Frontist leaders. It was as much a message to the German as to the Swiss
people, in whom by this point Zander had likely lost faith, stating that:

[we] declare to the European peoples that the Swiss peoples [Volk] in all its tribes have
understood the signs of the time and has decided of its free creative will to contribute
to the creation of a significant European future.55

A few months later, in May of 1941, Zander left for Germany.

Zander never commented on the reasoning behind his decision to continue his
political work from Germany, a decision he must have known would – and in
fact did – condemn him to a sentence of treason in Switzerland. His BTE comrade
Benno Schäppi, who left for Germany in March of 1941, did.56 Writing in his
defence in a 1947 trial, Schäppi reasoned that:

the West was at this point, more or less out of the picture and thus could not, and this
also out of ideological reasons, stand in the way of the Soviet Union . . . the way I had
been raised and my political inclinations demanded that I become a soldier.57

50 BAR, ‘Bericht des Bundesrates an die Bundesversammlung’, 27.

51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 BAR E 4320 (B) 1970/25, 69, Dossier C.2.564, Urteil des Bundesgerichtes, 14 July 1939.
54 BAR, ‘Bericht des Bundesrates an die Bundesversammlung’, 136.
55 ‘Bundesbrief vom 1941’, quoted in Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’, 3.
56 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde [BArch], SSO (formerly Berlin Document Center) 068B, Benno
Schaeppi.
57 AfZ NL Benno Schäppi, II.4., Verteidigungs Schrift Spruchkammer-Verfahren Nr.5829,
Darmstadt 10.3.1947, 3.
52 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

Schäppi’s postwar rationale was common among non-German volunteers to the

German cause, that of primarily wishing to defend the European heartland against
the threat of Communism. While a fear of communism likely played a role in the
Swiss Frontists’ decision to leave for Germany, from their work once in Germany,
it is clear that both Zander and Schäppi were interested in much more. Zander’s
career in the SS was more than an escape from prosecution in Switzerland and a
defensive action against Bolshevism. In 1937, Zander wrote that ‘in every healthy
Swiss there is a National Socialist; he just needs to be woken’; preventing this
awakening were the ‘paranoid democrats’’ continuous efforts at blocking this
development.58 By the time of his defection to Germany, the SS seemed the only
viable vehicle through which to continue his pedagogical and political work. Thus
once in Germany, Zander lost little time working to create both a forcible take-over
of Switzerland by Germany and to use his pedagogical skills to turn first Swiss and
later all so-called ‘Germanic Europeans’ into believers in the European
Volksgemeinschaft.
With several Swiss Frontist leaders now congregating in Germany, the SS was
keen to establish some order.59 In October of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, one of
Himmler’s top subordinates and director of the SS Reich’s Security Main Office,
invited the leaders of the most significant Swiss fascist groups to a meeting in
Munich to discuss a potential union within one umbrella movement. Also present
was Franz Riedweg, a Swiss member of the SS and the head of the Germanische
Leitstelle office within the SS-Haupamt. Zander, recently released from prison, was
unable to join and sent one of his colleagues and co-leader of the BTE, Hans
Oehler. While many disagreements remained, both among the Swiss Frontists
themselves and between various Swiss and the SS, Zander decided to disband his
BTE and amalgamate his group under a larger umbrella organization, the Bund der
Schweizer in Grossdeutschland.60 In contrast, other Swiss Frontists, such as Franz
Burri, proved more stubborn and while Burri continued to agitate from within
Germany, his application to join the SS was turned down by Heydrich himself.
Zander, on the other hand, embarked on a career in the SS.
Once settled in Germany, Zander took up work under the leadership of Riedweg
and his Germanische Leitstelle. This office was housed under the SS-Hauptamt, one
of 12 main offices within the SS and along with the SS-Führungshauptamt pri-
marily responsible for the military wing of the organization, the Waffen-SS.61

58 H. Zimmermann, Die Schweiz und Grossdeutschland, 155.

59 On overall German policy and views on Switzerland, see, J. Fink, Schweiz aus der Sicht des Dritten
Reiches (Zürich 1985); Die Schweiz, der Nationalsozialismus und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Schlussbericht der
Unabhängigen Expertenkommision Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg (Zürich 2002); Kaestli,
Selbstbezogenheit und Offenheit.
60 AfZ, NL Heinrich Bueler, 9.4. Strafprozess Bundesanwaltschaft gg Franz Riedweg, Heinrich
Bueler und Konsorten, Luzern 1947, ‘Urteil des Bundesstrafgerichts in Sachen Franz Riedweg und
18 Mitangeklagte’, 25.
61 K. Mehner, Die Waffen-SS und Polizei 1939–1945: Führung und Truppe (Noderstedt 1995), passim.
For good overviews of the Waffen-SS, see B. Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS 1933–
1945 (Paderborn 1999); G. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler’s elite guard at war, 1939–1945 (Ithaca, NY
1984); J.L. Leleu, La Waffen-SS. Soldats politiques en guerre (Paris 2007).
Gutmann 53

Together with a group of Swiss, German and other ‘Germanic’ volunteers to the
SS, Zander worked to turn the Germanische Leitstelle into the organ for transform-
ing Western, so-called Germanic, Europe into a Greater German Empire which
would see national boundaries and distinctions wither away as the Germanic cul-
tural and racial core of Europe would live in a Volksgemeinschaft. The office’s
ambitions were grand and transnational in nature. One of Zander’s Swiss col-
leagues, Fritz Ullrich, wrote even after the war that it had been the office’s aim
to promote an ‘organic solution’ between Germany and its related ‘Germanic
tribes’. Beyond a mere political alignment, however, Zander and his colleagues
sought to engineer the Germanic volunteers into embodiments of this new
Europe. In Ulrich’s words, the SS was to be a ‘germ cell for future European
fighters’ and ‘an elite for constructing this in the postwar year’.62 A Swiss postwar
investigation also came to the conclusion that the Germanische Leitstelle was one of
the organizations in charge of ‘the total political work in the Germanic areas’.63
However, the office never gained as much influence as it sought due to the blocking
of other organs of the Nazi state. This opposition was due both to many German
National Socialists’ opposition to the idea that all Germanics were equal and just
as much to the regular departmental and organizational infighting that character-
ized the Nazi state.64
The office has escaped sustained attention from historians, especially in the
extent to which it received vital impulses and direction from non-German SS offi-
cers. Robert Koehl, the author who most engages the office’s ambitions and influ-
ence – calling it ‘one of the most vigorous planning agencies of the SS’ – reduces
this solely to the credit of the SS-Hauptamt’s chief, Gottlob Berger.65 Zander and
his cohort’s stories, however, testify to the office’s ambitions and scope, and the
extent to which it was run in collaboration between Swiss, other Germanic and
German SS officers.66 At the Germanische Leitstelle, Zander was surrounded by
colleagues from Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and other Germanic
countries. Most of these men, like Zander, had developed a fascist perspective

62 Westberg Private Archive, Sundsvall, Sweden, F. Ulrich, ‘Die großgermanische/europäische

Reichsidee und die Waffen-SS’, 13.
63 AfZ, NL Heinrich Bueler, 9.4. Strafprozess Bundesanwaltschaft gg Franz Riedweg, Heinrich
Bueler und Konsorten, Luzern 1947, ‘Urteil des Bundesstrafgerichts in Sachen Franz Riedweg und
18 Mitangeklagte’, 37. In addition to this document, the Germanische Leitstelle is examined in M.
Gutmann, ‘Fighting for the Nazi New Order: Himmler’s Swiss, Swedish and Danish Volunteers and
the Germanic Project of the SS’, unpublished PhD thesis, Syracuse University (2011); C. Madajczyk,
‘Das Hauptamt für Volkstumsfragen und die Germanische Leitstelle’, in U. Buettner (ed.), Das
Unrechtsregime. Internationale Forschung über den Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg 1986).
64 See Gutmann, ‘Fighting for the Nazi New Order’.
65 R.L. Koehl, The Black Corps: The Structure and Power Struggles of the Nazi SS (Madison, WI
1983), 193.
66 Gerhard Rempel agrees with this assessment, writing that the Germanische Leitstlle was ‘ideologic-
ally important but neglected by research’. G. Rempel, ‘Gottlob Berger and Waffen-SS Recruitment
1939–1945’, Militärgeschichtlische Mitteilungen, 27 (1980), 46. One exception is J. Elvert, whose article
‘‘‘Germanen’’ und ‘‘Imperialisten’’’, elucidates the far-reaching plans for a ‘Grossgermanisches Reich’
developed by the office. J. Elvert, ‘‘‘Germanen’’ und ‘‘Imperialisten’’. Zwei Europakonzepte aus natio-
nalsozialistischer Zeit’, Historische Mitteilungen, 5 (1992), 163–8.
54 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

on the world while maintaining a strong adherence to cross-national collaboration

within Germanic Europe and the wish to see a political union above the nation
state.67 Riedweg, for example, saw a Germanic union as the only hope of prevent-
ing a Bolshevik revolution and had sought contacts with Nazi officials while still
active in Switzerland.68 The influential Nazi official Wilhelm Stuckart later said of
Riedweg that he ‘held decidedly European thinking without relinquishing his Swiss
position, for whom an awakening of all European forces capable of effectively
countering the Bolshevik threat was a priority’.69 Like Schäppi and Zander, how-
ever, a union of Germanic countries always had intrinsic benefits beyond defeating
communism. In Switzerland in the early 1930s, Riedweg had formed the Action
nationale Suisse contre le Communisme (Swiss League against Communism).
Riedweg later admitted that one of the goals of the Action was to use the fear of
communism to consolidate conservative power across Europe.70 Much like Zander
had gained his transnational experience by his scholarship and travel in the service
of New Education, Riedweg had visited a host of European countries and inter-
acted with foreign officials in his role as secretary of the Action, including German
Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Heinrich Himmler and Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels.71
That Zander became an active member of the Germanic staff of the SS is hardly
surprising given his background. With his previous emphasis on engineering a spirit
of Volksgemeinschaft in individuals, to Zander, creating the Greater Germanic
Empire meant above all creating properly educated and thus motivated individuals.
The war, and the resulting influx of Germanic volunteers into the Waffen-SS,
provided the ideal source of subjects. Initially, Zander directed his efforts at
Swiss living in Germany with the hopes of creating a corps of motivated and
properly ideologically schooled Swiss to help integrate the country following a
German take-over or, in his words, ‘to build a National Socialist
Volksgemeinschaft’.72 One of his primary efforts involved the formation of Swiss
political soldiers into a single fighting unit. At the founding of the BSG, into which
Zander had folded his BTE upon moving to Germany, the Swiss frontists had
agreed to ‘create a disciplined fighting troop [of Swiss] for the National Socialist
ideology with members being political soldiers committed to Adolf Hitler, the

67 M. Gutmann, ‘Debunking the myth of the volunteers: transnational volunteering in the Nazi
Waffen-SS officer corps during the Second World War’, Contemporary European History, 22, 4
(2013), 585–607.
68 AfZ, NL Franz Riedweg, 3. Personalakten, ‘Urteil des 20. Spruchkammer des Spruchgerichts
Hiddesen 18.11.1948’, 2. For more on Riedweg, see Gutmann, ‘Fighting for the Nazi New Order’;
M.P. Gingerich, ‘Toward a brotherhood of arms: Waffen-SS recruitment of Germanic volunteers,
1940–1945’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin (1991), 429; M. Wyss, Un suisse au service
de la SS: Dr. Franz Riedweg (1907–2005) (Neuchâtel 2010).
69 AfZ, NL Franz Riedweg, ungeordneter Bestand, ‘Testimony of Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Nürnberg,
29 October, 1947’.
70 Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich [IfZ], ZS669 Riedweg Franz, ‘Neiderschrift einer Unterredung
mit Herrn Dr. Med. Franz Riedweg, 22 November 1955’, 2.
71 Ibid, 4.
72 Quoted in Näf, ‘Alfred Zander’.
Gutmann 55

Führer of all Germanics and the creator of a new European order’.73 Inculcating
volunteering Swiss, however, was more than an expedient, for Zander believed that
the Swiss individual had always shown himself in his most ideal form in martial
circumstances. Drawing on his interpretation of Switzerland’s tradition of mercen-
aries, he wrote that:

The Swiss man is an ideal soldier when he is led well and knows what he is fighting for.
Our forefathers fought for hundreds of years for Kaiser and Reich and for the freedom
of the Germanic peoples. Then the Swiss sold their military might to France for three
hundred years. Would it really be a departure if in the future young Swiss engaged
themselves on behalf of Europe and their own race?74

In 1942, the Germanische Leitstelle prepared a special detachment of Waffen-SS

Swiss to be sent into Switzerland to partake both in the violent overthrow of the
government and in the establishment of a new regime. It was eventually disbanded
and the men sent back to the Eastern Front.75
By this point, Zander’s focus had moved above specifically Swiss concerns. Since
the beginning of his work in Germany, Zander had given lectures and speeches
throughout Germany on behalf of the Germanische Leitstelle in an effort to win
converts to the idea of a Germanic empire.76 In the summer of 1943, Zander offi-
cially joined the Waffen-SS. His primary posting would be at the SS school at
Sennheim which was, in the words of an SS-pamphlet, ‘the first school for
Germanic education, [where] young volunteers learn the fundamentals of political
soldierdom’.77 Although Zander left no recollections of his time in Sennheim, it is
likely that he used his full pedagogical skills to instil in the various Waffen-SS
volunteers the vision he and others shared for the future Europe.78 His thinking
by this point was clearly more characterized by the transnational spirit of the
Germanische Leitstelle and the need to create a supra-national spirit of National
Socialism across Germanic Europe. A syllabus from the SS-Junkerschule at Bad
Tölz, where Germanic Waffen-SS officer candidates were trained, and a document
Zander in his role as ideological educator within the Germanische Leitstelle may
have co-authored, claimed that ‘National Socialism is the reincarnation of these old
Germanic values and proposes a new solution to the problems of the 19th century.
The re-emergence of an empire leads simultaneously to an organic European

73 Ibid, 88.
74 Quoted in V. Oertle, Sollte Ich Aus Russland Nicht Zurückkehren: Schweizer Freiwillige an
Deutscher Seite, 1939-1945 (Zürich 1998), 122.
75 BAR E 2001 (E) 1968/78/Band 158, Schweizerische Bundesanwaltschaft, Polizeidienst, Abschrift,
Schaffhausen den 19. Febr. 1942, Auszug aus dem Abhörprotokoll betreffend A.[. . .].
76 BAR, ‘Bericht des Bundesrates and die Bundesversammlung’, 88–9.
77 Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv-Freiburg [BArch MA], N 756 Nachlass Wolfgang Vopersal,
‘SS-Ausbildungslager Sennheim’, 336.
78 For more on pedagogical methods and emphasis of Zander and other Germanic ideological instruc-
tors, see M. Gutmann, ‘Creating a Transnational Political Soldier: The SS Officer Cadet School at Tölz
and the Nazi Quest for a Greater Germanic Empire, 1943–1945’, Transnational Subjects, 2, 1 (2011),
85–93.
56 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

solution’.79 That Zander, his co-teachers and his students only emphasized
‘positive’ elements in their ideology, as postwar apologetic literature on the
Waffen-SS has often claimed, can be discounted.80 Zander, as we have seen, was
a rabid antisemite for whom fighting Bolshevism was as much a matter of annihi-
lating what he saw as an inferior group of people as defending Europe. Inmates
from the Natzweiler concentration camp were engaged to build barracks at the
school in Sennheim from 1944 on and it is unlikely that Zander would not have
come in contact with these forced laborers.81
The members of Riedweg’s Germanische Leitstelle, including Zander, gave few pre-
cise details as to how the incorporation of Germanic countries within the Greater
Germanic Reich would occur. Nor were they precise about what the relationship
between the peripheral countries would be vis-a-vis Germany. By the time the office
had grown to its peak influence and received a near blanket mandate from Himmler on
Germanic work, in March of 1942, the tide of war would increasingly begin to turn
against long-term German domination over the continent. The office’s plans, of course,
could not be implemented.82 Within a year of taking up his work at the SS school in
Sennheim, Zander and his fellow teachers and classmates were assigned to combat
units. Zander was assigned to the Waffen-SS Division Charlemagne, composed
mainly of French volunteers, and fought a retreating battle until his surrender with a
small remnant of the division in Bavaria to US troops in May of 1945.83 In November
1943, the Swiss government had taken away Zander’s citizenship and prohibited him
from entering the country.84 Additionally, after the war Zander and several other Swiss
National Socialists were tried for treason in absentia. After his release from an intern-
ment camp, Zander remained in Germany as an educator, working first as a teacher at
the New Education school Werkschule Albert Merz and later taking over the director-
ship of the Landerziehungsheim Burg Nordeck. He continued publishing on education,
including a book on Pestalozzi in 1952.85 He died in 1997.

Dirk van Laak has challenged scholars to look less to the concrete results of social
engineering projects and more to the ‘methods and process of interaction with
which the present was to be guided to the future’.86 It is in examining Zander’s
methods and process in attaining a Volksgemeinschaft, both as a pedagogue and as
a right-wing organizer, that historiographical insights can be gleaned. David
Blackbourn has written that ‘the gap between rhetoric and reality that exists in

79 BArch MA, RS 5/320, ‘Lehrstoffeinteilung fur den 4.Lehrgang fur germanische Offiziere’.
80 See for example, R.S. Kossens, Militärischer Führernachwuchs der Waffen-SS: Die Junkerschulen
(Coburg 1999).
81 BArch MA, N 756 Nachlass Wolfgang Vopersal, Helmut von Haaren to Vopersal, 11 January
1974, 336.
82 National Archives and Records Administration, T-175/20, 2524945, Dr. Brandt to Berger, 15
March 1942.
83 Oertle, Sollte ich aus Russland, 305–9.
84 BAR, E 4264, 1985/57, 44 M3052.
85 A. Zander, Pestalozzis Geistiges Testament (Heidelberg 1952).
86 D.v. Laak, ‘Planung, Geschichte und Gegenwart des Vorgriffs auf die Zukunft’, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, 34, 3 (2008), 306.
Gutmann 57

all political systems was especially wide under National Socialism’.87 It is certainly
true that viewed in hindsight, Zander and his cohort’s vision first for Switzerland
and later for the future of Europe remained largely rhetorical. Yet Zander truly
believed that they were building a Volksgemeinschaft in Europe in the form of a
Greater Germanic Empire, a phenomenon that has been observed in other
European fascists as well.88 The vagueness of his process of achieving an ‘organic
alignment’ among the Germanic peoples points not to a superficiality or lack of
commitment but testifies to the depth of his belief that a Volksgemeinschaft was a
natural and inevitable development and therefore one that required little precise
planning. Thus in regards to his process, Zander represents a unique form of social
engineer. Whereas geographers and economists, for example, relied on data, cal-
culations and detailed planning to define and implement their aims, it was against
this very reliance on hard science that Zander campaigned. Starting with his work
in education, Zander followed a consistent trajectory from promoting a ‘school
spirit’ above specific content or heuristic tools to awakening first the Swiss and later
the general Germanic population to the spirit of Volksgemeinschaft. The Swiss did
not have to be moulded into National Socialists, instead their natural – albeit
temporarily obscured – inclination to this natural state needed to be rekindled.
The consistent belief in the natural essence of this spirit, then, is what allowed
Zander to construct both his pedagogy and his ideological work toward a
European Volksgemeinschaft in such vague terms. The most noticeable develop-
ment in his otherwise consistent aim over the course of his career was the growing
belief that violence, far beyond a means to an end, could serve as the tool that
would revitalize this spirit within an individual.89
Zander’s experience contributes to an understanding of where the teleological
belief in a Volksgemeinschaft that so defined the bulk of fascists came from. In his
case, his belief in an essentially ‘utopian’ goal through a reversion to a natural,
idealized state has concrete links to his training in New Education and goes a way
toward explaining his engagement with Swiss Frontism and National Socialism. In
fact his transformation into a National Socialist is not wholly out of the ordinary
when compared to his peers. Though German New Education institutions were
either forcibly shut down or assimilated to Nazi tenets with the seizure of power in
1933 – the most prominent and researched example is Paul Geheeb, who fled with
his Jewish students to Switzerland, leaving his Odenwaldschule in the hands of the
Nazis – many were eager to collaborate with the new regime.90 For while its tenets

87 D. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany
(New York, NY 2006), 298.
88 For the most recent discussion of European-wide concepts of a Volksgemeinschaft, see
M. Fioravanzo, ‘Die Europakonzeption von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (1939–1943)’,
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 58, 4, 509–41; R. Grubbert, Der Europagedanke westeuropäischer
faschistischer Bewegungen 1940–1945 (Paderborn 2012).
89 As pointed out in Patel and Reichardt’s introduction, to be published in issue with this article.
90 See D. Shirley, The politics of progressive education: the Odenwaldschule in Nazi Germany
(Cambridge, MA 1992). On New Education and National Socialism in general, see H. Kunert,
Deutsche Reformpädagogik und Faschismus (Hannover 1973).
58 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

of peace and internationalism were in conflict with the Nazi emphasis on nation-
alism and militarism, both movements were driven by attainment of a similar goal,
a Volksgemeinschaft. Geheeb stressed above all in his pedagogy the abandonment
of prescribed classroom methodologies in favour of the cultivation of small and
close-knit student-teacher living communities within his school, ‘families’ as he
called them, from which the impulse to true learning would spring.91 Of course
the link between Zander and New Education’s essential elements is not complete.
Few New Education proponents espoused the violent antisemitic rhetoric of
Zander nor an affinity for violence as a means to an end. In fact these ideas
were diametrically opposed to New Education’s emphasis on peace and equality.
Yet through his writing and actions, it is clear that Zander developed his conviction
for a Volksgemeinschaft through his work as an educator. While the way that he
arrived at this conclusion may be unique, the fact itself is not; recent works have
highlighted the extent to which significant groups of interwar Europeans defined
themselves as Europeans in opposition to a Bolshevik, Eastern other.92 In Zander’s
case, his enduring conviction that such a spirit was paramount, first in the class-
room, later in Switzerland and finally in Europe trumped his earlier belief in
humanity, equality and democracy as the growing crisis he perceived called for
ever radical methods against opponents. Of course this neither fully explains nor
justifies why he, and not any of the hundreds of other New Education teachers
active in Switzerland, became an adherent of right-wing politics.
Zander’s emphasis on a cross-national methodology of social engineering too
derived originally from his educational background. The New Education move-
ment, of which Zander was a dedicated and contributing member, saw inter-
national cooperation not as an ancillary activity but as the primary vehicle of
disciplinary advancement. New Education saw its tenets as universal and not
bound nor in the service of any nation state. Zander’s transnational perspective,
then, fits clearly within his training and adherence to New Education ideals. In his
overview of transnationalism’s historiographical development, Kiran Klaus Patel
highlights the need to examine the issue of directionality, that is that the nation-
state can either ‘be understood as an enabling condition of transnational inter-
action’ or vice versa.93 Zander’s trajectory involves essentially a third direction,
that of working from within a transnational framework and rationalization toward
a transnational goal. Both as an educator and later as an ideological instructor for
the Waffen-SS, Zander emphasized the need for transnational interaction for a
concrete goal above and despite the nation state. Even during his leadership in
the Frontist movement in the 1930s, Zander stands out as having sought

91 B. Lembke-Ibold, Paul Geheeb: Gemeinschaft und Familie im Landerziehungsheim (Hamburg 2010).

92 See, for example, A. Mattioli, ‘Denkstil ‘‘christliches Abendland’’. Eine Fallstudie zu Gonzague de
Reynold’, in K. Armborst and W.-F. Schäufele (eds), Der Wert ‘‘Europa’’ und die Geschichte. Auf dem
Weg zu einem europäischen Geschichtsbewusstsein (Mainz 2007).
93 K.K. Patel, ‘Transatlantische Perspektiven transnationaler Geschichte’, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, 29, 4 (2003), 625–47.
Gutmann 59

connections to and cooperation with German and other sympathetic international

colleagues, in contrast to many more domestically-focused Frontist agitators.
This conclusion supports a growing work of scholarship that examines the
numerous fascists during the interwar and Second World War period whose
work was neither confined to strictly nationalist parties nor meant to advance
strictly nationalist aims.94 Where to place these men within the historiography of
the peripheral Western European countries and the war is challenging. In
Switzerland, as in the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, collective memory
and postwar historiography long emphasized a ‘collaboration and resistance’
dichotomy, in which the majority of the population resisted Nazi designs, while
a small minority enthusiastically betrayed their country.95 In the Swiss case, it has
been argued, the postwar population embraced a collective ‘militarized’ memory in
which the defining experience of the war was Switzerland’s preparedness and will-
ingness to repel a German attack.96 More recent historiographical insights have
softened the dichotomy by highlighting the extent to which businesses and govern-
ment institutions accommodated themselves with the Nazi New Order, whether out
of conviction or opportunistic motives.97 Zander’s singular case is not enough to
unsettle large-scale historiographical readings, but his story suggests that a further
softening of the more simplistic reading of Switzerland’s wartime experience may
be necessary.
Zander’s fellow Frontist and later chief of the ‘Swiss desk’ at the Germanische
Leitstelle summarized the feeling of many Frontists in a speech in the early 1930s
that:

We are of the opinion that especially the past proves that humans make history and
not history humans . . . Humans are the cause of their own reality. The history of
humans is the history of his own spiritual power. Only the spiritual can penetrate
the material and not the other way around.98

94 Benjamin Martin has referred to such actors as ‘inter-nationalists’. See B.G. Martin, ‘A New Order
for European culture: the German–Italian Axis and the reordering of international cultural exchange,
1936–1943’, unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University (2006). See also M. Mazower, Hitler’s
Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York, NY 2008); Gutmann, ‘Fighting for the Nazi New
Order’; A. Bauerkämper, ‘Ambiguities of transnationalism. Fascism in Europe between Pan-
Europeanism and Ultra-Nationalism, 1919–39’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 27, 2
(2007), 43–67.
95 See, for example, N. Sørensen, ‘Narrating the Second World War in Denmark since 1945’,
Contemporary European History, 14, 3 (2005), 295–315; S. Ekman (ed.) Sweden’s Relations with
Nazism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust (Stockholm 2003).
96 See L. Van Dongen, ‘Swiss Memory of the Second World War in the Immediate Post-War Period,
1945–1948’, in G. Kreis (ed.), Switzerland and the Second World War (Portland, OR 2000), especially
270.
97 A good examination of European businesses is J. Lund (ed.), Working for the New Order. European
Business under German Domination, 1939–1945 (Copenhagen 2006). In the case of Switzerland specif-
ically, see for example, C. Ruch et al. (eds), Geschäfte und Zwangsarbeit: Schweizer
Industrieunternehmen im ‘Dritten Reich’ Veröffentlichung der UEK, vol. 6 (Zurich 2001).
98 AfZ, NL Heinrich Büeler, 2.2 Ueber eidg. Sozialismus, Rede Heinrich Büelers, 2.
60 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)

This statement encapsulates the essence of Zander as an educator, fascist and social
engineer. Zander was not a proponent of a scientific approach to achieving what he
believed was a better society, indeed the betterment of society had little to do with
material improvements. Industrialization, liberalism and rationalism were obscur-
ing what he thought was a more natural and communal way of living. Humans had
been robbed of agency. The persistence of this belief accompanied him from a
passionate young teacher to a proponent of violence and hatred.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Kiran Klaus Patel and Sven Reichardt and the two
peer reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Biographical Note
Martin Gutmann is a European Union Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the
Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. He has previously been an
ACLS New Faculty Fellow, a visiting professor at Quest University, Canada,
and a lecturer at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Gutmann received his
PhD from Syracuse University in 2011. His work has been published in
Contemporary European History, Transnational Subjects, History Compass, and
the Journal on Terrorism and Security Studies. His manuscript ‘Building a Nazi
Europe: Himmler’s Foreign Volunteers and the Germanic Project of the SS’ is
under contract with Cambridge University Press.