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by Katharina Fuchs (Author)
The political, economic and social upheavals of Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic also shaped university students. At the Stuttgart polytechnic (TH Stuttgart) the student body was politically diverse at the beginning of the period under study. However, increasing radicalization among students at Stuttgart resulted in 86 percent of the electorate nominating nationalist and National Socialist candidates for academic office by December 1932. Because such nominee lists were mainly fed by members of nationalist and conservative student fraternities, the National Socialist German Students' Union (NSDStB) focused from the start on meddling into the power structure of these student associations. The present inquiry is based on documents that the private archive of the fraternity Ghibellinia has made available for the first time. Thus it has become possible to write a new chapter in the history of the University of Stuttgart during the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism based on these previously inaccessible sources. Three salient phases (1928, 1932/33, 1935/36) are taken to show how the NSDStB established itself at TH Stuttgart. The central question is how the existing student corporations reacted to the NSDStB's growing strength and its imposed restyling of student life from 1933 onwards.
