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Paper short abstract:

This lecture examines Caucasus and "Turkestan" research from Vienna at the end of the Second World War. The focus is on voice recordings of defectors, who helped the Nazi intelligence service set up an "Eastern Turkic SS Corps" against the Soviet Union.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture deals with voice recordings (mainly songs and fairy tales) from the Phonogrammarchiv (PhA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) concerning Caucasus and "Turkestan" research at the end of World War II. The recorded individuals were mainly soldiers assigned to the troops of the German Wehrmacht, but also to the SS. This leads to the conclusion that they were not prisoners of war, but defectors of the Soviet army to German combat units.

The voice recordings are related of the Nazi intelligence service, which at the time cooperated closely with the Vienna Oriental Studies and the Ethnology Department. The recordings were supervised by the Viennese Turkologist Herbert Jansky (1898-1981). Jansky participated in the SS research group "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Turkestan" in the field of "folklore", which had been initiated by Kaltenbrunner in early 1944 as a camouflage facility for SS research on Central Asia.

At the end of 1944, an "Eastern Turkic SS Corps" (OTWV) was set up under the command of Wilhelm Hintersatz, an SS-Standartenführer who had converted to Islam. In order to stir up the fighting spirit against the Soviet Union, Jansky participated in the Panturkish Commission supported by the SS, which published the Panturkish, anti-Soviet magazine "Tyrk Birligi" (Turkish Unity) of the OTWV. OTWV's regional connection to Vienna has been largely ignored in research to date. This research project tries to close this desideratum with new archive material.