Günther Franz (13 May 1902 – 22 July 1992) was a German historian and academic known for his work in agricultural history and the history of the German Peasants' War. He was a leading figure in shaping postwar German agrarian history alongside contemporaries such as Wilhelm Abel and Friedrich Lütge, and his book Der deutsche Bauernkrieg was long regarded as a standard work on the subject. Franz held professorships at several universities, including Heidelberg, Jena, and the Reichsuniversität Straßburg during World War II, where his research and academic roles intersected with National Socialist institutions. During the Nazi era, he was a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, and some of his work from that period incorporated ideological elements aligned with Nazi expansionist and antisemitic views. After the war, Franz underwent denazification, later resumed an academic career, and served as rector of the University of Hohenheim, where he continued to influence the fields of agricultural economics and agricultural history.
Life
Early years Franz's father, Gottlob Franz (1855 – 1903), had been the director of a textile factory in Hamburg, but was killed in an industrial accident before Franz's first birthday. His widowed mother relocated to Greiz in the Principality of Reuss-Greiz (now Thuringia), where her family operated a successful paper mill. Franz completed his elementary and secondary schooling in Greiz, and at the age of twelve he followed in the footsteps of his elder brothers by joining the Wandervogel. After the outbreak of the First World War, Franz's eldest brother was killed in France in 1915, aged only 19. The experience of having grown up during the Great War meant that Gunther belonged to what in German is called the Kriegsjugendgeneration or "war-youth generation." Franz graduated from high school in 1921, after which he went to Marburg University to study history and German literature. Two semesters later in 1922, he transferred to the University of Göttingen. He spent the winter of 1923-4 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München on a guest semester, and it was during this time in Munich that he began his writings on Bismarck, which would eventually become his dissertation. In 1925, at the age of 23, Franz received his doctorate from Arnold Oskar Meyer at the University of Göttingen. Immediately after his promotion, he seems to have begun an in-depth study of the German Peasants' War, which research led what would become the subject of his habilitation. Due to his close connection and association with this specific conflict and period in German history, Franz was affectionately given the nickname Bauern-Franz (Farmers' Franz) by his students and contemporaries. In 1927 he went to work at the University of Göttingen as an assistant professor under Mayer, and in 1930, he received his habilitation from Wilhelm Mommsen at Marburg University. In the winter semester of 1934/35, Franz sat in for Wilhelm Schüssler in his chair at the University of Rostock. Franz's subsequent career was substantially augmented by the influence of his brother-in-law, the legal historian and SS-Sturmbannführer Karl August Eckhardt, who, from 1934 onward, was a principal advisor to the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture (German: Reichswissenschaftsministeriums). In the spring of 1935, Franz succeeded Karl Hampe in his chair of medieval history at the University of Heidelberg. Prior to this appointment, Franz had published extensively on the Peasants' War, indeed, the definitive work on the subject, but had otherwise written very little on wider medieval history. At Heidelberg, his academic interests took a turn towards population history, which eventually led him to undertake a study of the Thirty Years War. Also at Heidelberg, in 1939, Franz founded a regional studies society, called the Institut für Fränkisch-Pfälzische Landes- und Volksforschung, which still exists today, as the Institut für Fränkisch-Pfälzische Geschichte und Landeskunde. In 1936, Franz succeeded Alexander Cartellieri as chair of Medieval History at the University of Jena where he was instrumental in the founding of another regional history society, the Anstalt für geschichtliche Landeskunde. Jena was also where Franz first made the acquaintance of fellow historian Erich Maschke, with whom he would form a lifelong friendship, and together they began to publish the series "Arbeiten zur Landes- und Volksforschung." At the height of the Nazi-era, from 1941 to 1945, Franz taught at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg, specializing in "the history of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War" and in particular "the study of the German national body.
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