Werner Krauss (7 June 1900 - 28 August 1976) was a German university professor (Romance studies).
During the 1940s he became a political activist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. In 1943 he was found guilty of preparing to commit high treason and condemned to death. Following the intervention of influential fellow-intellectuals the sentence was commuted to a five-year prison term in 1944.
Life
Provenance and early years
Werner Krauss was the son of the archivist-scholar and his wife, born Ottilie Schüle. Werner's mother's sister was the mother of Eberhard Koebel. In June 1918 Werner Krauss successfully completed his schooling at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, after which he was conscripted into the wartime army.
Discharged from the army in 1919 Krauss went on to study Literary sciences at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at what later became the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a particular focus on Romance studies.
Between 1922 and 1926 he lived in Spain, studying at Madrid. For his doctorate he was supervised by Karl Vossler (who had also taught Victor Klemperer) at Munich for a study of daily life and literature in Medieval Spain, which was subsequently published.
He moved to Marburg in April 1931, taking a post as an assistant at the university, and received his habilitation qualification a year later, this time for a piece of work entitled "The development of the bucolic in Spanish Literature", for which he was supervised by Erich Auerbach. Shortly after this politics intervened at the beginning of 1933 when the Nazi party took power and lost little time in imposing their version of a one-party dictatorship on Germany. Auerbach lost his post at Marburg because he was Jewish, and Krauss took over Auerbach's teaching responsibilities, which normally would have gone hand in hand with a professorship. However, in the case of Werner Krauss the teaching duties came without the professorship because he was believed by those in charge to be ideologically unreliable.
Nazi years
On 11 November 1933, a ceremony was held at the Albert Hall in Leipzig to celebrate the "National Socialist Revolution". As part of the celebration many mainstream academics (and others) signed a declaration of which the character can be inferred from the title: "With Adolf Hitler for the German People’s Honour, law and liberty" ("Mit Adolf Hitler für des deutschen Volkes Ehre, Freiheit und Recht!"). Werner Krauss was one of approximately 900 who signed it.
War returned in 1939, and in August 1940 Krauss was conscripted into the army, ending up in a special company of simultaneous translators: this involved relocating to Berlin, although the work also included front-line assignments.
In Berlin, through his friendship with the psychiatrist John Rittmeister Krauss came into contact with the resistance activist Harro Schulze-Boysen. Krauss and his girlfriend, Ursula Goetze, now participated in a "sticker campaign" against a high-profile exhibition being held in the Lustgarten park in May/June 1942, which carried the ironic title "The Soviet Paradise". This led to their identification as what the Gestapo termed Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") members and Krauss was arrested in November 1942.
On 18 January 1943 they were both found guilty as accessories to High treason by the National War Court and condemned to death. As well as the incident involving the "sticker campaign", Krauss was condemned under the Law on extraordinary broadcast actions ("Verordnung über außerordentliche Rundfunkmaßnahmen") for having listened to, read and given publicity to "inflammatory articles" from abroad.
In the end the death sentence was never carried out. Supported by "psychiatric assessments" and the advocacy of influential academics including Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the death sentence was replaced with a five-year jail sentence on 14 September 1944. Ursula Goetze had been executed on 5 August 1943. By the time his sentence was commuted Krauss had spent twenty months awaiting execution, including a stretch in a death cell in Plötzensee Prison where he shared a cell with chemical engineer , another German resistance fighter. During his time in Plötzensee Werner Krauss was able to write, clandestinely, a satirical Roman à clef entitled "Die Passionen der halkyonischen Seele" ("The Passions of a Halcyon Soul"), with an air-force officer (Harro Schulze-Boysen) as its principal protagonist. The book was published after the war, in 1946, characterised as an anti-fascist novel: it was reissued in 1983.