The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4501
Theodor Nöldeke
1836 - 1930 (94 years)
Theodor Nöldeke was a German orientalist and scholar. His research interests ranged over Old Testament studies, Semitic languages and Arabic, Persian and Syriac literature. Nöldeke translated several important works of oriental literature and during his lifetime was considered an important orientalist. He wrote numerous studies and contributed articles to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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Fritz Hommel
1854 - 1936 (82 years)
Fritz Hommel was a German Orientalist. Biography Hommel was born on 31 July 1854 in Ansbach. He studied in Leipzig and was habilitated in 1877 in Munich, where in 1885, he became an extraordinary professor of Semitic languages. He became a full professor in 1892, and after his retirement in 1925, continued to give lectures at the University of Munich. He was the doctoral supervisor of Muhammad Iqbal, who wrote the thesis The Development of Metaphysics in Persia under his supervision.
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Gyula Mészáros
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Gyula Mészáros was a Hungarian ethnographer, Orientalist and Turkologist. Later in his career he became involved in a money counterfeiting scheme. Money counterfeiting In 1921, a group of Hungarian nationalists led by Mészáros set up a press in the town of Metzelsdorf outside Graz, Austria. The group managed to produce and put into circulation 60,000 500-Czechoslovak koruna banknotes, with the intent of damaging the Czechoslovak economy. Most of the forgers were arrested in July 1921, by that time the Czechoslovak government was forced to pull the entire sokol note series out of circulation, undermining the credibility of its currency reforms.
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Reynold A. Nicholson
1868 - 1945 (77 years)
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, FBA , or R. A. Nicholson, was an eminent English orientalist, scholar of both Islamic literature and Islamic mysticism and widely regarded as one of the greatest Rumi scholars and translators in the English language.
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Vasily Bartold
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold , who published in the West under his German baptism name, Wilhelm Barthold, was a Russian orientalist who specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples . Biography Barthold was born in St. Petersburg to a Russianized German family. His career spanned the last decades of the Russian Empire and the first years of the Soviet Union.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Paul de Lagarde
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Paul Anton de Lagarde was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest orientalists of the 19th century. Lagarde's strong support of anti-Semitism, vocal opposition to Christianity, Social Darwinism and anti-Slavism are viewed as having been among the most influential in supporting the ideology of Nazism.
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Gerrit van Poelje
1884 - 1976 (92 years)
Gerrit Abraham van Poelje was a Dutch civil servant, lawyer and Public Administration scholar. He is considered one of the most important founders of the science of Public Administration in The Netherlands.
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Ármin Vámbéry
1832 - 1913 (81 years)
Ármin Vámbéry , also known as Arminius Vámbéry, was a Hungarian Turkologist and traveller. Early life Vámbéry was born in Svätý Jur Austrian Empire , into a poor Jewish family. According to Ernst Pawel, a biographer of Theodor Herzl, as well as Tom Reiss, a biographer of Kurban Said, Vámbéry's original last name was Wamberger rather than Bamberger. He was raised Jewish, but later became an atheist. Vámbéry was 1 year old when his father died and the family moved to Dunajská Streda .
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Walter White
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
Walter Francis White was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.
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John Turner
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent." Turner was the first person to be ordered deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.
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Huang Zongxi
1610 - 1695 (85 years)
Huang Zongxi , courtesy name Taichong , was a Chinese naturalist, political theorist, philosopher, and soldier during the latter part of the Ming dynasty into the early part of the Qing. Biography Huang was a native of Yuyao in Zhejiang province. He was the son of Huang Zunsu, an official of the Ming court and an adherent of the Donglin Movement who died in prison after opposing the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian.
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Finlay Crisp
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Leslie Finlay Crisp was an Australian academic and political scientist. The son of Leslie Walter Crisp , and Ruby Elizabeth Crisp , née Duff, Leslie Finlay Crisp was born in Sandringham, Victoria on 19 January 1917. He married Helen Craven Wighton , whom he had met at university in Adelaide, on 22 June 1940 in Oxford, U.K. He suffered a heart attack on 19 December 1984, and died, in Canberra, on 21 December 1984.
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Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú was an Argentine politician who is best remembered for his spell as Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship in the 1940s. His daughter is Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, an Argentine writer and journalist.
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Joseph Halévy
1827 - 1917 (90 years)
Joseph Halévy was an Ottoman born Jewish-French Orientalist and traveller. His most notable work was done in Yemen, which he crossed during 1869 to 1870 in search of Sabaean inscriptions, no European having traversed that land since AD 24; the result was a most valuable collection of 800 inscriptions.
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Henry Masauko Blasius Chipembere
1930 - 1974 (44 years)
Henry Masauko Blasius Chipembere was a Malawian nationalist politician who played a significant role in bringing independence from colonial rule to his native country, formerly known as Nyasaland. From an early age Chipembere was a strong believer in natural justice and, on his return in 1954 from university in South Africa, he joined his country's independence struggle as a nationalist strategist and spokesman. In 1957, considering that the independence movement needed a strong leader similar to Kwame Nkrumah, and considering himself too young for this task, he joined with other young natio...
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Alessandro Farnese
1520 - 1589 (69 years)
Alessandro Farnese , an Italian cardinal and diplomat and a great collector and patron of the arts, was the grandson of Pope Paul III , and the son of Pier Luigi Farnese, Duke of Parma, who was murdered in 1547. He should not be confused with his nephew, Alessandro Farnese, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, grandson of Emperor Charles V and great-grandson of Pope Paul III.
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Hazel Hunkins Hallinan
1890 - 1982 (92 years)
Hazel Hunkins Hallinan was an American women's rights activist, journalist, and suffragist. Early life and education Hunkins Hallinan was born on June 6, 1890, in Aspen, Colorado, and grew up in Billings, Montana. She was the only daughter of Lewis Hunkins, a jeweller, watchmaker, and civil war veteran, and an Englishwoman, Ann Whittingham.
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Yang Lien-sheng
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Yang Lien-sheng who often wrote under the name L.S. Yang, was a Chinese-American sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He was the first full-time historian of China at Harvard and a prolific scholar specializing in China's economic history.
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Masaru Aoki
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Masaru Aoki was a Japanese Sinologist. Works Aoki wrote an article named "Hu Shih and the Chinese Literary Revolution" which was published in Chinese Study in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s, Aoki's work was considered an important contribution to translating and studying Chinese literature.
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Julius Fürst
1805 - 1873 (68 years)
Julius Fürst , born Joseph Alsari, was a Jewish German orientalist and the son of noted maggid, teacher, and Hebrew grammarian Jacob Alsari. Fürst was a distinguished scholar of Semitic languages and literature. During his years as professor in the department of oriental languages and literature at the University of Leipzig , he wrote many works on literary history and linguistics.
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August Fischer
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
August Fischer was a German orientalist. From 1883 to 1889 he studied theology and Oriental philology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Halle, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on the source biographies of Ibn Ishaq, Biographien von Gewährsmännern des Ibn Ishaq. In 1890 he obtained his habilitation for Oriental philology at the University of Halle, and several years later became an associate professor in Berlin. From 1900 to 1930 he was a full professor of Oriental philology at the University of Leipzig, where in 1914/15 he served as dean to the faculty of philosophy. For several...
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Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller
1768 - 1835 (67 years)
Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller was a German Orientalist and Protestant theologian. Biography He was the eldest son of the rationalist theologian Johann Georg Rosenmüller. He became identified with the University of Leipzig, first as a student, in 1792 as a tutor, extraordinary professor of Arabic in 1796, and ordinary professor of Oriental languages from 1813 to the time of his death, 1835. He promoted the study of the Arabic language, brought within the reach of theologians the rapidly increasing knowledge of his day with reference to the conditions of the East, and endeavored to raise the...
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Hellmut Ritter
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Hellmut Ritter was a leading German Orientalist specializing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and an authority on Sufi ritual and mystical beliefs. Biography The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War I in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy.
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Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Otto John Maenchen-Helfen was an Austrian academic, sinologist, historian, author, and traveler. From 1927 to 1930, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and from 1930 to 1933 in Berlin. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, he returned to Austria, and after the Anschluss in 1938 he emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of several oft-cited books, including a history of the Huns.
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Francis Walsingham
1532 - 1590 (58 years)
Sir Francis Walsingham was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I of England from 20 December 1573 until his death and is popularly remembered as her "spymaster". Born to a well-connected family of gentry, Walsingham attended Cambridge University and travelled in continental Europe before embarking on a career in law at the age of twenty. A committed Protestant, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I of England he joined other expatriates in exile in Switzerland and northern Italy until Mary's death and the accession of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.
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Oscar Straus
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Oscar Solomon Straus was an American politician and diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909, making him the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary.
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Friedrich Hirth
1845 - 1927 (82 years)
Friedrich Hirth, Ph.D. was a German-American sinologist. Biography He was educated at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Greifswald . He was in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1870 to 1897. In 1902, Professor Hirth was appointed to the first Dean Lung Professorship of Chinese at Columbia University .
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Friedrich Schwally
1863 - 1919 (56 years)
Friedrich Zacharias Schwally was a German Orientalist with professorships at Strasbourg, Gießen and Königsberg. He held the degrees of PhD, Lic. Theol., Dr. Habil., and the Imperial honour of the Order of the Red Eagle, Class IV.
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Marius Canard
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Marius Canard FBA was a French Orientalist and historian. Biography He was born in a small village in the region of Morvan, where his father was a school teacher. Canard studied at the Collège Bonaparte in Autun and completed his studies in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lyon, where he learned the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages under the guidance of his coeval Gaston Wiet .
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Hermann Guthe
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Hermann Guthe was a German Semitic scholar. He was educated at Göttingen and Erlangen, and afterwards worked for several years as a private tutor. In 1884 he became a professor of Old Testament exegesis at Leipzig University.
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Theophilus Siegfried Bayer
1694 - 1738 (44 years)
Theophilus Siegfried Bayer , was a German classical scholar with specialization in Sinology. He was a Sinologist and professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at St Petersburg Academy of Sciences between 1726 and 1737.
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Johannes Rahder
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Johannes Rahder , Dutch Orientalist, professor of Japanese at the University of Leiden and Yale University . Biography Rahder was born in Lubuk Begalung, the Dutch East Indies, now a subdistrict of Padang, where his father was governor of the west coast of Sumatra. The fact that he requested as a birthday present a library when he was five years old suggests that he was a precocious child.
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Nikolay Veselovsky
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist. Born in Moscow, Veselovsky went to school in Vologda, and then studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890.
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John Wesley Hill
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
John Wesley Hill was an American Methodist minister, political activist, author, and the chancellor of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, from 1916 to 1936. Early life Hill was born on May 8, 1863, in Kalida, Ohio. Hill's father was John Wesley Hill . Hill's mother was Elizabeth Hughes Hill . Hill attended Ohio Northern University and then took classes at the Methodist Boston Theological Seminary.
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George A. Kennedy
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
George Alexander Kennedy , was an American sinologist known for his studies of classical Chinese and for his teaching of Chinese to students. Life and career George Kennedy was born on 17 May 1901 in Moganshan, Zhejiang Province, China, where his parents Alexander and Ada Kennedy were serving as Protestant missionaries. Although his family spoke English at home, Kennedy grew up speaking the local Chinese dialect, a form of Wu Chinese, and often said that Chinese was his native language. The Kennedy family left China in 1918 after George's father and brother Fred died less than a month apart. They returned to the United States, where Kennedy attended the College of Wooster.
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Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
1856 - 1924 (68 years)
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, was a British orientalist, Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford. Biography Conybeare was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, the third son of a barrister, John Charles Conybeare, and grandson of the geologist William Daniel Conybeare. He took an interest in the Order of Corporate Reunion, an Old Catholic organization, becoming a Bishop in it in 1894. Also in the 1890s he wrote a book on the Dreyfus case, as a Dreyfusard, and translated the Testament of Solomon and other early Christian texts. As well, he did influential work on Barlaam and Josaphat.
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Carl Robert Osten-Sacken
1828 - 1906 (78 years)
Carl Robert Osten-Sacken or Carl-Robert Romanovich, Baron von der Osten-Sacken, Baron Osten Sacken was a Russian diplomat and entomologist. He served as the Russian consul general in New York City during the American Civil War, living in the United States from 1856 to 1877. He worked on the taxonomy of flies in general and particularly of the family Tipulidae .
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Daniel Lerner
1917 - 1980 (63 years)
Daniel Lerner was an American scholar and writer known for his studies on modernization theory. Lerner's study of Balgat Turkey played a critical role in shaping American ideas about the use of mass media and US cultural products to promote economic and social development in post-colonial nations. In 1958, he wrote the seminal book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Scholars have argued that the research project that formed the basis of the book emerged from intelligence requirements in the US government, and was a result of the contract between the Office of Int...
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Thomas Hyde
1636 - 1703 (67 years)
Thomas Hyde was an English linguist, historian, librarian, classicist, and orientalist. His chief work was the 1700 [On the Ancient Religion of the Persians], the first attempt to use Arab and Persian sources to correct the errors of Greek and Roman historians in their descriptions of Zoroastrianism and the other beliefs of the ancient Persians.
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Allen Schick
Allen Schick is a governance fellow of the Brookings Institution and also a professor of political science at the Maryland School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park. He is known as an authority on budget theory and the federal budget process, in particular. His book, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 1982.
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Hans Morgenthau
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Hans Joachim Morgenthau was a German-American jurist and political scientist who was one of the major 20th-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau's works belong to the tradition of realism in international relations theory; he is usually considered among the most influential realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. His Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through five editions during his lifetime and was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S.
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George Catlin
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-American co-operation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries holds his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. He had two children, one of whom was the politician and academic Shirley Williams.
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Jacqui True
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jacqui True is a political scientist and expert in gender studies. She is a professor of international relations at Monash University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. She studies international relations, gender mainstreaming, violence against women and its connections to political economy, and the methodology of feminist social science.
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Louis Hartz
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
Louis Hartz was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard, where he taught from 1942 until 1974. Hartz’s teaching and various writings —books and articles— have had an important influence on American political theory and comparative history.
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Harold Walter Bailey
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Sir Harold Walter Bailey, , who published as H. W. Bailey, was an English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages. Life Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and raised from age 10 onwards on a farm in Nangeenan, Western Australia, without formal education. While growing up, he learned German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek from household books, and Russian from a neighbour. After he grew interested in the lettering on tea-chests from India, he acquired a book of Bible selections translated into languages with non-European scripts, including Tamil, Arabic, and Japanese.
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William Edward Soothill
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
William Edward Soothill, was a Methodist missionary to China who later became Professor of Chinese at University College, Oxford, and a leading British sinologist. Life Born in Halifax, Yorkshire in January 1861, Soothill matriculated at London University. He entered the ministry of the United Methodist Free Church arriving in China in 1882 and spent 29 years as a missionary in Wenzhou, China. Another leading missionary there until 1909 was Grace Stott who led the China Inland Mission there.
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Edward Buehrig
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Edward Henry Buehrig was an American political scientist who spent most of his career at the Indiana University Bloomington. He was known as a leading authority on the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson.
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Hashimoto Mantaro
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Hashimoto Mantarō was a Japanese sinologist and linguist who is best known for advocating research on language geography, linguistic typology, and how different areal features in the varieties of Chinese reflect contact with other language families.
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Erich Haenisch
1880 - 1966 (86 years)
Erich Haenisch was a German sinologist and first-degree cousin of politician Konrad Haenisch. He was the academic teacher of George Kennedy . During World War II., Haenisch was the only German sinologist who actively intervened with the Nazi government on behalf of his colleague Henri Maspero, who had been arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Buchenwald, since his son was a member of the resistance. Since Haenisch did not receive support by his German colleagues, he could not save Maspero, who died in Buchenwald on March 17, 1945.
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