Achim Gercke

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Achim Gercke - official portrait from 1933

Achim Gercke ( Joachim Wilhelm August Gercke ; born August 3, 1902 in Greifswald ; † October 27, 1997 ) was a German scientist. He was an “expert for race research” in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and a member of the Reichstag .

Early years

Achim Gercke was born in Greifswald as the third of five children of Professor of Classical Philology Alfred Gercke . In 1909 the family moved to Breslau , where Achim Gercke took his Abitur and studied mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Breslau from 1922 to 1925 . At the beginning of March 1926 he joined the NSDAP in Göttingen ( membership number 31.490). He finished his studies in Freiburg in 1930 with a doctorate to become Dr. phil. nat. with a topic from chemistry. Gercke then followed his doctoral supervisor as an assistant to Greifswald.

In his free time, Gercke was intensively involved in genealogical studies from 1925 onwards and published eight booklets under the code name “German credit bureau” until 1932 on “family history records of the Jewish and Judged university professors and judges”, which later became the genealogical basis for the Dismissal of these university and college professors. Financially supported by a "Circle of Friends and Supporters of the German Credit Agency", he put together a card index with 400,000 data on Jews in Germany on a private initiative until 1932 , some of which could be used to denounce politicians, lawyers, scientists or party members. This card index was given the name "Archive for professional race statistics" and was renamed from 1931 to "NS information". After Adolf Hitler's " seizure of power " , it provided the basis for the implementation of the later Aryan paragraph .

In the "Brown House"

At the end of 1931, Gercke and his card index were brought to Munich's Braune Haus as head of the "NS-Information at the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP" . His staff checked the “ Aryan ” ancestry of the party candidates and expanded the file. Gercke himself intervened in prominent cases such as Reinhard Heydrich and Theodor Duesterberg .

With Helmut Nicolai , a lawyer and employee of the domestic affairs department of the Reich leadership of the NSDAP , he drafted a “Rassenscheidungsgesetz” in 1932, which took up points four, five and seven in the party program of the NSDAP and expanded them. The " Eastern Jews " should be deported, certain professions should be closed to all Jews and the right to vote should be denied. Obstacles to marriage and a ban on sexual intercourse between Germans and Jews were also planned, as was complete deportation to a “locked national home”.

In May 1933 Gercke published an article on the “solution of the Jewish question ” in which he called for the “planned march out” of all Jews and an “international regulation to create a home” for them. Gercke also took part on December 20, 1934 in Munich at a meeting with the staff of the Führer’s deputy and the Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner , in which similar regulations were proposed as were later inserted in the “ Blood Protection Act ” of the Nuremberg Laws . In addition, all persons should be regarded as “mixed Jews”, “if their ancestors living on January 1, 1800 were descended from parents who were not baptized into Christian at birth”. As an exception, mixed Jews should be allowed to remain in public positions if they renounced a descendant.

Gercke's suggestions therefore anticipate parts of the measures actually implemented later, without a direct causal relationship with the following laws and ordinances being demonstrable.

Rise and fall

With the law to restore the civil service of April 7, 1933 all civil servants were required to provide proof of parentage. On May 2, 1933, Achim Gercke became head of the “Service of the Expert for Race Research at the Reich Ministry of the Interior” in Berlin. The tasks included the supervision of the implementation of the law, the supervision of clan researchers, the review of doubtful cases and the last-instance classification of descent according to hereditary biology auxiliary opinion. On March 28, 1934, Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler determined that Gercke was responsible “for the NSDAP as well as for the entire direct and indirect Reich administration for all questions of ancestry and for questions of clan research”.

Immediately after being appointed head of the Berlin office, Gercke tried to force all family history associations into a Reich Association for Family Research and Heraldry under the leadership of Karl Fahrenhorst , but failed because of the reluctance of the Central Office for German Personal and Family History, Leipzig under the direction of Johannes Hohlfeld and the Herald in Berlin, whose chairmanship had meanwhile taken over by Kurt Mayer .

On November 12, 1933, Gercke became a member of the Reichstag . Gercke worked on the draft of the RIM for a "Kinship Office Law", in which "Kinship offices" were supposed to link information on "Aryan" descent with information on hereditary health and possibly "anti-sociality". The implementation of the plan failed because of disputes over competence with the Ministry of Justice and the Reich Health Authority.

In January 1935, Gercke was arrested for alleged violations under Section 175 . He was expelled from the party on March 18 of the same year and lost all his offices as well as his mandate in the Reichstag on April 9, 1935. An intrigue of his successor in what was to become the Reichssippenamt is considered conceivable. This successor was Kurt Mayer , who worked on the staff of the Reichsführer-SS as a department head in the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) and in the Main Office for Public Health under Reichsärzteführer Gerhard Wagner .

Gercke was not rehabilitated. Shortly after the start of the war he was drafted into the state riflemen, was assigned to a parole battalion in 1943 and returned in 1945 from Soviet captivity.

After the Second World War he worked as an archive folder in the regional church archive of the Evangelical Lutheran regional church of Hanover and as a registrar in Adensen . He also worked as a genealogist and writer of non-fiction books on local history and as a beekeeper .

literature

  • Culture Department Göttingen (Ed.): Göttingen under the swastika. National Socialist Everyday Life in a German City - Texts and Materials. Göttingen 1983.
  • Diana Schulle: The Reichssippenamt. An institution of National Socialist racial policy. (Diss. 1999) Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89722-672-3 .
  • Cornelia Wegeler: "... we say from the international scholarly republic". Classical Studies and National Socialism. The Göttingen Institute for Classical Studies 1921–1962 . Böhlau, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-205-05212-9 , pp. 72-83.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gercke, Achim, Dr. phil. In: Alfons Labisch / Florian Tennstedt: The way to the "Law on the Unification of Health" of July 3, 1934. Development lines and moments of the state and municipal health system in Germany , Part 2, Academy for Public Health in Düsseldorf 1985, p. 412f.
  2. ↑ Information from: Diana Schulle: Das Reichssippenamt. Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89722-672-3 .
  3. ^ Diana Schulle: Das Reichssippenamt. Pp. 48-59.
  4. ↑ Wolf Gruner (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 , vol. 1., German Reich 1933–1937. Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58480-6 , doc. 48, p. 168.
  5. ↑ Wolf Gruner (edit.): The persecution ... Vol. 1., German Reich 1933 - 1937. Doc. 146, p. 392.
  6. ↑ cf. Guidelines to Section 1a (3) of the Reichsbeamtengesetz of August 8, 1933, RGBl. I p. 575.
  7. ↑ Cornelia Essner: The “Nuremberg Laws” or the Administration of Rassenwahns 1933 - 1945 , Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-72260-3 , p. 89.
  8. ↑ Volkmar Weiss : Prehistory and consequences of the Aryan ancestral pass: On the history of genealogy in the 20th century. Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk, 2013, ISBN 978-3-944064-11-6 .
  9. ↑ Cornelia Essner: The "Nuremberg Laws" ... , p. 88.
  10. ^ Diana Schulle: Das Reichssippenamt. P. 154f.
  11. ^ Diana Schulle: Das Reichssippenamt. P. 155f.
  12. ↑ Cornelia Essner: The "Nuremberg Laws" ... , p. 90.
  13. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller: Man for Man - A biographical lexicon . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-518-39766-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Gercke, Achim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gercke, Joachim Wilhelm August (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German race researcher and politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Greifswald
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1997