page_title: Ernst Klink
section_title: Education and career
hierarchical_section_title: Ernst Klink / Education and career
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
context_page_description: Ernst Klink was a German military historian who specialised in Nazi Germany and World War II. He was a long-term employee at the Military History Research Office. As a contributor to the seminal work Germany and the Second World War from MGFA, Klink was the first to identify the independent planning by the German Army High Command for Operation Barbarossa.
  During Klink's career as a historian, he was a member of, and worked with the denialist Waffen-SS veteran lobby group HIAG. In recent assessments, some of Klink's work has been questioned due to his support for the ahistorical notions of the "clean Wehrmacht" and that the German attack on the Soviet Union had been "preventive".
context_section_description: Born in 1923, Ernst Klink grew up in Weimar and Nazi Germany; his mother was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of the National Socialist Women's League. In 1941, Klink joined the SS and was commissioned to the SS Division Leibstandarte, fighting in Joachim Peiper's regiment against the Soviet Union Red Army. Reaching the rank of SS-Unterscharführer (sergeant), he participated in the Third Battle of Kharkov. He was so severely wounded on the first day of the Battle of Kursk that he was permanently disabled from military service.
  After the war, Klink studied history, the German language, philosophy and the English language. He submitted his PhD thesis on the Åland Islands dispute 1917 to 1921 at the University of Tübingen in 1957. During the 1950s, Klink joined HIAG, a Waffen-SS veteran's association and lobby group, set up in West Germany in 1951 by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel. Klink joined the Military History Research Office (MGFA) at Freiburg in 1958. His tenure at MGFA was controversial, especially in recent assessments, due to his perceived sympathy to the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht".
caption: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Klink's mother, was head of the National Socialist Women's League.
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