Karl Jaspers and Uni Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls) August 1933

In the Kirkbright autobiography, pg 150, we find this excerpt from a letter of Karl Jaspers:
Dear parents,

[...]Now a new university constitution has been drawn up according to the 'Führerprinzip'. The Rector is to be appointed by the Ministry; the Deans nominated by the Rector. No elections take place. As longs as the faculties remain intact, they are only to be given an advisory role - decisions are not voted upon. The earlier 'scholars' "republic" is at an end. After my experience of it, that suites me well enough, especially if I myself could become Rector, or another name that I trust just as much as myself! Excuse my high spirits![...]

At this date Heidegger is Rector of Freiburg.
In the the post-war years Jaspers repeatedly speaks of 1933 as an endpoint - but he does not give a month. This is August 28. Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg on April 21, 1933. The Reichstag Fire was February 27, 1933. Gleichschaltung can be dated to January 30, 1933.  By August 28, 1933 the SA or Sturmabteilung are roaming freely.
 
It is the contention of Steven Remy in The Heidelberg Myth: the Nazification and Denazification of a German University, that after 1945 Jaspers can be blamed for the ineffectiveness of denazification.  In Kirkbright's autobiography, it is none other than Robert Heiss who is reported as contacting Jaspers concerning Heidegger.
 
By 1949 Jaspers will already be writing in support of Heidegger's return to teaching - and writing in terms that flatly contradict Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt (who was not yet back in touch with Heidegger.)
 
Jaspers assertion in a letter to Arendt that Heidegger was not so much an anti-Semite as one who would stoop to anti-Semitic remarks when talking with an anti-Semite is an assertion concerning which I remain very sceptical given the tone of remarks elsewhere in Heidegger's writing - including his letters to Elfride.
 
In the their September 1953 correspondence, Jaspers in anxious that Arendt read his piece on Heidegger for the Schillp volume (it was suppressed in the first edition.)
 
It was not until June of 1937 that Jaspers was informed that his marriage to a Jew would require forced retirement - but that law dates to April 1933.  Jaspers application to the Ministry to protect his pension was supported by none other than Ernst Krieck.  Anyone wondering what Japsers is doing relying on Krieck would have to know that Jaspers has invested his small fortune in his library (after the war he will take this library over the border to Basel.)
 
What are we to make of Jaspers claim that Heidegger was silent about his dismissal because he had lost interest in him (letter to Arendt)?  Jaspers problem was in fact quite different: when Heidegger embraced the SA, Jaspers was still enamoured with his "Germans".  The extent to which Jaspers - who had relocated to a fine professorial villa by the university - still considered himself as rejecting "mediocrity" and "machinations" so typical of mere democracy without a guiding elite or aristos - has to be gleaned from his edits to critical texts for their re-edition. To my knowledge, we have only Jaspers word for his reaction to Heidegger's addresses at Freiburg and Heidelberg and only Jaspers word that he had come to fear Heidegger. What he did have to fear was the content of his letters in which he had compromised himself.
 
Jaspers the untainted is a myth which he permitted in the late 1940's given his ambition for a role in the new University. It became something he could not tolerate (he was writing on guilt) and he wisely withdrew to Basel.  The only hard line that can be drawn between the Jaspers of late 1933 and the Heidegger of late 1933 is that the latter had become enamoured with the SA.
 
That the "Spiessburger" were troubled by the SA would seem little concern to the Jaspers who despised Husserl as just one such - and who saw his alliance with Heidegger as built on this revolt. Both men, physical weaklings, never faced a test of force. Gertrud's brothers fled before any were befallen by a squad of SA Männer.
 
As late as March 1945, Jaspers is relying on his personal prestige to protect Gertrud. The intervention with the SS in Berlin is reported by Kirkbright as Paul Schmitthenner, a Nazi architect leater purged from his university without pension (Heidegger stooped much lower at about the same time - to try to avoid service to his Volk.)
 
Heidegger's speech at Heidelberg was June 30, 1933.  The Rector of Heideberg, Willy Andreas, passes without mention in Kirkbright's autobiography - astonishing given her quotation from Jaspers' letter of August 1933.

To my knowledge Steven Remy is the only author to have brought Jaspers into question. The myth of Jaspers is very much part of the ethos of 1950's Germany and the importance attached to his radio broadcasts and his "stature" as a philospher of Existentz.

Jaspers' letter to Arendt of Sept 1, 1949, cannot be reconciled with Jaspers' letter to Gerd Tellenbach, Rector of Freiburg, earlier in 1949 [quoted in Kirkbright, pp 372-3.]  Or did Jaspers imagine that one day Heidegger would give him his due - for Existenz, for van Gogh.

Kirkbright's book is sub-titled "Navigations in Truth" - but might better be labeled "Navigations in Murky Waters". Until historians have complete access to the papers of Jaspers and Heidegger, a good deal will remain murky.