Karl Alexander von Müller

Karl Alexander von Müller (20 December 1882 – 13 December 1964) was a German historian. His immediate disciples were Nazi politicians and academics such as Baldur von Schirach, Rudolf Heß, Hermann Göring, Walter Frank, Wilhelm Grau, Friedrich Wilhelm Euler, Clemens August Hoberg, Hermann Kellenbenz, Karl Richard Ganzer, Ernst Hanfstaengl and Klaus Schickert. However, due to his political openness, other non-Nazi historians such as Karl Bosl, Alois Hundhammer, Heinz Gollwitzer and even Wolfgang Hallgarten also studied under Müller. He had also taught the medievalist Edward Rand and the Portuguese ethnologist Jorge Dias.

Life

Müller was born in Munich, the son of the Bavarian culture minister Ludwig August von Müller. He studied law and history at the Wilhelmsgymnasium München in 1901 and from 1903 to 1904 studied for two terms at Oriel College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship as part of its first cohort of German students. In 1908 he gained his PhD under Sigmund von Riezler at the University of Munich (LMU Munich), with a thesis entitled Bavaria in the year 1866 and the appointment of Prince Hohenlohe.

In the summer of 1919 Müller together with Gottfried Feder gave lectures on political education at the LMU that were funded by the army with a view to countering the revolutionary socialist mobilisation. During one course, he identified Adolf Hitler's "rhetorical talent". As a result of this recommendation, Hitler was selected as a political officer in the team of instructors that were sent to lecture at a German Army camp near Augsburg.