Life
Witte was born in Bratislava in Slovakia (then known as Pressburg) on 18 February 1907, the son of William G. J. Witte. His family travelled widely, and he was educated in Poland and Austria and then attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. After a year at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, he ended in the University of Breslau (then in Germany, now Wrocław in Poland) where he gained a doctorate in economics in 1930.
In 1931, he left mainland Europe to go to Aberdeen University in Scotland as an assistant lecturer in German. In 1936, he transferred to Edinburgh University in the same role for one year before returning to Aberdeen, with a PhD from Edinburgh. As a non-German German-speaker he survived the rigours of the Second World War and began to climb in position. He was appointed Professor of German in 1951. Most of his years in Aberdeen, he lived on Don Street close to the university.
The University of London awarded him an honorary doctorate (DLitt) in 1966. In 1978, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Thomas Malcolm Knox, Fraser Noble, Robert Cross and Anthony Elliot Ritchie.
He died on 22 September 1992. He is memorialised in the Snow Kirk in Old Aberdeen.
