Schmidt was born on 15 July 1890 in Elberfeld, in the Wuppertal region of western Germany, the son of a merchant. He began studying mathematics and the natural sciences at the University of Bonn in 1909, moved briefly to Freiburg and Munich, and returned to Bonn, where it is highly likely that he first met Alexander Koenig, the wealthy ornithologist who had laid the foundation stone for his privately financed natural history museum in 1912. Schmidt passed his doctoral examination in June 1914 and received his doctorate in October 1915, in absentia, while serving on the Eastern Front during the First World War. His dissertation examined the comparative morphology of abdominal segments in male dragonflies, a subject that would define his entire career. By the end of his life, Schmidt had assembled a private collection of approximately 30,000 dragonfly specimens representing 1,200 species, which he estimated to be one of the largest such collections in Europe, and he had described four new genera and 109 species or subspecies new to science.

After military service, Schmidt qualified as a teacher in botany, zoology, chemistry, mineralogy, and physics but never entered regular school service. Instead, he worked at a plant pathology station in Geisenheim, then as a consultant for a silk production cooperative in Berlin, before joining the German Entomological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem in June 1927 as its sole assistant. That institute belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. His employment there ended abruptly in January 1934 when he was dismissed without notice for calling his boss Walther Horn’s assertion that he had got on well with everyone a lie. Schmidt consulted a lawyer and wrote to colleagues asking for material to prove that Horn was a difficult person. It is not known whether the matter went to court. Nevertheless, Schmidt continued his research on a freelance basis, supported by the Emergency Association of German Science, the forerunner of the German Research Foundation, with six of his applications approved between 1934 and 1944.

On 1 December 1934, Schmidt was appointed research assistant and head of the Entomology Department at the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Institute and Museum in Bonn, which had opened just six months earlier. He was the only full-time entomologist at the museum at that time. Letters from 1935 suggest a productive period: he requested material from colleagues in Vienna, arranged the insect displays in the exhibition, which had opened in May 1934 but was still incomplete almost a year later, and published five papers in 1936, more than in any single year since 1926. However, discrepancies arose with the museum management because Schmidt maintained a private collection at home, a practice that was also criticised by Horn in two lengthy letters to Alexander Koenig. Private interests conflicted with those of the institute. Koenig brought the news of the personnel problems to Ernst Telschow, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and expressed regret at having failed to ask Horn about Schmidt’s character before hiring him. Koenig had already reprimanded Schmidt in October 1935 for inconsistencies, but the disciplinary measure had not had the desired effect.

The situation escalated when it emerged that Schmidt had approximately four boxes of the museum’s odonate specimens at his home without a loan agreement. Among the missing material was a specimen of the legendary giant dragonfly Chlorogomphus papilio from the interior of China, an animal so fabulous that Schmidt had been able to name it at first sight. When Schmidt left the institute, only one of the two specimens received remained in the museum’s collection. Koenig’s deputy, Adolf von Jordans, established that under the Reich Employees’ Collective Agreement, dismissal was only possible with six weeks’ notice at the end of the quarter. Schmidt was dismissed from service on 2 April 1936 and took legal action at the labour court. The parties then amicably agreed that he would leave the institute’s services on 1 July 1936, with salary payments up to that date and a simultaneous leave of absence, and undertook not to cause him any difficulties in his future career. Schmidt found a non-scientific job at the tax office of the Bonn city administration to support himself.

But the story did not end there. Alexander Koenig, a staunch monarchist and devout Christian who had always maintained an extremely distant relationship with National Socialism, had also dismissed his senior taxidermist Berthold Korf without notice. Korf, who had worked at the museum since 1929, was a committed Nazi, a member of the NSDAP and its Sturmabteilung since 1931, and had made derogatory and insulting remarks about employees of other faiths. When he refused to retract these insults at Koenig’s request, he was dismissed. Local Nazi leaders tried to persuade Koenig to reinstate both Korf and Schmidt, but he insisted on his decision, and a corresponding case before the Bonn Labour Court was unsuccessful. Even a letter of mediation from Hermann Göring, the second highest-ranking Nazi under Adolf Hitler, was answered by Koenig in the negative. This showed that the political standardisation of social life, the so-called Gleichschaltung, had not yet taken place in all areas at that time.

In a joint will dated 27 March 1938, Alexander and Margarethe Koenig appointed the Alexander Koenig Foundation, to be established, as their heir, limited to what remained after all bequests had been paid out. The assets consisted primarily of the expected proceeds from the sale of their Blücherhof estate in Mecklenburg, valued at three to four million Reichsmarks. But Koenig made a specific and binding provision: the foundation would be dissolved if the employees he had dismissed, Korf and Schmidt, were ever re-employed by the museum. Both, he wrote, had seriously damaged social harmony and industrial peace, making fruitful cooperation impossible in the future. Should either of them find employment at the museum again, the entire assets intended for the foundation would be divided equally among the children of his brothers. This clause caused quite a stir among NS party officials in Bonn, particularly because Koenig had also stipulated that his long-time assistant Adolf von Jordans should succeed him as director of the museum, a decision that was probably a thorn in the side of those in power, as the museum had previously refused to join the National Socialist reorganisation of exhibitions and research in line with Nazi ideology.

Following Margarethe Koenig’s death on 14 May 1943, the executors of her will applied for approval of the foundation to the Reich Ministry of Science and Education in Berlin. What followed, reproduced in detail for the first time from correspondence in the Bonn City Archives, was a concerted political campaign to block the foundation. Cuno Eichler, the NSDAP district leader and the highest-ranking Nazi official in Bonn, wrote to mayor Ludwig Rickert in September 1943 that the restrictions imposed on party members Korf and Schmidt were nothing short of unbelievable, that such a foundation with these convoluted clauses was unworthy of the Greater German Reich, and that he recommended rejecting the entire foundation. Karl Chudoba, rector of the University of Bonn, criticised the provisions restricting the new director’s freedom of decision-making as decidedly unacceptable and argued that Schmidt’s academic qualifications alone demanded his return to the museum. Mayor Rickert, in his assessment to the Cologne district president, described Korf as one of the best taxidermists in the world, instrumental in creating the museum’s wonderful dioramas, and concluded that the mere fact that a leading party member who had belonged to the party since 1930 was still being persecuted with Old Testament hatred should be enough to reject the foundation. He also described Schmidt as one of the most exceptional scientists, who continued to carry out research assignments on behalf of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society after his dismissal.

The correspondence dragged on for almost a year. The Bonn NS party officials involved unanimously concluded that it was unreasonable for the government to approve a foundation whose board of directors would consist almost exclusively of politically unreliable individuals. The will should also be rejected on moral grounds, they argued, as the founder’s restrictive provisions relating to party members violated not only the honour of those concerned but also that of the entire party. On 15 June 1944, the district president was advised to apply to the Reich Ministry to reject the foundation. On 4 August 1944, Eichler informed Rickert of the Ministry’s as yet unofficial decision, quoting Ministerial Director Rudolf Mentzel, probably the most influential science politician of the Third Reich, who confirmed that the Ministry had not yet made an official decision but that it would be negative, and that the Ministry was thus in agreement with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and, with satisfaction, also with the mayor of the City of Bonn. Ultimately, the decision was probably postponed due to the war. Blücherhof was expropriated by Russian troops in August 1945, and the foundation was not established until 4 April 1946, following the collapse of the Nazi regime.

Schmidt’s own involvement with National Socialism, documented in his denazification file, adds a further layer of complexity. He had been a member of the Sturmabteilung from November 1933 to March 1935, joined the NSDAP in December 1937, and belonged to the German Labour Front and the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organisation. From December 1940 to March 1941 and again from June 1944 to February 1945, he served as a block leader, and from around October 1944 to February 1945 as a deputy cell leader in Bonn. These so-called authority figures of the lowest hierarchical levels within the NSDAP were responsible for the administration of 40 to 60 households, and their diverse tasks included spying on and denouncing their neighbours. It is not known whether Schmidt was responsible for denouncing Eva Merkelbach, a Jewish woman from his street who was arrested in June 1944 and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died shortly afterwards. In his letters, Schmidt wished his Viennese colleague a speedy German victory and expressed enthusiasm that the anti-aircraft service had given him the opportunity to get to know the night fighters better. He bequeathed his extensive private collection of dragonflies to his Japanese colleague Syoziro Asahina, and it is now housed at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. The Alexander Koenig Foundation, established in accordance with the charitable intentions of its founders, continues to support the Museum Koenig in its diverse scientific endeavours to this day, a quiet testament to the endurance of scientific vision over political persecution.

Subject of Research: The entomologist Erich Schmidt (1890–1969), his premature dismissal from the Museum Koenig Bonn, and the Nazi plot against the Alexander Koenig Foundation

Article Title: The entomologist Erich Schmidt (1890–1969), his premature dismissal from the Museum Koenig Bonn, and the Nazi plot against the Alexander Koenig Foundation

Article References: Koch, A. (2026). The entomologist Erich Schmidt (1890–1969), his premature dismissal from the Museum Koenig Bonn, and the Nazi plot against the Alexander Koenig Foundation. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 3, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.3.180615

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.3.180615

Keywords: Museum Koenig Bonn, Erich Schmidt, Alexander Koenig Foundation, National Socialism, History of Science, Natural History Collections, Entomology, Odonata, Nazi Germany, Archival Research, entomologist, Erich