ABSTRACT
With increasing Nazi power and, finally, the beginning of the war, involvement in foreign impact discussions ceased completely, although it continued unabated in North America, leading, for example, to a research programme in the 1950s to search for impact craters on the Canadian shield. The isolation of German geologists from this development was not only caused by external politics and the war. It was also self-inflicted, due to a general chauvinistic attitude favouring 'German Geology' as being something special that had nothing to learn from outside. The roots of this notion of 'German Geology' go back to the early nineteenth century, with German Romanticism and culminated in Nazism. The stratigrapher and palaeontologist Curt Teichert left Germany in 1933 to accompany his Jewish wife. The palaeontologist Georg Walter Kühne was arrested in 1933 for 'communist activities'.
