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Wilhelm Theodor August Hermann Volz (11 August 1870 †– 14 January 1958) was a German geographer and geologist.

Life

Volz was the son of a grammar school principal and studied geography, ethnology and geology in Leipzig, Berlin and Breslau from 1890. In Breslau he was an assistant at the Geological Institute and received his doctorate in 1895 (The coral fauna of the strata of St. Cassian in South Tyrol) and in 1899 his habilitation in geology (Contributions to the geological knowledge of North Sumatra).

In 1902 Volz married Anna Kauffmann, the daughter of a Jewish industrialist. He had five children with her (Peter, Joachim, Hildegard, Dietrich and Christine).

Between 1897 and 1906 he undertook three expeditions in Southeast Asia (Sumatra, Borneo, Java), including a multi-year expedition to North Sumatra on behalf of the Humboldt Foundation of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1904–1906. In 1904, he first described the extinct coral species Lonsdaleia Frechi VOLZ, 1904, which he named after Fritz Frech, which was later renamed Wentzelloides Frechi (VOLZ, 1904). In 1915, an extinct coral species from the Permian discovered in southern China was given Volz's name. It is now called Wentzellophyllum volzi (YABE & HAYASAKA, 1915).

He spent the First World War as a reserve officer on the Eastern Front (1914), as a company commander of a Landsturm battalion in eastern Upper Silesia to guard the border (1915–1916), and as head of the counterintelligence unit Dept. I a in Breslau (1916–1917).

He was professor of geography in Erlangen (from 1908), Breslau (from 1918) and Leipzig (from 1922).

In 1921 he was elected a member of the Geographical Association. In 1925 he became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. As Chair of Geography in Leipzig, Volz supervised up to 500 students and about 70 doctoral candidates. The Leipzig Geography Institute was thus the second largest in the German Reich.

Wilhelm Volz's academic work can be divided into three distinct periods. The first runs from 1894 to 1916, during which he devoted himself to the geology, geography and anthropology of Southeast Asia. In the second phase, from about 1919 to 1935, he worked on the regional geography in Upper Silesia with a special focus on borders and population, and on the other hand on the population and economic geography of Germany as a whole. The third period overlaps with the second. It spans from about 1922 until his death. His research focused on theoretical geography and physical anthropology.

Between 1926 and 1931 he was the managing director of the Foundation for German Folk and Cultural Soil Research in Leipzig.

He was a member of the DNVP from 1923 to 1928.

In November 1933, he signed the German professors' pledge of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

After the end of the Second World War, Oberschlesien, edited by him and Karl Schmeißer, among others, and the Geneva Arbitration Award : Institute for Eastern Europe in Breslau (Berlin 1925) were placed on the list of literature to be discarded in the Soviet occupation zone.

Volz held the title of Privy Councillor.

He was buried in the cemetery of Lissen.