Albert Forster

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Albert Forster

Albert Maria Forster (born July 26, 1902 in Fürth , † February 28, 1952 in Warsaw ) was a German politician and war criminal . From 1930 to 1945 he was Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Danzig and from 1939 Reich Governor there .

Life

Origin, education and occupation

Albert Forster was the youngest of six children. His father, who came from Ingolstadt , was a prison administrator in Fürth. Forster attended the local elementary school from 1908 to 1912 , then switched to the Fürth Humanist Gymnasium , which he left in 1920 with secondary school leaving certificate. Until 1922 he went on a commercial apprenticeship . He then worked as a banker at Fürth Bankhaus Brückner .

Early political activity

On November 7, 1923 Forster joined the NSDAP and the SA . On June 30, 1924, he was dismissed from the Brückner bank “for political activity”. He then worked as a magazine advertiser for the anti-Semitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer , with whose publisher Julius Streicher he became friends. From August 1, 1924 to February 16, 1925, he was the chairman of the " Greater German People's Community " in Fürth , a substitute organization for the temporarily banned NSDAP. After re-admission to the NSDAP, he was local group leader for Fürth from February 26, 1925. In the same month Forster met Hitler in Munich. On April 5, 1925, he rejoined the NSDAP ( membership number 1.924) , keeping his old membership number, and joined the SS on June 12, 1926 (SS number 158). Until 1927 he was the leader of the SS group he founded in Nuremberg-Fürth. Forster is portrayed as having a talent for rhetoric, as early as 1925 he appeared as a full-time speaker for the NSDAP. From 1928 he was district leader of the NSDAP in the Middle Franconia district.

From February 22, 1928, Forster worked in the Nuremberg pay office of the German National Handicrafts Association (DHV). In December 1929 he was transferred to Hamburg and in April 1930 he became district manager of the DHV in the “Lower Elbe” district.

Gauleiter of Danzig and member of the Reichstag

On September 14, 1930 Albert Forster was elected to the Reichstag for the constituency of Franconia . From 1930 to 1933 he was a consultant for labor service and white-collar issues of the NSDAP parliamentary group and was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Reichstag. Until the end of the war, Forster was a member of the Reichstag , which was insignificant during the Nazi era.

On October 15, 1930 Forster was appointed Gauleiter of the Gaues Gaues . At that time, as a free city, Danzig was outside the German Empire. In Danzig he founded the party newspaper Danzig Observer on November 1, 1930 , and became its editor. The newspaper was later renamed Der Vorposten , from June 1, 1933, Der Danziger Vorposten . As Forster's biographer was Wilhelm Löbsack known.

After Hitler came to power on May 10, 1933, Forster was appointed head of the student council for clerks and leader of the Association of German Employees in the German Labor Front (DAF). He also became a member of the Large and Small Convention of the DAF. On July 11, 1933 he was appointed to the Prussian State Council and a member of the Reichstag . From September 1, 1935, Forster was a member of the Reich Chamber of Labor .

On May 9, 1934 Forster, meanwhile equally honorary citizen of Fürth and Danzig , married Gertrud Deetz. The place of the wedding was the Berlin Reich Chancellery , Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess acted as witnesses and took part in the wedding celebrations.

In Gdansk, Forster led internal party competition against Arthur Greiser , who was the Free City's head of government as Senate President . On August 23, 1939, Forster was elected “State Leader” of the Free City of Danzig and was thus the formal head of state for a few days : On September 1, 1939, at the same time as the German invasion of Poland , he enacted a “law of the reunification of Danzig with the Greater German Reich ”, abolishing the position of Gdańsk head of state. The annexation of Danzig to the German Reich took place on the same day in the Reichstag session immediately after Hitler's speech by Reich law. This annexation was a breach of the Versailles Treaty and as such an explicit charge in the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946 .

In World War II

On September 19, 1939, Forster welcomed Hitler in the "liberated" Danzig as the host Gauleiter at Artushof . From the beginning of the month he had been head of civil administration for the Gdansk area, and from September 8th for the military district of Gdansk-West Prussia. On October 26, 1939, he took over the newly created Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia as NSDAP Gauleiter and Reich Governor and the Military District XX (Danzig) as Reich Defense Commissioner . In the course of the war, Forster was transferred to further offices in the Gau: on November 15, 1940, he was appointed Gau Housing Commissioner as regional representative of Reich Housing Commissioner Robert Ley ; the work, Fritz Sauckel .

As an SS honorary leader , Forster was constantly promoted: on March 15, 1933 to SS-Oberführer , on September 15, 1933 to SS-Brigadführer , on January 27, 1934 to SS-Gruppenführer and finally on December 31, 1941 to SS-Obergruppenführer . Forster's relationship with Himmler remained tense, however: "If I looked like Himmler, I wouldn't talk about race," Forster is said to have said in a circle of confidants. Himmler, who was given this quote, did not appoint Forster, but the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) Richard Hildebrandt as his regional representative as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Ethnicity (RKFDV). There was sharp power struggle between Hildebrandt and Forster before Hildebrandt was recalled in April 1943.

The main point of dispute between Forster and the SS was the so-called national politics towards the Polish and Kashubian populations, especially in the former Polish corridor . Forster, who had the ambition to be the first Gauleiter to report his Gau to Hitler not only as " free of Jews ", but also as "free of Poland", resorted to different methods:

In June 1942 Forster was proposed by Joseph Goebbels as the successor to the sick Gauleiter of Munich , Adolf Wagner . However, he could not prevail against Paul Giesler .

Towards the end of the Second World War, Forster was appointed organizer and leader of the " German Volkssturm " in his Gau on September 25, 1944 . After the conquest of West Prussia by the Red Army , Forster went to see Hitler on March 19 or 23, 1945 in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, because in his opinion the city could no longer be defended against the overwhelming Soviet forces. Forster was convinced of the opposite by Hitler: “He told me that he would save Danzig, and there is nothing more to doubt.” Forster returned to Danzig, but a few days later fled with the remains of his staff to the Hela peninsula . On May 4, 1945 he took the Sopot steamer to Grömitz on the Bay of Lübeck.

Trial and execution in Poland

On May 27, 1945 Albert Forster was arrested by the British occupying forces in Hamburg and interned first in the Fallingbostel camp and then in Neuengamme . On August 12, 1946, the British military government transferred him to the Polish authorities on the basis of extradition proceedings . On August 25, 1946, an arrest warrant for mass murder was issued against him . Initially imprisoned in Warsaw, he was transferred to Gdansk Prison on September 14, 1946. In his trial, which took place in Danzig from April 5 to 29, 1948, Forster were among other things “mass murders of people from the ranks of the Polish intelligentsia and Jewish descent, persecution and mistreatment of the Polish population, appropriation of Polish public and private property “Proven. On April 29, 1948 Forster was the Supreme Polish National Court to death by the strand convicted. After Forster's petitions for clemency to the court, the Polish President and personalities in Western Europe, the execution was initially postponed. On February 28, 1952, Forster was brought from Gdansk to Warsaw and executed there on the same day in the courtyard of the central prison. Forster's wife, who had last heard from her husband in 1949, was not notified of the execution until 1954.

literature

  • Heinz Bergschicker: German Chronicle 1933–1945. A picture of the times of the fascist dictatorship . Knowledge Advice: Olaf Groehler. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1981, 2nd dgs. 1982 edition (ill. P. 162).
  • Peter Hüttenberger : The Gauleiter. Study on the change in the power structure in the NSDAP. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1969 (series of quarterly books for contemporary history ).
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
  • Dieter Schenk : Hitler's husband in Danzig. Gauleiter Forster and the crimes in Danzig-West Prussia. Dietz, Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-8012-5029-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lilla: extras , p. 148.
  2. ^ A b Dieter Schenk: Structures of a Gauleiter using the example of Albert Forster's Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia . (PDF; 52 kB) p. 11
  3. ↑ Thomas Grasberger: The forest of the dead . In: Die Zeit , No. 4/2011. Subtitles Long before the human extermination started in Auschwitz, the Nazis had started their murder program. The Piaśnica massacre in September 1939 was the beginning.
    Dieter Schenk: Structures of a Gauleiter using the example of Albert Forster's Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia (PDF; 52 kB) p. 9
  4. ^ An employee of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle about his experiences with Albert Forster at deutsche-und-polen.de
  5. ↑ Cf. Max Domarus: Hitler. Speeches and proclamations 1932–1945. Würzburg 1962/1963, Volume 2, Page 52.
personal data
SURNAME Forster, Albert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Forster, Albert Maria (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR, Gauleiter of the NSDAP and Reich Governor in Danzig
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Fuerth
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1952
Place of death Warsaw