Abstract

Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1919–1999) was a major figure in musicology in post-war Germany. Thus, when Boris von Haken presented a paper before the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in September 2009, asserting that Eggebrecht—as a member of a notorious German military police unit in the Crimea—had participated in the mass murder of 14,000 Jews from Simferopol in December 1941, he ignited a heated controversy. At the American Musicological Society conference in November 2010, a special session was devoted to the controversy. Three presenters from that session are included here. Anne Shreffler outlines the course of the controversy in Germany, emphasizes the distinction between legal guilt and historical and moral judgment, and—in terms of reassessing Eggebrecht’s scholarship—notes that he himself emphasized the importance of the scholar’s subjective attitudes and values. Boris von Haken reviews the numerous and extensive judicial investigations pertaining to the Eggebrecht case, the problematic nature of the postwar interrogations as a historical source, and the key evidence indicating the involvement of Eggebrecht’s platoon in the Simferopol massacre. Christopher Browning examines the two most trenchant German responses to von Haken that attempt to refute the assertion of Eggebrecht’s participation in the Simferopol massacres, and then explores the hitherto unexamined issue of Eggebrecht’s role in guarding Soviet POWs.

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