Did the Bauhaus movement have Nazi sympathizers in it?

by esbern
153x153

Firstly to narrow this question down, I will write only about the actual Bauhaus school and the roughly 1,300 students that attended, rather than the "movement" or style of it which suggests something broader than can be answered.

The administration of the Bauhaus school was essentially coerced into closure by pressure from the Nazi regime who marked the institution as a haven for communist thought, i.e. moral degenerates. Many students and staff fled to other countries such as the UK and US to continue their work, while others stayed behind either by choice or a lack thereof. Many notable students, like Otti Berger, would ultimately perish in concentration camps throughout the war.

Now I want to strictly define "Nazi sympathizer" as it relates to the question. There were indeed students of the Bauhaus school who would later go on to contribute their skills to the Nazi regime in one form or another, but it should be noted that this is where things get muddy. It's possible some were on board with Nazi ideology, but I cannot name any names, to my knowledge, that were open about this -- not to mention how difficult this would be to prove or disprove without direct evidence. Many were coerced, either directly or indirectly, into working for the regime. "Sympathizer" should not be equated with "employee" of the Nazi government because for many individuals cooperation was compulsory for survival.

Bauhaus student Franz Ehrlich was arrested in 1935 as a communist and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He asserted his skills as an architect and would be taken on to design aspects of the camp, such as the main gates. Later he would be made the chief designer of the Buchenwald construction office while a prisoner there. He was released in 1939 but stayed on the job, where he designed expansions to Buchenwald's prisoner housing and barracks, however throughout his career his work was mostly belonging to interior aesthetics (chairs, tables, desks, etc). He even designed a guest house for Goering. Later in life he would assert that he had done no wrong, and that he had even contributed to the resistance when he could, but this is not concrete. In any case, the position his occupation afforded him was also his means of escaping certain death.

Fritz Ertl, who was a student at the Bauhaus under Wassily Kandinsky, would become an SS officer during the war. He was an architect at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, designing some of the very apparatus that would facilitate the mass murder of prisoners there. At the post-war Vienna Auschwitz Trial of 1972, he claimed to have been unaware of the ultimate intent of his designs, and was acquitted.