BRETHOLZ, BERTHOLD

BRETHOLZ, BERTHOLD (1862–1936), Moravian historian. He was baptized when young. Bretholz collaborated in the publication of Monumenta Germaniae Historica (1886–92). In 1892 he was appointed official historian of Moravia, then director of the Bruenn (Brno) municipal archives and the provincial archives (1900). Bretholz published numerous works on Bohemian and Moravian history. The "Bretholz-theory," expounded mainly in his four-volume work Geschichte Boehmens und Maehrens (1921–24), ascribes the descent of the Bohemian and Moravian Germans to Teutonic tribes who had settled the area before the advent of the Czechs and not to medieval colonists. The theory became an important argument of extremist German nationalists in Czechoslovakia. In the last years of his life Bretholz turned to Jewish history; he wrote Geschichte der Juden in Maehren im Mittelalter (1934), edited Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Maehren (1935), and contributed to the yearbooks of the Jewish historical society in Czechoslovakia. His Geschichte der Stadt Bruenn (1911) contains a chapter on the Jewish community in Bruenn (pp. 363–81). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: NDB, 2 (1955), 601–2; B. Bretholz, Bruenn (Ger., 1938), 317–21 (full bibliography, 322–6); Steinherz, in: JGGJČ, 9 (1938), 463.