Breyer the Researcher

The doubts of the researcher?

In March 1939 Albert Breyer wrote in a letter to Adolf Eichler that 'his farewell of Sompolno and his profession as a teacher had been very hard for him ... He (also) reported about his new secure sphere of activity at Poznań, where he could con­centrate on his ethnic and historic studies.'[1]

Was Albert Breyer's retirement from any active and exposed political work and his concentration on his studies a withdrawal to privacy, that had already showed since his move to Sompolno? This retirement would be understandable for the meanwhile 50 years old Albert Breyer, who had lost his profession as a teacher, for which he had fought most of his life. Or where there also fundamental doubts that caused his retirement?

The growing and immense influence that the politics of the Reich gained over the German movement in Poland, the growing feeling of being remote controlled obviously caused serious doubts and controversies within the groups of the German movement.

Albert Breyer's early death spared him the experience of the developments after the German occupation of Poland. How would the sensitive researcher have reacted upon the inhumane measures of the Nazis in Poland? His likewise sensitive friend Julian Will committed suicide in 1941.

Certainly Albert Breyer's life's work, the research of the subtle ethnic structures and origins of Germans in Central Poland, would have been ceased by the Nazi measures of resettlement, which ignored and destroyed ethnic structures that had developed over centuries.

Jutta Dennerlein - April 2007