Who's Who in Nazi Germany

Robert S. Wistrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136413889
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Who's Who in Nazi Germany looks at the individuals who influenced every aspect of life in Nazi Germany. It covers a representative cross-section of German society from 1933-1945, and includes:
* Nazi Party leaders; SS, Wehrmacht and Gestapo personalities; civil service and diplomatic personnel
* industrialists, churchmen, intellectuals, artists, entertainers and sports personalities
* resistance leaders, political dissidents, critics and victims of the regime
* extensive biographical information on each figure extending into the post-war period
* analysis of their role and significance in Nazi Germany
* an accessible, easy to use A-Z layout
* a glossary and comprehensive bibliography.

A

Abetz, Otto (1903–58) German Ambassador to Vichy France, Otto Abetz was born on 26 May 1903 in Schwetzingen and matriculated in Karlsruhe, where he became an art teacher at a girls’ school. He was a supporter of the NSDAP from 1931 and took up relations with French ex-servicemen on its behalf. In January 1935 he entered the Foreign Service under von Ribbentrop (q.v.). His activities as its Paris representative led to his expulsion from France in 1939, but following the German occupation (after the fall of France), Abetz returned in June 1940 and in November received accreditation as German Ambassador – a post he held for four years. The embassy was theoretically responsible for all political questions in occupied and non-occupied France, and for advising the German police and military. Abetz's primary objective was to secure complete collaboration from the French, but as a Party activist – he held the rank of SS-Standartenführer — he also sought to seize the initiative as much as possible – suggesting, for example, that all emigre, stateless Jews should be expropriated and expelled to the Free Zone. Abetz regarded anti-semitism as an important lever in undermining the grip of the army and church in Vichy France and replacing it by a pro-German, anti-clerical, populist mass movement. In July 1949 he was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour by a Paris military tribunal, as a war criminal. Released in April 1954 he was burned to death in a motor ‘accident’ four years later on the Cologne—Ruhr autobahn when something went wrong with the steering wheel of his speeding car. His death may have been a revenge killing for his role in sending French Jews to the gas chambers.

Abs, Hermann (1901–94) Hermann Abs, once described by David Rockefeller as the ‘leading banker in the world’, was born in Bonn on 15 October 1901, the son of a lawyer. After studying law and a brief apprenticeship in a Cologne bank, Abs gained experience and connections in international banking abroad in Paris, London, New York and Amsterdam. In 1929 he was already the director of an Amsterdam bank and a year later he became a confidential clerk for the Berlin private banking house of Delbruck, Schickler and Co. By 1935 he was a partner in this firm, whose clients included Hitler and Rosenberg. In 1937 Abs was nominated to the Vorstand (managing board) of Germany's biggest bank, the Deutsche Bank. The bank's profits were greatly augmented by ‘Aryanization’ and the expropriation of banks in newly annexed territories. Thus, the Deutsche Bank absorbed the Jewish-owned Mendelsohn bank and bought another big Jewish company, Adler and Oppenheimer, at knock-down prices. After the annexation of Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, it took over Austria's giant Creditanstalt Wiener Bankverein as well as Czech banks and industries. Thus, by the end of 1938 Abs, who was in charge of the Deutsche Bank's Foreign Department, was already at one of the nerve centres of German power. Acknowledged as a rising star by Hjalmar Schacht (q.v.), President of the Reichsbank, his good relations with British and American bankers, his commercial and diplomatic skills led to his being entrusted with sensitive missions on behalf of the Third Reich. This also involved resisting efforts by Germany's creditors seeking repayment of the vast loans made to it after World War I. The urbane Abs, solid, discreet and powerful (‘a velvet glove around an iron fist’) was perfectly suited by his international standing to such diplomacy. A devout Catholic who was never a member of the Nazi Party (though he joined the DAF) his loyalty was never in doubt and his services were indispensable to the Nazi Party and Government in preparing the economic base for German hegemony in Europe. He helped bankroll the German industrial expansion following the Wehrmacht conquests. His clients reaped substantial profits from the economies of a dozen conquered European nations. Between 1939 and 1943 three-quarters of Europe's industrial resources were there for the taking and the Deutsche Bank's own wealth quadrupled as a result of its activities during the Third Reich. By 1942, Abs held 40 directorships, a quarter of which were with firms in lands occupied by German troops. Many of the companies financed by the Deutsche Bank used slave labour and some 6 million Europeans (men, women and children) were used – and often worked to their deaths – in German factories and mines. From 1940 Abs was on the board of directors of IG Farben, which had built a concentration camp adjacent to Auschwitz (called IG Auschwitz by the directors) to produce artificial rubber. Some 50,000 inmates died from starvation and exposure in building it – prisoners at this camp rarely survived more than three months since company policy was to supply a minimal amount of food. The Deutsche Bank was IG Farben's main banker and Abs was its representative on the giant company's supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat). Towards the end of the war Abs, along with some other leading German industrialists and bankers, began to plan ahead for after the defeat. He was asked by the British Military Government to help rebuild the German banking system after 1945, on the assumption that it was imperative to get the German economy moving again. Under American pressure Abs was stripped, however, of his 45 directorships and arrested as a suspected war criminal on 16 January 1946, but released after three months thanks to British intervention. A detailed report in 1947 on the Deutsche Bank, which suggested that there was enough evidence to prosecute Abs as a war criminal, was disregarded. By 1948 the banker was in effect managing the German economic recovery programme and had won the trust of the Allies. On 1 March 1948 Abs was appointed Deputy Head of the Reconstruction Loan Corporation and President of the Bank Deutsche Länder, which decided on the allocation of Marshall aid to German industry. Thus not only did Abs escape prosecution at Nuremberg (though the Yugoslavs sentenced him to death in his absence as a war criminal after 1945) but he would successfully rebuild the Deutsche Bank after World War II. Moreover, his prewar international connections proved invaluable in financial diplomacy on behalf of the Federal Republic. Already in 1951 Abs had negotiated the German foreign debt at the London conference, on behalf of the new German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (q.v.). He was seen as indispensable to re-establishing Germany's post-war creditworthiness. Adenauer wanted him as his first Foreign Minister but had to bow to a French veto. Abs would remain Adenauer's close friend and financial adviser. In 1957 Abs became Chairman of the Board of the Deutsche Bank (a post he held until 1967) and then Chairman of its Supervisory Board. At the time, the bank had a controlling interest in nearly one-third of West German industry and was the second largest bank in Europe. He was once again part of that small élite of international bankers, one who had made a brilliant career in the Third Reich and a no less spectacular contribution to the post-war Federal Republic. Praised as a patriot, a financial diplomat and patron of the arts (in 1992 he won the State prize for North Rhine Westphalia for his services to the arts), he died at the age of ninety-two, enjoying wealth, power and honours.

Adam, Wilhelm (1877–1949) Born in Anspach, Bavaria, on 15 September 1877, Wilhelm Adam served as an officer in the Bavarian army during World War I and subsequently acquired a reputation as one of the most able and efficient officers in the Reichswehr. Promoted to Major General in 1930, he was appointed three years later as Commander of the Munich Military Area. In 1935 he was given command of the newly created Armed Forces Academy in Berlin. Adam's earlier association with General von Schleicher (q.v.) and his lukewarm attitude to Hitler's plans – including the building of the West Wall fortifications – made his relations with the Führer somewhat tense, though he survived the crisis of early 1938 which followed the dismissal of two leading generals, von Blomberg (q.v.) and von Fritsch (q.v.). In November 1938, Wilhelm Adam was stripped of his western front command – another sign of Hitler's success in solidifying his control over the army. He died on 8 April 1949 in Garmisch.

Adenauer, Konrad (1876–1967) Born on 5 January 1876 into a Catholic family in Cologne, where he became Deputy Mayor in 1909 and served as Lord Mayor between 1917 and 1933, Adenauer was a member of the republican-democratic wing of the Centre Party during the Weimar period. A resolute opponent of Hitler and National Socialism, Adenauer was dismissed from his position in 1933 and arrested a year later by the Gestapo for continued resistance to the régime. A further arrest followed in 1944 when he was sent to Brauweiler prison. After the fall of the Third Reich, Adenauer co-founded the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and was elected in 1949 as Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, a position he maintained until his retirement, because of advanced age, in 1963. This was the longest tenure in office of any German statesman since Bismarck, coinciding with a long period of prosperity (the ‘economic miracle’) and political stability which transformed West Germany into an accepted member of the community of nations. At home and abroad, Adenauer's patriarchal style of leadership, his pro-western orientation and impeccable moral credentials strengthened confidence in the new Germany. His policy favoured close ties with France, European economic cooperation and reconciliation with Israel – in a declaration before the Bundestag on 27 September 1951 Adenauer had acknowledged German crimes against the Jews and the obligation to make ‘moral and material amends’. Nevertheless many judges, civil servants, businessmen and police officers with a compromised past continued to serve under his administration. Adenauer's greatest achievement during fourteen years of rule was to provide West Germans with the sense of stability and continuity that could reconcile them to democracy in the post-war period. He died at the age of ninety-one in his villa at Röndorf in April 1967.

Albers, Hans (1892–1960) The blond, daredevil adventurer and irresistible lover of the German screen, Hans Albers was born in Hamburg on 22 September 1892 and began his career as an apprentice in business before turning to acting in the circus and variety. On active service during World War I, Albers was wounded and after the war resumed his acting career in Berlin in operettas, later in plays – first in comic parts, then in character acting. He had outstanding success and started filming, being one of the first actors to appear in talking movies. After 1927 Albers began to establish himself as one of the most prominent film actors and producers in the German cinema. During the Third Reich he was one of the best-loved actors among the public, frequently embodying the spirit of virile heroism, idealism and self-sacrifice in films like Gustav Ucicky's Flüchtinge (1933), set in the Far East among a group of Germans trying to escape Bolshevik persecution, or in Carl Peters (1941), an idealized Nazi version of the anti-British German colonialist and patriot in East Africa. Albers also starred in Fritz Wend-hausen's adaptation of Peer Gynt (1934), in Gold (1937) and as the alcoholic engineer-hero in Wasser für Canitoga (1939) – a film set in the Canadian North, one of the better examples of the Nazi commercial cinema. One of Albers's most seductive performances was in the film spectacular, Münch-hausen (1943) – for which the screenplay was written by Erich Kastner. After World War II, Albers continued to make films, right up until his death in July 1960. They included Und über uns der Himmel (1947), Der Letzte Mann (1955), Das Herz von St Pauli (1957) and Kein Engel ist so rein (1960).

Amann, Max (1891–1957) Born in Munich on 24 November 1891, Amann attended business school and served an office apprenticeship in a Munich law firm before becoming business manager of the Nazi Party in 1921, and after 1922 Director of the Party publishing house, the Eher Verlag. He always enjoyed the full confidence of Hitler, who held him in high regard and unstintedly praised his role in developing the Völkische Beobachter and the Party's giant newspaper trust after 1933. Their relationship dated back to World War I when Amann had served as Hitler's company sergeant in a Bavarian infantry regiment. During the Beer-Hall putsch, Amann along with other Party activists had been arrested and briefly jailed. In 1924 he was elected as an NSDAP candidate to the Munich city council and in 1933 became a Nazi member of the Reichstag for the electoral district of Upper Bavaria/Swabia. The pint-sized Amann was the aggressive, rowdy type of Nazi, brutal, domineering and ruthless towards subordinates. This ‘Hercules of the Nazi publishing business’ was in the words of Kurt Lüdecke ‘a merciless man who sweated lesser Nazi workers for the least possible pay’. Amann was also personally greedy, exploiting his appointment in November 1933 as President of the Reich Association of German Newspaper Publishers and President of the Reich Press Chamber to pillage and plunder the non-Nazi newspaper chains. As chief actor in the Gleichschaltung of the press he was a master of the techniques of the legal freeze-out and enforced business deal, by means of which he established Party control of most of the press and gradually eliminated independent publishing.

Hitler's personal wealth owed a great deal to Amann's shrewd business sense. The jovial Bavarian was his personal banker and, apart from overseeing his royalties from Mein Kampf, ensured that the Führer received huge fees from his contributions to the Nazi press. But his political services which earned him his appointment as a Reichsleiter were no less appreciated. In 1942 Hitler described Amann as ‘the greatest news paper proprietor in the world Today the Zentral Verlag owns from 70 to 80 per cent of the German press.’ Amann enormously enriched himself through his monopoly over the world's largest press and publishing combine. His income increased from 108,000 to 3,800,000 marks between 1934 and 1944; besides his large salary from the Eher Verlag and 5 per cent of the net profits, he owned a substantial interest in the Müller printing company, and was able to pocket millions without paying income tax. As a Party man, Amann's talents were, however, very limited. He was no orator or debater and incapable of writing a single printable line by himself. All articles signed ‘Amann’, addresses, important letters or announcements were written for him by his right-hand man, Rolf Rienhardt (q.v.).

After the fall of the Third Reich, Amann sought to pose as a businessman who had no ideological commitment to Nazism. His de-Nazification trial showed, however, that of all the Nazi leaders he had made the greatest material gains from his association with the Party. On 8 September 1948 he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years’ imprisonment by a Munich court and two months later the Central de-Nazification Court imposed ten years’ labour camp on him as a ‘Major Offender’. He lost his property, his business holdings and pension rights, dying in poverty in Munich on 30 March 1957.

Axmann, Artur (born 1913) Reich Youth Leader, Artur Axmann was born on 18 February 1913 in Hagen, studied law and by 1928 had founded the first Hitler Youth group in Westphalia. In 1932 he was called into the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP to carry out a reorganization of Nazi youth cells and in 1933 became Chief of the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leadership. Axmann gained a place for the Hitler Youth in the direction of State vocational training and succeeded in raising the status of Hitler Youth agricultural work. He was on active service on the western front until May 1940. In August of the same year he succeeded Baldur von Schirach (q.v.) as Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. In 1941 he was severely wounded on the eastern front, losing an arm. During Hitler's last days, Axmann was among those present in the Führerbunker, making his escape at the end of April 1945. He was arrested in December 1945 when a Nazi underground was uncovered which he had been organizing. A Nuremberg de-Nazification court sentenced him in May 1949 to a prison sentence of three years and three months as a ‘Major Offender’. Axmann subsequently worked as a sales representative in Gelsenkirchen and Berlin. On 19 August 1958 a West Berlin de-Nazification court fined the former Hitler Youth Leader 35,000 marks (approximately £3,000), about half the value of his property in Berlin. The court found him guilty of indoctrinating German youth with National Socialism right until the end of the Third Reich, but concluded that he had been a Nazi from inner conviction rather than base motives. During his trial Axmann told the court that he had heard the shot with which Hitler committed suicide, and had later also seen the body of Martin Bormann (q.v.) lying on a bridge in Berlin. He was found not guilty of having committed any crimes during the Nazi era.

B

Bach-Zelewski, Erich (1899–1972) General of the Higher SS and Police Leader Corps, responsible for anti-partisan warfare on the eastern front during World War II, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was born on 1 March 1899 in Lauen-burg, Pomerania. A professional soldier from a Junker military family, handsome and typically East Prussian in manner, Bach-Zelewski served in World War I, then in the Freikorps and as a Reichswehr officer during the 1920s. In 1930 he joined the NSDAP and a year later he was made an SS-Untersturmführer. From 1932 until 1944 he was a member of the Reichstag, representing the Breslau electoral district. After 1934 he commanded SS and Gestapo units in East Prussia and Pomerania. In 1939 Bach-Zelewski was promoted to the position of SS General and two years later became a General of the Waffen – SS assigned to the Central Army Group on the Russian front until the end of 1942. In this period Bach-Zelewski was responsible for many atrocities in which he took a personal part. On 31 October 1941, after 35,000 persons had been executed in Riga, he proudly wrote : ‘There is not a Jew left in Estonia.’ He also participated actively in massacres of Jews at Minsk and Mogilev in White Russia.

In July 1943 he was appointed by Himmler (q.v.) as anti-partisan chief on the entire eastern front. Subsequently he claimed that in this role he had tried to protect Jews from the Einsatzgruppen. Bach-Zelewski was in command of the German units which suppressed the Warsaw rising in the summer of 1944, being awarded the Knight's Cross in connection with these operations. Highly regarded by Hitler for his brutality and improvisational skills – he was able to conjure armies out of very unpromising material – Bach-Zelewski ended the war as an army Commander. The fact that he testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, denouncing Himmler and his own fellow police chiefs, spared him extradition to Russia. In March 1951 he was condemned by a Munich de-Nazification court to ten years’ ‘special labour’, which in practice meant being confined to his own home in Franconia. The only one among the mass murderers who publicly denounced himself for his wartime actions, he was never prosecuted for his role in the anti-Jewish massacres. Instead, he was arrested and tried in 1961 for his participation in the Röhm Blood Purge and sentenced to four and a half years ; indicted again in 1962 for the murder of six communists in 1933, he was tried before a jury in Nuremberg and received the unusually harsh sentence of life imprisonment. Neither indictment mentioned his wartime role, thereby suggesting that only the murder of ethnic Germans was perceived as an unpardonable crime. He died in a prison hospital in Munich-Har-laching on 8 March 1972.

Backe, Herbert (1896–1947) Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture during the last year of the Nazi régime, Herbert Backe was born on 1 May 1896 in Batum, Russia, the son of German colonists. He attended a Russian secondary school between 1905 and 1914, and was interned during the period of the war, later resuming his studies at Göttingen University in Germany. Assistant lecturer at Hanover Technical High School (1923–4), Backe then turned to tenant farming. He joined the Nazi Party and became head of the farmers’ political organization in his district in 1931. From October 1933 he was State Secretary in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and a year later he launched the so-called Battle of Production (Erzeugungsschlacht) aimed at maximizing domestic output and cutting down on food imports. In 1936 he was made Food Commissioner for the Four Year Plan, responsible to Goering (q.v.) for the coordination of agrarian and industrial policy. Backe was regarded as an expert not only on agrarian but also on Russian affairs, and from May 1942 he was nominated as Darré’s (q.v.) successor, responsible in particular for organizing the foodstuffs sector for the war against Soviet Russia. He was promoted to Reich Minister and Reichsbauernführer (Reich Farmers’ Leader) at the end of 1943. On 1 April 1944, Backe, whose hard-headed pragmatism and efficiency was increasingly preferred to Darré’s ideological ‘blood and soil’ policies, was appointed Reich Food Minister, serving in Hitler's last cabinet. He died on 6 April 1947, committing suicide by hanging himself at Nuremberg prison.

Baeck, Leo (1873–1956) The central figure of German Jewry during the Nazi period, a great rabbinical scholar, teacher and community leader, Leo Baeck was born in Lissa, Prussia, on 23 May 1873. After obtaining his rabbinical qualification at the Berlin Institute in 1897, he served until 1907 as a rabbi in Oppeln (Upper Silesia) where he wrote his magnum opus, Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism) in 1905 – conceived as an answer to the theology of the Protestant Professor Adolf von Harnack. In 1912 when he was called to serve the most prominent Jewish congregation in Berlin, a position he was to hold for thirty years, Baeck was alread...