Hermann Kügler (chemist)

Hermann Rudolf Kügler (born October 1, 1900 in Dresden - Leuben ; † January 19, 1993 in Vienna ) was a German-Austrian chemist and economist . He was a youth leader in the Bundische youth movement and temporarily worked in the Ribbentrop office .

Life

Education

Kügler attended the secondary school in Glauchau , where his father was director of the municipal power station. After graduating from high school in 1918, he was drafted into army service in Zittau , but no longer served in the war. He studied chemistry , physics , mineralogy and philosophy in Leipzig and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1923 on the knowledge of the reduction products of tolylhydrazones . Later he studied with the help of foreign scholarships also economics at the University of Caen , where he obtained a "Diplome d'Etudes Supdrieures res d'Economie Politique" in 1929 and in 1929/30 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . In the fall of 1930 he took over the international department at the “Central Economic Office for University Studies and Academic Careers” at the Institute for World Economy in Kiel .

The idea of ​​the boys' union

In 1913 Kügler joined the Wandervogel Glauchau. From 1920 to 1921 he was Gauwart of the wandering bird in Gau Saxony I. He was one of the driving forces within the wandering bird federations who pursued the idea of ​​the all-boy federation. The Gau Sachsen had already become the first pure boys' district in the Wandervogel in October 1919 when the girls left. The federal representative assembly in Naumburg on October 23 and 24, 1920 now led to the separation. On March 30, 1921, Kügler was one of the founders of the Wandervogel Boys' Association, in which the Jungegaue of Saxony, Harz-Elbe and Baden joined forces. He also became the first leader of the new covenant. At the end of 1921, the Silesian Young Society under Hans Dehmel also joined the Bund.

Kugler is considered to be the one who coined the term church youth coined in reference to the term "young team" of Silesia.

“We do not enact the covenant from above. We offer the possibility of becoming a federal government. Not a development that confidently leaves it to time to make something of us, but a development that is carried by its will. This will can lead to the mixed covenant or the boys' union.
Our will leads to the boys' union.
The boys 'spirit is towards the union, the girls' attire is towards mating. But that wears down every covenant. A covenant cannot harbor germs that necessarily lead to its decline. "

- Hermann Kügler : About the Bund on July 27, 1920

In retrospect, Kügler described the post-war migratory bird as in bad shape in the 1970s. In Saxony the mixed groups predominated. “But the girls were humiliated, the boys were effeminate, girlish, many were walking around in dance smocks and long hair . Some groups threatened to split up into pairs. You couldn't rebuild a union with such groups. "

Cross-border activities and trips abroad

The Saxon Boys ' Union, headed by Kügler, became the core district of the Wandervogel Boys ' Association . Since the summer of 1922, the Gau Sachsen had officially called itself the Saxon Young Society in the Wandervogel Boys ' Association. In August 1923, the Wandervogel-Deutsche Jungenschaft was formed as an amalgamation of the Wandervogel-Jungebund, Schlesischer Wandervogel-Jungsbund, Altwandervogel and Wandervogel-Wehrbund deutscher Jugend. At the instigation of the federal leader Ernst Buske , this union was called Altwandervogel-Deutsche Jungenschaft since March 1924. Kügler made an active effort to join forces with other groups. In February 1922, he and Dehmel visited Martin Voelkel , the head of the New Scouts , and later Walther Matthey from Altwandervogel to organize an alliance meeting. A meeting organized by the New Pathfinders at the Wartburg on April 10, 1922, to which other associations such as the Jungnationale Bund , the Köngener Bund and the Ringgemeinschaft Deutscher Pfadfinder were invited, did not lead to an agreement.

Another joint project that Kügler and Dehmel played a key role in were trips abroad. The Saxon Boys' Association mainly made trips to Southeast Europe . Folk German colonies were specifically visited. These trips, which were all led by Kügler, had an undisguised political significance in that they were placed in the "service of the German people's thought ". The purpose of these trips was not least to preserve the “Germanness” through educational work and to promote the bridging function of ethnic Germans.

Before such "borderland trips", which took the Saxon youngsters mainly to Hungary and Yugoslavia in the areas of Swabian Turkey , Slavonia , Batschka , Syrmia , Dalmatia , Bosnia , Moravia and the Hungarian Ore Mountains , the participants were trained in regional studies, for example by Hugo Grothe at the University of Leipzig or the German Foreign Institute in Stuttgart . In 1925 members of the Saxon Youth Union founded the Grenzlandamt (Grenzlandamt) of the student body at Leipzig University to look after foreign students.

In Yugoslavia in particular, the trip groups tried to take a systematic inventory of ethnic German settlements. In 1927, the large group was split up in order to record the entire “Germanness” in Yugoslavia systematically, but conspiratorially, using questionnaires.

No less political was a trip to France by the Saxon Youth, which Kügler carried out in 1928 in order to broaden the image of Europe and Germany for those high school graduates and students who received “a one-sided view of the cultural primacy of the German people” through the trips to Southeastern Europe and deepen. At the same time, the requirements for studying abroad in France should be created for the six participants . The group was trained in Heidelberg by Ernst Robert Curtius and Hans von Eckhardt before they were placed in Caen via Paris for a month . In this way Kügler received a place for the academic year 1928/29 as the first German exchange student at the University of Caen.

In the meantime, the Saxon youth under Kügler in October 1926 joined the Association of Wandering Birds and Pathfinders , in which Kügler became Federal Official in January 1927, an office that he retained even after the association was renamed "German Freischar". When a land service he had planned at the Führer Day of the Saxon Young Society in May 1928 was canceled as a district enterprise, Kügler resigned from the state leadership in July 1928. In October 1931, Kügler was commissioned with the organization and management of an "Ostmarkenlanddienst" for 1932 within the Deutsche Freischar. When Hans Dehmel became federal leader of the German Freischar in February 1932, Kügler took over the office of federal boy leader. He headed the federal land service at the German eastern borders in East Prussia , Pomerania , Neumark and Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia , in which around 2,000 boys took part.

The aim of the rural service was to bring the young people closer to rural life and to sensitize them to the problems of agriculture and the "German East". The farmers on the eastern border of the German Empire should be helped with bringing in their harvest. Kügler understood the land service politically as "a national act in the deepest and truest sense", since the historical task of the German youth from 1932 lies in the German east. He saw this as “the first step on the way to the great German youth group”, which should also include other groups such as the Freischar Junge Nation .

During the National Socialism

In the Ribbentrop office

Alongside Dehmel, Ernst Bargel , Hans Raupach and Eberhard Wolff, Kügler was one of the leaders of the German Freischar who publicly declared their accession to the NSDAP on March 14, 1933 . In the declaration, the activities of the border and foreign trips to the German settlements in Southeast Europe were assigned to the goals of the National Socialist movement, and the election result of the Reichstag elections that had just been held was assessed to the effect that a government under National Socialist leadership “the time for the realization of the unified Young team of a tightly managed German people came ”.

When the Central Economic Office was dissolved in the summer of 1933, Kügler also lost his job. After a private trip abroad through Italy , through the mediation of Helmut Haubold , a former member of the Saxon Youth Union, he was offered the main office for border and foreign policy in the Reich leadership of the German student body . As part of this activity, Kügler traveled in 1933/34 to the International Congress of Academic Youth for the League of Nations , to an Italian University Olympiad in Milan and to the conference of the World Student Union in Cambridge . In doing so, he came into contact with Gustav Prince Biron von Curland , who was in charge of the foreign office of the National Socialist student union . Together they defended the "National Socialist Revolution" in a public discussion at the Royal Institute of International Affairs on March 20, 1934 in London.

It was also Prince Biron von Curland who recommended Kügler to Joachim von Ribbentrop . In June 1934, when Kügler was about to lead the first trip to Poland for a group of the Hitler Youth and the German student body, he was appointed to work in the Ribbentrop office in 1934. He justified his decision to accept the offer after the war by saying that he had followed a concept of the Bundische Jugend. Attempts have been made to influence decision-makers in the “Third Reich”. In Ribbentrop he believed he had found someone who had influence on Adolf Hitler in order to influence National Socialist foreign policy through him .

Kügler also made enemies in competing Nazi organizations. In 1935 he was first transferred to Hanover, where he took over the front fighter department that Ribbentrop had set up for the uniform management of World War II veterans. At the end of September 1935, Kügler was arrested by the Gestapo . The accusation of "allied activities" and homosexuality was raised against him . Presumably he fell victim to an intrigue by the NSDAP / AO , Ernst Wilhelm Bohles and Alfred Rosenbergs , which was supposed to hit Ribbentrop. Kügler had probably also initiated Ribbentrop's successful attempt to get Hitler to take charge of the work with ethnic Germans and had thus become a target. From January to August 1936 he was forcibly kept in Deister Wald under the supervision of the Gestapo . On March 10, 1936, he was expelled from the NSDAP and, according to Roland Ray, also from the SS .

"Oil Protection" in Romania

After having worked for a short time as a consultant in the planning of industrial estates in Schneidemühl , Kügler joined the office of the commercial board committee of IG Farben in Berlin on August 1st, 1937 . Initially he worked here in the Middle East , later in Eastern Europe with the exception of the Soviet Union . In August 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht , but obtained an order from the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) ( Abwehr ) to take care of securing the Romanian oil fields. At the beginning of May 1939, Kügler had already been in Bucharest with a delegation from the German chemical industry to explain the application of new IG Farben processes to Romanian oil. With the new assignment, he became the liaison officer for IG Farben in Romania and at the same time the head of the Wehrmacht's oil protection company, carefully disguised as a civilian. He reported on the domestic political situation for the Abwehr, built up a network of informants and brought former comrades from the German Freischar to Romania. It was possible to let the oil fields and oil refineries fall into the hands of the Wehrmacht, largely undamaged by attempts at sabotage. Kügler received the War Merit Cross with Swords in 1941 and personal praise from Admiral Wilhelm Canaris . Kügler later stated that the "private war on the oil front" had been waged by men from the German Freischar group. Without the use of force, the Romanian oil wells were secured for the Romanian people "with temporary use by the empire". During the German-Soviet war , Kügler was supposed to organize the safeguarding of the oil reserves in Baku from neutral Turkey . Due to the German withdrawal, these plans became obsolete.

Adviser to the Romanian government and career in Austria

When Romania capitulated on August 23, 1944, Kügler was interned and released from the Turnu Măgurele camp in the spring of 1946 . On the mediation of Ion Miclescus, he was appointed advisor to the Romanian Ministry of Economic Affairs in matters of the chemical industry. After the proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic in 1948, Kügler initially returned to Germany. He then went to Vienna , where he initially became a consultant at an Austrian Landesbank and briefly in Bremen in the private sector. In 1952 he started working for Hoechst . In 1953 he became co-managing director of the Hoechst agency in Austria and in 1954 its head. In 1965 he retired, but at the same time traveled to Pakistan , Afghanistan , Iran and Tunis for Hoechst as part of a work contract . In the meantime he had become an Austrian citizen . He became managing director of Albertchemie and a member of the board of Vianova Kunstharz AG, a position which he resigned in 1977.

Kügler was also involved in the Free German Convention , with which he incorporated his "Sachsenkreis", founded in 1957 with old friends.

Publications

• For knowledge of the reduction products of tolylhydrazones. [Summary of the dissertation]. , Berlin 1923.
• (Ed.): Journey of the Saxon Young Society to the southeast, summer 1924. [Ed .: Hermann Kügler]. The young people, Plauen Straßbergerstr. 48 1925.
• The youth in the Bundish youth. [Hermann Kügler]. Publishing house Das Junge Volk, Plauen i. V 1928.
• and Günter Keizer: Demand and young talent for chemists and physicists. Struppe & Winckler, Berlin 1932.
• with Theodor Zotschew: The industrialization of Southeast Europe. In: Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch. 1 (1957) 1957, pp. 141-156.

literature

• Rudolf Kneip: History of the Saxon Youth. Self-published, Mittweida 1928.
• Rudolf Kneip: From Wandervogel to Boys' Association. On behalf of d. Saxon. Boyhood. verse. u. ed. Rudolf Kneip. Self-published; Herbert Müller, Mittweida, Mittweida, Bahnhoffstr. 17 1928.
• Rudolf Kneip: Wandervogel - Bündische Jugend, 1909 to 1943. The way of the Saxon youngsters to the Great League. 1st edition. Dipa-Verl, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
• Rudolf Kneip: The work abroad of the Saxon Youth Union . In: Peter Nasarski (Ed.): German youth movement in Europe. Attempt to take stock. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1967, pp. 226–237.
• Rudolf Kneip, Ludwig Liebs u. Karl-Heinrich Zimmermann: On the secret of Bündischer leadership. Documentary discussions with Hermann Kügler . dipa, Frankfurt / Main 1980, ISBN 3-7638-0221-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rudolf Kneip: Wandervogel - Bündische Jugend, 1905-1943. Frankfurt a. M. 1967, cit. after Werner Kindt (ed.): The German youth movement 1920 to 1933. The Bundische Zeit. Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1974, p. 70.
2. ↑ Kneip, Lieps u. Zimmermann, On the Secret of Bündischerführung , p. 12.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Kneip, Lieps u. Zimmermann, On the Secret of Bündischerführung , p. 11.
4. ^ Rudolf Kneip: Wandervogel - Bündische Jugend, 1905-1943. Frankfurt a. M. 1967, cit. after Werner KIndt (ed.): The German youth movement 1920 to 1933. The Bundische Zeit. Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1974, p. 109f.
5. ↑ Hiltraud Casper Hehne: On the language of the Bundischen youth. Using the example of the German Freischar . Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 1989, p. 123.
6. ^ ^{A b c d} Hans Adolf Jacobsen: National Socialist Foreign Policy 1933-1938. Metzner, Frankfurt / M. 1968, p. 268.
7. ↑ Kneip, Foreign Work , p. 234.
8. ↑ Kneip, Foreign Work, pp. 227–232.
9. ↑ Kneip, Lieps u. Zimmermann, From the secret of Bündischerführung , pp. 128-136, quoted in. 130, 135f.
10. ^ Matthias von Hellfeld : Bündische Jugend and Hitlerjugend. On the history of adaptation and resistance 1930–1933. Cologne 1987, p. 80f.
11. ^ Roland Ray: Approaching France in the service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942. Munich 2000, p. 144.
12. ↑ At the same time, this is the only reference to Kügler's SS membership. Roland Ray: Approaching France in the Service of Hitler? Otto Abetz and the German policy on France 1930–1942. Munich 2000, p. 229.
13. ↑ Kneip, Lieps u. Zimmermann, From the Secret of Bündischerführung , pp. 168–172.