[4][a] Although they were largely ignored or denied in the post-war period, Kuhn's close connections to National Socialism before and during World War II have come under increased scholarly scrutiny since the publication of Michael Burleigh's Germany Turns Eastward (1988).
[6] As a boy, Kuhn distributed flowers to soldiers guarding against Polish youths who were celebrating the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which Michael Burleigh argues shows an early consciousness for national issues.
[7] Kuhn began to study German settlement in Eastern Europe while he was a student, including undertaking several trips to Poland and Ukraine and making several publications.
[13] Kuhn viewed himself and his colleagues as "bearers of civilization" and his goal as "to transform the instinctive feeling of superiority and pride towards the surrounding peoples (…) into a true national consciousness".
[14] Kuhn also secretly worked for the organization Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland to verify the population numbers on the German minority in Poland given by the Polish government.
[15] Kuhn, writing under the pseudonym Andreas Mückler, claimed in a publication of the Viennese Institut für Statistik der Minderheitsvölker that the Polish census of 1921 had omitted half of Poland's German population.
[18] He received this job through the help of Otto Ulitz, leader of the German minority in Upper Silesia,[17] and Eduard Pant, a German-Polish politician and member of the Sejm.
[20] Beginning in 1934, Kuhn's work was supported monetarily by Nord- und Ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [de] (NOFG), a Nazi research organisation.
[35] The memorandum also called for the "removal of Jewry" and of elites, and the "reduction" (Minderung) of the total population, in order that the territory could be settled as Lebensraum by the state.
[35] In the winter of 1940, Kuhn served as an advisor to the Immigration Headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst in Litzmannstadt (Łódź) for German settlers being resettled out of the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland and the General Government.
[30] Kuhn briefly considered emigrating to Chicago in the United States due to financial troubles before Hermann Aubin arranged for him to take a temporary teaching position at the University of Hamburg that same year.
[3][26] Kuhn's pre-war work came under critical fire, especially from the folklorist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, who accused him of ethnocentrism and of deliberately polarizing the differences between Germans and Poles.
[3] Norbert Angermann identifies him as "the most significant historian of the German Ostsieldung" ("bedeutendster Historiker der deutschen Ostsiedlung") in the period before his death in 1983.
[3] Kuhn's connections to National Socialism before and during World War II would not become a topic of discussion until 1988, when Michael Burleigh published Germany Turns Eastward (1988).
[49] Matthias Weber, Hans Hennig Hahn, and Kurt Dröge write that Kuhn's work on language islands as particularly apt to support concepts of imperialistic aggression.
[51] Kuhn's focus on language islands had mostly been replaced by inter-ethnic studies by 1970, largely through the work of folklorist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann and historian Walter Schlesinger.
[53] Although works such as Kuhn's continue to provide the fullest accounts of German minority populations in areas such as Volhynia, Heinke Kalinke writes that their use today "requires especially careful source criticism and contextualization in academic history" ("bedarf [...] besonders sorgfältiger Quellenkritik und wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Kontextualisierung").
[4] As a specific example, Weczerka notes that one of Kuhn's maps in the Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung (1958, edited by Wilfried Krallert) depicted the Masurians, Kashubians, Sorbs, and Upper Silesians as "groups that according to language and feeling of belonging have become German" (Nach Sprache und Zugehörigkeitsgefühl deutsch gewordene Gruppen).
[55] Holocaust scholars Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt refer to Kuhn as representative of "first-rate German historians".
[d] Andrew Demshuk writes: "As professor for Siedlungsgeschichte (history of settlement) at the University of Hamburg, [Kuhn] dedicated his work [Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung] to all who remained "faithful" (now to Heimat rather than Hitler) and wrote tales of German suffering through the ages under Slavic oppression.