"[1] Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.
[2] A student of the national conservative historian Hans Rothfels at the University of Königsberg, Conze began his career during the Nazi period, working on Ostforschung, specifically studying German language islands and agrarian society in Eastern Europe.
His early writings evince völkisch and antisemitic ideas, including advocating for the purging of Jews from Eastern Europe by unspecified means.
In the postwar years, Conze moved away from his earlier völkisch positions and became a major mentor of new historians between the 1950s and 1970s;[5] he was one of the most significant advocates of social history.
[13] In Königsberg, Conze was a doctoral student of Hans Rothfels, where he wrote his dissertation on the German linguistic island of Hirschenhof in Livonia (now Irši, Lithuania).
[2] While he continued to work on his habilitation under Ipsen in Königsberg, in 1936 Conze accepted a scholarship of the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem [de] (PuSte), part of the Prussian State Archives in Berlin.
[4] In 1938 Conze blamed the lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination",[22] and referred to Vilnius as a "center of world Jewry", a "foreign body" which would have to be removed.
Sociological Conference in Bucharest in 1939, Conze argued that the Polish population had "degenerated" because Jews in the cities were preventing it from moving into trades there.
[28] From 1957 to his retirement in 1979 he was professor at the University of Heidelberg,[6] Conze continued to collaborate with many scholars he knew from Königsberg, most of whom were connected to his dissertation advisor Rothfels - this group was instrumental in the success of social history after the war,[30] including especially Theodor Schieder.
[31] While at Heidelberg, he developed a reputation for innovative, experimental scholarship and attracted many young scholars to work with him,[32] becoming one of the most important mentors of postwar German historians,[5] including of Reinhart Koselleck, whose habilitation he advised.
[5] In 1957, Conze published an important essay Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe für Forschung und Unterricht, in which he argued for a recent history focused on larger social processes rather than on the biographies of great individuals.
"[39] According to Reinhart Koselleck, Conze's work underwent a "paradigm shift" and he began to study social structures rather than ethnic ones.
[50] Conze's involvement with and ideological support of the aims of the Nazis in eastern Europe became a subject of great controversy in 1998 at a meeting of the Union of German Historians.
[52] What was very clear at least, were indications that both Schieder and Conze either supported or participated in the creation of the Nazi Generalplan Ost, which advocated the removal of large population groups in eastern Europe and their replacement with ethnic Germans.
[53] Schieder offered up expanding Lebensraum at the expense of ethnic Poles along with Poland's de-Judaization; Conze's input regarding German conquest was likewise replete with antisemitic commentary about how the "Führer's name" had reached "the most remote villages" in White Russia "due to his clear politics on the Jewish Question.
[43] Werner Lausecker argues that Conze continued to make use of anti-Semitic tropes in his work after the war and even to justify the oppression of Jews.