Die Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung und das Auslanderstudium in Deutschland 1925–1945: Von der ‘gerauschlosen Propaganda’ zur Ausbildung der ‘geistigen Wehr’ des ‘Neuen Europa

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, set up in 1925 under Stresemann, was only formally an independent instrument of the Federal Foreign Office’s cultural policy from the start. With the help of scholarships, foreign students should be won over as future multipliers. After 1933, the National Socialists continued to promote foreign studies under new ideological guidelines. Up until the last weeks of the war, the granting of scholarships served to recruit elites for Hitler’s empire - both in the sense of a political elite willing to collaborate and in the sense of a racial elite: the intellectual defense of the New Europe . Holger Impekoven’s study contributes significantly to the political history of foreign studies in Germany. At the same time, she reports from the dark side of academic foreign relations, looking not only at the intentions of those involved in politics but also at the individual level of foreign students in Hitler’s racial state .