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Nicholas Poppe | |
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| Born | Nikolay Nikolayevich Poppe (1897-08-08)8 August 1897 Yantai, Shandong, China |
| Died | 8 June 1991(1991-06-08) (aged 93) Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Petrograd University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguist |
| Institutions | University of Washington |
| Main interests | |
Nicholas Poppe (Russian:Николай Николаевич Поппе,romanized: Nikolay Nikolayevich Poppe; 8 August 1897 – 8 June 1991) was a Russian linguist and Nazi collaborator. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications.
Poppe was a leading specialist in theMongolic languages and the hypothetical (and controversial)Altaic language family to which the Mongolic,Turkic, andTungusic languages are supposed to belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion ofKorean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.
Poppe was born on 8 August [O.S. 27 July] 1897 inYantai, Shandong, China.[1][2] Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service.
Poppe's boyhood and youth were marked by wars: theBoxer Rebellion, theRusso-Japanese War, theFirst World War, and theRussian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Later, he experienced Stalin'sGreat Purge and theSecond World War.
Poppe graduated from the Mongolian Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Petrograd University in 1921 where his main mentor was B. Ya. Vladimirtsov. He began teaching at the Institute for Modern Oriental Languages before he had completed his studies in 1920 at the age of 23. Three years later, in 1923, he began teaching at theUniversity of Petrograd. In 1931, he was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies in theInstitute of Oriental Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1933, at the age of 36, he was elected as the youngest associate member of theSoviet Academy of Sciences.
DuringWorld War II, Poppe left Leningrad in 1941 while it was under threat of capture by the German military, and found work at a teaching institute inMikoyan-Shakhar.[3]: 149 However, he defected to the Nazis when they arrived there in August 1942. Poppe "actively collaborated in the creation of the quisling government in the Karachai minority region", which quickly rounded-up and killed the region's Jews.[4]: 118 Poppe himself says he acted as a translator and helped the German military identify mountain passes through which to advance further into the country.[2]: 163-164 After the war, Poppe condemned the actions of theSS in the Karachai region and claims he helped spare the Tats, a religiously Jewish but ethnically Iranian group of mountain people.[4]: 118
When the German troops retreated Poppe went with them, and in 1943 was given a job at the SSWannsee Institut "as one of its most important intelligence experts on the USSR." The Nazi collaborators at Wannsee "prepared reliable studies for the SS and theGerman high command describing the location of promising targets inside the Soviet Union, including concentrations of Jews and other minority groups." Historian Christopher Simpson writes that "the Wannsee collaborators did not sign orders for executions; they just told the killers where to find their prey."[4]: 119
After the war ended, Poppe lived undetected in theBritish occupation zone in Germany until summer 1946, when the Soviet Union demanded the British hand him over under the terms of theYalta protocol, describing Poppe as "an active agent of the Gestapo".[3]: 150 Poppe was interrogated by British intelligence officers as part of Operation Applepie, while Foreign Office officials claimed to the Soviets that they could not find him, despite conceding in private that they were "sheltering a traitor to the Soviet Union and a war criminal."[3]: 152 Concerned that Poppe would disclose British and American recruitment of Nazis to the Soviets,[3]: 153 the British asked the US military to "lose" Poppe in the United States:[4]: 120
His presence in the British Zone is a source of embarrassment to British Military Government, as the Soviet authorities are continually asking for his return as a war criminal. The British feel that Mr. Poppe is valuable as an intelligence source and have asked me if it is possible for U.S. intelligence authorities to take him off their hands and see that he is sent to the U.S. where he can be "lost."
— Colonel Peter P Rodes, Top Secret memo of 22 May 1947
Poppe was subsequently debriefed by US Army intelligence and assigned to the "historical study group" composed of Nazis and Nazi collaborators atCamp King. He was given a false name (Joseph Alexandris) and brought to the US in May 1949 by military transport plane, with his emigration overseen by senior State Department officialGeorge F. Kennan as part ofOperation Bloodstone. While in Washington DC, Poppe's work was supervised byOffice of Policy Coordination officerCarmel Offie.[4]: 120-121
After a brief period working at the State Department with Nazi diplomatGustav Hilger, Poppe joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at theUniversity of Washington,[4]: 121 where he taught until his retirement in 1968.
In the 1950s, Poppe aided SenatorJoseph McCarthy's campaign against ProfessorOwen Lattimore, whom McCarthy accused of being a Soviet agent. Poppe claimed during the 1952 hearings that Lattimore's work on Mongolia was "very superficial" and told Senate investigators that Lattimore had conspired with "important Communist Party bosses" during a trip to Moscow in the 1930s. However, the committee was not informed of Poppe's work for the SS, nor of Poppe's belief that Lattimore had attempted to prevent his immigration to the US prior to 1949.[4]: 121-122
In 1968, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by theUniversity of Bonn. He was elected a Foreign Member of theFinnish Academy of Sciences in 1968 and again in 1977.
In May 1989, a group of graduate students interested in Central and Inner Asian Studies initiated the first Nicholas Poppe Symposium. Poppe attended its first meeting in 1989 and the second in 1990. He was invited to the third meeting in May 1991 but was unable to attend on account of the state of his health.
Poppe died on 8 June 1991 inSeattle, Washington, at the age of 93.[1]
Poppe spoke fluent Mongolian and attained an unmatched familiarity withMongolian oral literature. His research focused on studies of theAltaic language family, especiallyKhalkha-Mongolian andBuryat-Mongolian, and on studies of the folklore of these and related languages. He wrote manuals and grammars of written and colloquial Khalkha-Mongolian and Buriat-Mongolian,Yakut, the Alar dialect, andBashkir.
His publications in the realm of Mongolian oral literature include eleven volumes of Mongolian epics, collections of Mongolian sayings, songs, and fairy tales, and Mongolian versions of works inSanskrit.
After 1949, Poppe wrote mostly in German and English, in addition to Russian. Regardless of the language he used, his writing was remarkable for its simplicity and clarity. As a result, his works are easily comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Poppe was a highly prolific scholar. A bibliography of his publications from 1924 to 1987 includes 284 books and articles and 205 book reviews. Between 1949 and 1968 — a period during which he was teaching 16 to 17 hours a week at the University of Washington, with only three months in the summer for uninterrupted research — he wrote 217 works, including over 40 books.
The secret of his high productivity, as he jokingly described it, was that while other people were enjoying "the beautiful surroundings of Seattle, climbing the mountains or sailing the waters", "he sits at his desk, wearing out one typewriter after the other like other people wear out their shoes".
This list of publications is based on "Nicholas Poppe Bibliography 1977–1982" by Arista Maria Cirtautas.[5]
