Sigrid Hunke (26 April 1913,

Kiel Kiel () is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 246,243 (2021). Kiel lies approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the southeast of the Jutland ...

– 15 June 1999) was a German author. She is known for her work in the field of religious studies.

Biography

Sigrid Hunke was born in

, Germany on 26 April 1913, the daughter of the publisher (1879-1953) and Hildegard Lau (1879-1944). Her mother was the daughter of engineer Thies Peter Lau (1844-1933) and Walewska Berta Anna Artelt (1856-1943). She had two sisters, including Waltraud Hunke. Sigrid Hunke received her PhD in religious studies from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin in 1941. Her tutor was Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, who later became associated with the ideology of the ''

Neue Rechte Neue Rechte (''New Right'') is the designation for a right-wing political movement in Germany. It was founded as an opposition to the New Left generation of the 1960s. Its intellectually oriented proponents distance themselves from Old Right Naz ...

''. Hunke joined the "''Germanischer Wissenschaftseinsatz''", the German Sciences Service of the SS, the organization established by

Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...

to oversee the Germanization of Northern Europe. Her job was to research racial psychology. After 1957, she went to

Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to A ...

and stayed two years in

Tangier Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the capi ...

(Tanja), after which she returned to

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...

. Hunke was a pagan Unitarian. She was also known for her claims of Muslim influence over Western values. In her book, "''Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland''" (1960; "''Allah's sun over the Occident''") she asserts that "''the influence exerted by the Arabs on the West was the first step in freeing Europe from Christianity.''" The scholar Sylvain Gouguenheim includes a lengthy description of her work in an appendix to his book ''Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel'' under the heading “The Legacy of Sigrid Hunke”. He refers to her book on Islam and Europe, ''Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland'', in this way: “This text, which extols the superiority of Islam over Christianity, is the work of a Nazi intellectual. At its origin lies the political commitment of the author, who joined the NSDAP (the German National Socialist Party) on May 1, 1937 and was an active member of the Berlin section of the National Socialist Student Association (Nationalsozialistischer Studentenbund) from 1938 onwards.”See Sylvain Gouguenheim, ''Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne '', Éditions du Seuil, coll. L'univers historique, Paris, 2008, Appendix I, ()

Biography

References

Further reading