Friedrich Meinecke (October 20, 1862 – February 6, 1954) was a German historian with national liberal and antisemitic views who supported the Nazi invasion of Poland.

As a nationalist historian, Meinecke had little regard for the wishes of peoples in Eastern Europe,[4] and he went as far as writing about "raw bestiality of the south Slavs",[5] while favoring German expansionism into the East.

Starting with Die Idee der Staatsräson (1924), much of his work concerns the conflict between Kratos (power) and Ethos (morality) and how to achieve a balance between them.

[12] In of Meinecke's best-known books, Die Deutsche Katastrophe ('The German Catastrophe') of 1946, he attempted to reconcile his lifelong belief in authoritarian state power with the events of 1933–45.

His explanation for the success of Nazism points to the legacy of Prussian militarism in Germany, the effects of rapid industrialisation and the weaknesses of the middle classes, but Meinecke also asserts that Hitlerism benefited from a series of unfortunate accidents, which had no connection with the earlier developments in German history.

The German catastrophe represented two classic themes of antisemitism: resentment based on Jewish economic activities and their alleged "character".