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Theodor Vahlen

January 01, 1970

Karl Theodor Vahlen (30 June 1869 – 16 November 1945) was a mathematician and professor who was a member of the Nazi Party. He served as the first Gauleiter of Pomerania and was a member of both the SA and SS.

Karl Theodor Vahlen
Gauleiter of Gau Pomerania
In office
22 March 1925 – 21 August 1927
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byWalther von Corswant
Ministerial Director
Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture
In office
1 June 1934 – 1 January 1937
President
Prussian Academy of Science
In office
1 January 1939 – 1 April 1943
Personal details
Born(1869-06-30)30 June 1869
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died16 November 1945(1945-11-16) (aged 76)
Štěchovice, Czechoslovakia
Alma materUniversity of Berlin
ProfessionProfessor
Known forJournal editor Deutsche Mathematik
Signature
Military service
Allegiance German Empire
Branch/serviceImperial German Army
Years of service1914–1918
RankMajor
Unit68th (6th Royal Saxon) Field Artillery Regiment
Battles/warsWorld War I
AwardsIron Cross, 1st class and 2nd class

Early years edit

Theodore Vahlen was born in Vienna, the son of a German classical philologist Johannes Vahlen (1830–1911). He went to volksschule and gymnasium in Berlin before studying mathematics at the University of Berlin and receiving his doctorate there in 1893.[1] From 1893, Vahlen was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the Königsberg Albertina University. In 1904, he began teaching at the University of Greifswald, and in 1911 he became an ordinarius professor there. He entered military service at the beginning of World War I with the rank of Hauptmann in the 68th (6th Royal Saxon) Field Artillery Regiment. He was an artillery battery commander on the western front (1914-1915) and the eastern front (1916-1917). Wounded in action on three occasions, he earned the Iron Cross, first and second class. He left the service on 30 September 1918 with the rank of Major of the reserves. He returned to teaching at the University of Greifswald.[2]

Political career edit

Vahlen in 1919 initially became a member of the German National People's Party (DNVP). He co-founded a völkische group in Pomerania in 1922. In November 1923, he and his wife joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) just before it was outlawed as a result of the Beer Hall Putsch. He then joined the National Socialist Freedom Party, a Nazi front organization, becoming its Gauleiter in Pomerania on 4 April 1924. In May 1924, under its auspices, he was elected to the Reichstag for electoral constituency 6 (Pomerania). From mid-1924 through September 1926, he was the co-publisher of the daily newspaper Norddeutscher Beobachter (North German Observer).[3]

When the ban on the Nazi Party was lifted, Gregor Strasser, Hitler's authorized representative for northern Germany, selected him to be the first Party Gauleiter for Gau Pomerania on 22 March 1925 and Hitler confirmed this appointment. Vahlen formally rejoined the Party on 11 May (membership number 3,961). In December 1925, Vahlen joined the National Socialist Working Association, a group of north and northwest German Gauleiters closely associated with Strasser. On 1 March 1926, Vahlen joined Strasser and his brother Otto Strasser in founding the publishing house Kampf-Verlag in Berlin.[4]

By 1927, Adolf Hitler was replacing many early Party leaders whom he considered not to have the attributes to be effective party administrators.[5] Consequently, Vahlen was placed on indefinite leave on 1 May 1927 and his newly appointed Deputy, Walther von Corswant, was effectively put in charge. On 21 August, Vahlen was finally dismissed and Corswant officially became Gauleiter.[4]

Also in May 1927, Vahlen faced disciplinary actions stemming from an incident a few years earlier when he was Rector at the University of Greifswald. On 11 August 1924, Constitution Day, Vahlen had incited a crowd at the university against the Weimar Republic, which resulted in taking down the flags of the Republic and the Free State of Prussia. The university suspended him for political abuse of his function, and in May 1927 he was dismissed without a pension.[6] Upon his dismissal, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott increased the funding Vahlen had been receiving for his work for the German Navy since 1922. Vahlen worked briefly as an assistant in Johannes Stark's private physics laboratory. In 1930 Vahlen returned to his birthplace and became a lecturer of mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Wien.[7][8]

Once Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Vahlen's career again gained momentum and flourished in Germany as a result of his support for the NSDAP. In that year, he became an ordinarius professor of mathematics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, as successor to Richard Edler von Mises,[9] who emigrated from Germany as a result of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which was in part directed against professors with Jewish ancestry, which von Mises had. After 1933, Vahlen was a strong advocate of Deutsche Mathematik, a parallel movement to Deutsche Physik, advocated by the Nobel Laureate physicists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark; both movements were anti-Semitic. From 1934, he was ordinarius professor at the University of Berlin, a position he held until attaining emeritus status in 1937.[7]

In July 1933 Vahlen joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) but on 10 July 1936 he switched to the Schutzstaffel (SS) with the rank of Sturmbannführer and was assigned to the SS Main Office. On 30 January 1938 he was attached to the staff of the Reichsführer-SS. He received successive promotions, the last being to SS-Brigadeführer on 9 November 1943.[10]

During the period 1933 to 1937, Vahlen served as third vice president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft. In January 1934 he became an employee in the University Department of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Public Education, and by 26 April he was head of the department. From 1 June 1934, he was a Ministerial Director and Chief of the Science Office at the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture.[11] Actually, the Science Office was split into two components, WI, a continuation of the Prussian department, and WII, the army office for research. Vahlen was head of WI, but, in actuality, the deputy chief, the chemist Franz Bachér ran WI.[12] From this position, in 1936, Vahlen began publishing the journal Deutsche Mathematik, for which the Berlin mathematician Ludwig Bieberbach was the editor; in the journal, political articles preceded the scholarly articles. On 1 January 1937 Vahlen was relieved of his duties at the Ministry at his own request. Through a manipulation of the election process by Vahlen and his supporters, he was selected as president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences effective 1 January 1939 and remained in this post until 1 April 1943.[6][7][13] In April 1944, Vahlen moved to Vienna after his Berlin apartment was destroyed in an air raid and again taught at the Technische Hochschule Wien. In August 1944 he moved to Prague and worked as a lecturer at the Charles University. At the end of the war in May 1945 he was imprisoned, and he died in Czech custody in November 1945.[14]

Mathematics edit

Vahlen gained his doctorate with Beiträge zu einer additiven Zahlentheorie, and continued to specialise in number theory, but later turned to applied mathematics.

Theodor Vahlen was an early proponent of geometric algebra. His 1902 paper in Mathematische Annalen recounts William Kingdon Clifford's construction of his 2n dimensional algebra with n − 1 anti-commuting square roots of −1. Vahlen also recounts split-biquaternions and parabolic biquaternions originated by Clifford. But Vahlen cites Eduard Study most of all since Study also focussed on the geometric motions (translation and rotation) as implicit in algebra. Since Vahlen explores some of the fractional-linear transformations of Clifford algebras, he is sometimes remembered for the Vahlen matrices. These are   matrices with coefficients in a Clifford algebra that act on a projective line over a ring. In 1985 Lars Ahlfors recalled the article as follows: "The method was introduced as early as 1901 by K.T. Vahlen in a rather short, but remarkable, paper. His motivation was to unify the theory of motions in Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptic space, which is obviously in the spirit of Clifford. In this respect the paper seems somewhat antiquated, but the essence is in the method it advocates."[15] The subject of relativity was a polemical issue in Nazi Germany. As Mark Walker writes

Eventually Vahlen adopted the common tactic of ascribing the theory of relativity to other "Aryan" physicists, thereby accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but also making the theory palatable to the National Socialist state.[6]: 97 

Works edit

  • 1899: "Rationale Funktion der Wurzeln, symmetrische und Affektfunktionen", (i.e. "Rational functions of roots, symmetric and effect-functions") Klein's encyclopedia, 1–1.
  • 1900: "Arithmetische Theorie der Formen", (i.e. "Arithmetic Theory of Forms") Klein's encyclopedia, Volume 1-2
  • 1902: "Über Bewegungen und complexe Zahlen", (i.e. "On Motions and Complex Numbers") Mathematische Annalen 55:585–93
  • 1905: Abstrakte Geometrie. Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der euklidischen und nicht-euklidischen Geometrie, (i.e. Arithmetic Geometry. Studies of the Foundations of Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry), Leipzig,[16] 2nd edition 1940, Deutsche Mathematik, 2nd supplement
  • 1911: Konstruktionen und Approximationen in systematischer Darstellung, (i.e. Systematic Representations of Constructions and Approximations) Teubner[17]
  • 1922: Ballistik (i.e. Ballistics) de Gruyter[18] 2nd edition 1942
  • 1929: Deviation und Kompensation, (i.e. Deviation and Compensation) Vieweg-Verlag
  • 1942: "Die Paradoxien der relativen Mechanik", (i.e. "Paradoxes of relative mechanics") Leipzig, Deutsche Mathematik, 3rd supplement

Bibliography edit

  • Beyerchen, Alan D. (1977) Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale) ISBN 0-300-01830-4
  • Hentschel, Klaus, editor and Ann M. Hentschel, editorial assistant and Translator (1996) Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser) ISBN 0-8176-5312-0
  • Höffkes, Karl (1986). Hitlers Politische Generale. Die Gauleiter des Dritten Reiches: ein biographisches Nachschlagewerk. Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag. ISBN 3-87847-163-7.
  • Macrakis, Kristie (1993) Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (Oxford) ISBN 0-19-507010-0
  • Miller, Michael D.; Schulz, Andreas (2021). Gauleiter: The Regional Leaders of the Nazi Party and Their Deputies, 1925 - 1945. Vol. 3 (Fritz Sauckel - Hans Zimmermann). Fonthill Media. ISBN 978-1-781-55826-3.
  • Orlow, Dietrich (1969). The History of the Nazi Party: 1919-1933. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-3183-4.

References edit

  1. ^ Theodor Vahlen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Höffkes 1986, p. 354.
  3. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, pp. 507–508.
  4. ^ a b Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 508.
  5. ^ Orlow 1969, p. 119.
  6. ^ a b c Walker, Mark (1995) Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb, pages 95–99, (Persius, 1995) ISBN 0-306-44941-2
  7. ^ a b c Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see entry for Vahlen.
  8. ^ Macrakis, 1993, pp. 78-79.
  9. ^ Richard von Mises and the economist Ludwig von Mises were brothers.
  10. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 509-510.
  11. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, pp. 506, 509.
  12. ^ Beyerchen, 1977, p. 57.
  13. ^ Beyerchen, 1977, pp. 144-145.
  14. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 510.
  15. ^ Lars Ahlfors (1985) "Mobius transformations and Clifford numbers", pages 65 to 73 in Differential Geometry and Complex Analysis, H.E. Rauch Memorial Volume, I. Chavel & H.M. Farkas editors, Springer books ISBN 3-540-13543-X
  16. ^ Veblen, Oswald (1906). "Book Review: Abstrakte Geometrie". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 12 (10): 505–507. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1906-01386-6. ISSN 0002-9904.
  17. ^ Ponzer, Ernest W. (1912). "Book Review: Konstructionen und Approximationen". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 19 (2): 92–94. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1912-02302-9. ISSN 0002-9904.
  18. ^ Rowe, J. E. (1923). "Review: Ballistik, by Dr. Theodor Vahlen" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 29 (4): 186–187. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1923-03703-8.

External links edit

January 01, 1970
theodor, vahlen, karl, june, 1869, november, 1945, mathematician, professor, member, nazi, party, served, first, gauleiter, pomerania, member, both, karl, gauleiter, pomeraniain, office, march, 1925, august, 1927preceded, byposition, establishedsucceeded, bywa. Karl Theodor Vahlen 30 June 1869 16 November 1945 was a mathematician and professor who was a member of the Nazi Party He served as the first Gauleiter of Pomerania and was a member of both the SA and SS Karl Theodor VahlenGauleiter of Gau PomeraniaIn office 22 March 1925 21 August 1927Preceded byPosition establishedSucceeded byWalther von CorswantMinisterial DirectorReich Ministry of Science Education and CultureIn office 1 June 1934 1 January 1937PresidentPrussian Academy of ScienceIn office 1 January 1939 1 April 1943Personal detailsBorn 1869 06 30 30 June 1869Vienna Austria HungaryDied16 November 1945 1945 11 16 aged 76 Stechovice CzechoslovakiaAlma materUniversity of BerlinProfessionProfessorKnown forJournal editor Deutsche MathematikSignatureMilitary serviceAllegiance German EmpireBranch serviceImperial German ArmyYears of service1914 1918RankMajorUnit68th 6th Royal Saxon Field Artillery RegimentBattles warsWorld War IAwardsIron Cross 1st class and 2nd class Contents 1 Early years 2 Political career 3 Mathematics 4 Works 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External linksEarly years editTheodore Vahlen was born in Vienna the son of a German classical philologist Johannes Vahlen 1830 1911 He went to volksschule and gymnasium in Berlin before studying mathematics at the University of Berlin and receiving his doctorate there in 1893 1 From 1893 Vahlen was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the Konigsberg Albertina University In 1904 he began teaching at the University of Greifswald and in 1911 he became an ordinarius professor there He entered military service at the beginning of World War I with the rank of Hauptmann in the 68th 6th Royal Saxon Field Artillery Regiment He was an artillery battery commander on the western front 1914 1915 and the eastern front 1916 1917 Wounded in action on three occasions he earned the Iron Cross first and second class He left the service on 30 September 1918 with the rank of Major of the reserves He returned to teaching at the University of Greifswald 2 Political career editVahlen in 1919 initially became a member of the German National People s Party DNVP He co founded a volkische group in Pomerania in 1922 In November 1923 he and his wife joined the Nazi Party NSDAP just before it was outlawed as a result of the Beer Hall Putsch He then joined the National Socialist Freedom Party a Nazi front organization becoming its Gauleiter in Pomerania on 4 April 1924 In May 1924 under its auspices he was elected to the Reichstag for electoral constituency 6 Pomerania From mid 1924 through September 1926 he was the co publisher of the daily newspaper Norddeutscher Beobachter North German Observer 3 When the ban on the Nazi Party was lifted Gregor Strasser Hitler s authorized representative for northern Germany selected him to be the first Party Gauleiter for Gau Pomerania on 22 March 1925 and Hitler confirmed this appointment Vahlen formally rejoined the Party on 11 May membership number 3 961 In December 1925 Vahlen joined the National Socialist Working Association a group of north and northwest German Gauleiters closely associated with Strasser On 1 March 1926 Vahlen joined Strasser and his brother Otto Strasser in founding the publishing house Kampf Verlag in Berlin 4 By 1927 Adolf Hitler was replacing many early Party leaders whom he considered not to have the attributes to be effective party administrators 5 Consequently Vahlen was placed on indefinite leave on 1 May 1927 and his newly appointed Deputy Walther von Corswant was effectively put in charge On 21 August Vahlen was finally dismissed and Corswant officially became Gauleiter 4 Also in May 1927 Vahlen faced disciplinary actions stemming from an incident a few years earlier when he was Rector at the University of Greifswald On 11 August 1924 Constitution Day Vahlen had incited a crowd at the university against the Weimar Republic which resulted in taking down the flags of the Republic and the Free State of Prussia The university suspended him for political abuse of his function and in May 1927 he was dismissed without a pension 6 Upon his dismissal Friedrich Schmidt Ott increased the funding Vahlen had been receiving for his work for the German Navy since 1922 Vahlen worked briefly as an assistant in Johannes Stark s private physics laboratory In 1930 Vahlen returned to his birthplace and became a lecturer of mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Wien 7 8 Once Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 Vahlen s career again gained momentum and flourished in Germany as a result of his support for the NSDAP In that year he became an ordinarius professor of mathematics at the Humboldt University of Berlin as successor to Richard Edler von Mises 9 who emigrated from Germany as a result of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which was in part directed against professors with Jewish ancestry which von Mises had After 1933 Vahlen was a strong advocate of Deutsche Mathematik a parallel movement to Deutsche Physik advocated by the Nobel Laureate physicists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark both movements were anti Semitic From 1934 he was ordinarius professor at the University of Berlin a position he held until attaining emeritus status in 1937 7 In July 1933 Vahlen joined the Sturmabteilung SA but on 10 July 1936 he switched to the Schutzstaffel SS with the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer and was assigned to the SS Main Office On 30 January 1938 he was attached to the staff of the Reichsfuhrer SS He received successive promotions the last being to SS Brigadefuhrer on 9 November 1943 10 During the period 1933 to 1937 Vahlen served as third vice president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft In January 1934 he became an employee in the University Department of the Prussian Ministry of Science Art and Public Education and by 26 April he was head of the department From 1 June 1934 he was a Ministerial Director and Chief of the Science Office at the Reich Ministry of Science Education and Culture 11 Actually the Science Office was split into two components WI a continuation of the Prussian department and WII the army office for research Vahlen was head of WI but in actuality the deputy chief the chemist Franz Bacher ran WI 12 From this position in 1936 Vahlen began publishing the journal Deutsche Mathematik for which the Berlin mathematician Ludwig Bieberbach was the editor in the journal political articles preceded the scholarly articles On 1 January 1937 Vahlen was relieved of his duties at the Ministry at his own request Through a manipulation of the election process by Vahlen and his supporters he was selected as president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences effective 1 January 1939 and remained in this post until 1 April 1943 6 7 13 In April 1944 Vahlen moved to Vienna after his Berlin apartment was destroyed in an air raid and again taught at the Technische Hochschule Wien In August 1944 he moved to Prague and worked as a lecturer at the Charles University At the end of the war in May 1945 he was imprisoned and he died in Czech custody in November 1945 14 Mathematics editVahlen gained his doctorate with Beitrage zu einer additiven Zahlentheorie and continued to specialise in number theory but later turned to applied mathematics Theodor Vahlen was an early proponent of geometric algebra His 1902 paper in Mathematische Annalen recounts William Kingdon Clifford s construction of his 2n dimensional algebra with n 1 anti commuting square roots of 1 Vahlen also recounts split biquaternions and parabolic biquaternions originated by Clifford But Vahlen cites Eduard Study most of all since Study also focussed on the geometric motions translation and rotation as implicit in algebra Since Vahlen explores some of the fractional linear transformations of Clifford algebras he is sometimes remembered for the Vahlen matrices These are 2 2 displaystyle 2 times 2 nbsp matrices with coefficients in a Clifford algebra that act on a projective line over a ring In 1985 Lars Ahlfors recalled the article as follows The method was introduced as early as 1901 by K T Vahlen in a rather short but remarkable paper His motivation was to unify the theory of motions in Euclidean hyperbolic and elliptic space which is obviously in the spirit of Clifford In this respect the paper seems somewhat antiquated but the essence is in the method it advocates 15 The subject of relativity was a polemical issue in Nazi Germany As Mark Walker writes Eventually Vahlen adopted the common tactic of ascribing the theory of relativity to other Aryan physicists thereby accusing Einstein of plagiarism but also making the theory palatable to the National Socialist state 6 97 Works edit1899 Rationale Funktion der Wurzeln symmetrische und Affektfunktionen i e Rational functions of roots symmetric and effect functions Klein s encyclopedia 1 1 1900 Arithmetische Theorie der Formen i e Arithmetic Theory of Forms Klein s encyclopedia Volume 1 2 1902 Uber Bewegungen und complexe Zahlen i e On Motions and Complex Numbers Mathematische Annalen 55 585 93 1905 Abstrakte Geometrie Untersuchungen uber die Grundlagen der euklidischen und nicht euklidischen Geometrie i e Arithmetic Geometry Studies of the Foundations of Euclidean and Non Euclidean Geometry Leipzig 16 2nd edition 1940 Deutsche Mathematik 2nd supplement 1911 Konstruktionen und Approximationen in systematischer Darstellung i e Systematic Representations of Constructions and Approximations Teubner 17 1922 Ballistik i e Ballistics de Gruyter 18 2nd edition 1942 1929 Deviation und Kompensation i e Deviation and Compensation Vieweg Verlag 1942 Die Paradoxien der relativen Mechanik i e Paradoxes of relative mechanics Leipzig Deutsche Mathematik 3rd supplementBibliography editBeyerchen Alan D 1977 Scientists Under Hitler Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich Yale ISBN 0 300 01830 4 Hentschel Klaus editor and Ann M Hentschel editorial assistant and Translator 1996 Physics and National Socialism An Anthology of Primary Sources Birkhauser ISBN 0 8176 5312 0 Hoffkes Karl 1986 Hitlers Politische Generale Die Gauleiter des Dritten Reiches ein biographisches Nachschlagewerk Tubingen Grabert Verlag ISBN 3 87847 163 7 Macrakis Kristie 1993 Surviving the Swastika Scientific Research in Nazi Germany Oxford ISBN 0 19 507010 0 Miller Michael D Schulz Andreas 2021 Gauleiter The Regional Leaders of the Nazi Party and Their Deputies 1925 1945 Vol 3 Fritz Sauckel Hans Zimmermann Fonthill Media ISBN 978 1 781 55826 3 Orlow Dietrich 1969 The History of the Nazi Party 1919 1933 University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN 0 8229 3183 4 References edit Theodor Vahlen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Hoffkes 1986 p 354 Miller amp Schulz 2021 pp 507 508 a b Miller amp Schulz 2021 p 508 Orlow 1969 p 119 a b c Walker Mark 1995 Nazi Science Myth Truth and the German Atomic Bomb pages 95 99 Persius 1995 ISBN 0 306 44941 2 a b c Hentschel 1996 Appendix F see entry for Vahlen Macrakis 1993 pp 78 79 Richard von Mises and the economist Ludwig von Mises were brothers Miller amp Schulz 2021 p 509 510 Miller amp Schulz 2021 pp 506 509 Beyerchen 1977 p 57 Beyerchen 1977 pp 144 145 Miller amp Schulz 2021 p 510 Lars Ahlfors 1985 Mobius transformations and Clifford numbers pages 65 to 73 in Differential Geometry and Complex Analysis H E Rauch Memorial Volume I Chavel amp H M Farkas editors Springer books ISBN 3 540 13543 X Veblen Oswald 1906 Book Review Abstrakte Geometrie Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 12 10 505 507 doi 10 1090 S0002 9904 1906 01386 6 ISSN 0002 9904 Ponzer Ernest W 1912 Book Review Konstructionen und Approximationen Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 19 2 92 94 doi 10 1090 S0002 9904 1912 02302 9 ISSN 0002 9904 Rowe J E 1923 Review Ballistik by Dr Theodor Vahlen PDF Bull Amer Math Soc 29 4 186 187 doi 10 1090 s0002 9904 1923 03703 8 External links editNewspaper clippings about Theodor Vahlen in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW Information about Theodor Vahlen in the Reichstag database Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Theodor Vahlen amp oldid 1222487269, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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