Geopolitics on trial: politics and science in the wartime geopolitics of Gudmund Hatt

The history of Danish geographers during the Second World War is almost synonymous with that of Gudmund Hatt (1884-1960), the Professor of Human Geography at Copenhagen University. Hatt was a key figure in the development of Danish geography and assumed the role of a public intellectual, particularly through his geopolitical analyses as they unfolded in a staggering number of radio speeches, newspaper essays, books and articles during the late 1930s and early 1940s. But this industriousness, which accelerated during the first years of the Nazi-German occupation of Denmark (9 April 1940-5 May 1945), was also the direct reason for Hatt's hard downfall - academically as well as personally. For his wartime activities, Hatt was as the only Danish university professor tried by a post-war public servants' tribunal. It found that he had engaged in 'dishonourable national conduct' during the occupation and dismissed him from his professorship. Drawing on archives and published sources from the period, the paper focuses on Hatt's wartime activities and geopolitical analyses in the complicated political context of the occupation, and it pays particular attention to the conflict between 'science' and 'politics' as it crystallised in the post-war trial of Hatt.