Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in the context of "Herbert Marcuse"

Philosopher Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer or "fellow traveller." The teaching ban was lifted in 1951, and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953, but he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chairmanship.

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements, although they also contain statements where Heidegger appears extremely critical of racial antisemitism. After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars. Heidegger never apologized for anything and is known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens").

University of Upper Alsace (French: Université de Haute-Alsace, UHA) is a multidisciplinary teaching and research centre based in the two cities of Mulhouse and Colmar, France. Research and teaching at UHA concentrates mainly on science, technology, economics, management, arts and humanities. In 2017, UHA has more than 8000 students with about a hundred courses offered. The founding of UHA was driven by social and business players, among them was Jean-Baptiste Donnet.

The special geographical situation of UHA, which lies close to the Swiss and German borders, is favourable to the emergence of single courses leading to double or triple degrees that are recognized in the neighbouring countries. Together with Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, University of Basel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, as well as University of Strasbourg, the university of Upper Alsace is a member of the EUCOR, which is a trinational cross-border alliance of five universities on the Upper Rhine in the border region between Germany, France and Switzerland.