Nikolaus Creutzburg

Nikolaus Creutzburg (Fünfhöfen, Kreis Strelno, 10 April 1893 – Freiburg im Breisgau 1 October 1978) was a German geographer.

Early life
Creutzburg was born in Posen as the son of a landowner and grew up in Thuringia from 1902 onwards. There he attended the humanistic gymnasium in Jena, where he graduated in 1912. From 1912 until the outbreak of the World War I Creutzburg studied geography at the University of Munich, mainly under Erich Dagobert von Drygalski; he was enrolled at the University of Vienna for one semester. Other teachers in Munich were the Alpine geologist August Rothpletz and the paleontologist Ferdinand Broili. In 1920 Creutzburg received his doctorate with the thesis Die Formen der Eiszeit im Ankogelgebiet. From 1922 he was an assistant to Ludwig Mecking (1879–1952) at the University of Münster, where he habilitated in 1924 with a ground-breaking thesis on Standortfragen der Industrie des Thüringer Waldes. In this work, he explored new possibilities for the cartographic representation of the facts and development of industrial location issues.

Career
At first Creutzburg turned to two main areas of work, which became his main research areas: cartography and the geomorphological exploration of the island Crete. His interest in this island was stimulated by Alfred Philippson, the pioneer of geological and geographical research in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1925 and 1926 Creutzburg undertook research trips to Crete, which were followed by two publications on The Landschaften der Insel Kreta (1927) und Kreta, Leben und Landschaft (1928).

After Creutzburg became professor by special appointment at the Gdańsk University of Technology in 1928, his research focus shifted, in that he devoted himself primarily to tasks and obligations of a regional and folklore nature. His publications of this time mainly concern the city of Danzig, Poland and the German folklore in the East. During his time in Danzig, Creutzburg also worked as a Gau clerk for geography in the National Socialist Teachers' Association (NSLB). In November 1933 he signed the Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler. In 1934, Creutzburg was appointed to a commission that primarily dealt with research of Eastern countries. Together with Carl Troll and Erich Obst, he became a member of the "German Political and Economic Studies" committee at the German Academy in Munich and in 1936 a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle.

From 1938 till the end of World War II Creutzburg was editor-in-chief of Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen.

From 1939 to 1945 Creutzburg was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Most recently working in army surveying, he was taken prisoner of war after the end of the war. Creutzburg was a contributor to the NS journal Auslandsdeutsche Volksforschung by the National Socialist Hans Joachim Beyer. Since he had been a NSDAP candidate and Wehrmacht officer before 1945, he was refused a return to the chair in Dresden and he switched to the University of Göttingen, where he taught geography from 1946 at the Institute of Hans Mortensen (1894–1964).

In 1948, Creutzburg received a professorship at the University of Freiburg, first as deputy chair and from 1951 as full professor and director of the Geographical Institute, where he retired in 1961.

In addition to his research on climatological topics, Creutzburg turned back to the island of Crete from 1956 onwards, where he stayed twice a year. A geological map of Crete on a scale of 1:200,000 was published in 1977 on the basis of the terrain surveys by Creutzburg and his colleagues. In 1958 a study on the problems of mountain structure and morphogenesis on the island of Crete was published. In addition, Creutzburg dealt with paleontological and settlement and economic geographical problems of this Mediterranean island.

Literature

 * Altpreußische Biographie. Band 4,2, p. 1194
 * Wolfgang Weischet: Zum Tode von Nikolaus Creutzburg. In: Geographische Zeitschrift 67, 1979, p. 105–109.
 * Wolfgang Weischet: Nikolaus Creutzburg zum Gedenken. In: Freiburger Universitätsblätter Jg. 17, H. 62, Dez. 1978, p. 6–8.
 * Franz Kirchheimer: Nikolaus Creutzburg. In: Jahrbuch der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften für das Jahr 1979, Heidelberg 1980, p. 69–70.
 * Rudolf Ullmann: Creutzburg, Nikolaus, Geograph. In: Badische Biographien. Neue Folge Bd. 3, Stuttgart 1990, p. 57–58.
 * Mechtild Rössler: Wissenschaft und Lebensraum. Geographische Ostforschung im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin/Hamburg 1990. Bild: Archiv der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.