Walter Schlesinger (April 28, 1908, Glauchau – June 10, 1984, Weimar-Wolfshausen, near Marburg) was a German historian of medieval social and economic institutions, particularly in the context of German regional history ("Landesgeschichte"). Schlesinger is widely recognized as one of the most influential and prolific scholars of medieval social history in the post-war period. Education and career Schlesinger received his doctorate at the University of Leipzig under Rudolf Kötzschke in 1935 and completed his second post-graduate thesis (Habilitation) under the renowned medieval historian Hermann Heimpel in 1940. Following service in the Wehrmacht and after recovering from serious injuries received during the war, Schlesinger briefly taught at the University of Leipzig, but was made to resign in 1945 due to his membership of the Nazi Party. After working for several years as an independent scholar, he was rehabilitated and taught in several West German universities, including Berlin and Frankfurt (Main). In 1964, he was awarded the chair in medieval history at the University of Marburg, where he remained until his death in 1984. Military service Like many academics of his generation, the young Schlesinger was an ardent nationalist and became a member of the Nazi Party as early as 1929. Both his teachers, Kötzschke and Heimpel, held similar views. By the mid-1930s, however, Schlesinger found himself increasingly at odds with the Party's ideology. His decision to write his Habilitation in medieval history under Heimpel came after a bitter falling out with Kötzschke's successor as professor of Landesgeschichte, the ardent Nazi historian and racial theorist Adolf Helbok. Though disillusioned with the Nazi regime, Schlesinger nonetheless joined the Wehrmacht in 1940 and was assigned a staff job that allowed him to continue his research and writing. However, when a letter he had written to his wife containing his candid views of the government and the war was intercepted by censors, he was punished by being assigned to a high-risk battalion fighting anti-Nazi forces in the Balkans. Scholarship Schlesinger was an active and prolific scholar who contributed to many fields of medieval history. His Habilitationschrift was published as Die Entstehung der Landesherrschaft (The Origins of Regional Lordship) in 1941 and became one of the most influential works on German social history in the post-war period. Entstehung dealt with the rise of the regional nobility in central Germany following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Schlesinger challenged earlier understandings about the foundations of comital (count's) power