Albert Hoffmann (Gauleiter)

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Albert Hoffmann (born October 24, 1907 in Bremen , † August 26, 1972 in Heiligenrode near Bremen) was a German entrepreneur and NSDAP party functionary. During the time of National Socialism he was Reichsamtsleiter in the party chancellery , deputy Gauleiter in Gau Oberschlesien and from 1943 Gauleiter Westphalia-South .

Life

Albert Hoffmann attended secondary school and commercial school in his hometown and then completed a commercial training and an internship in Amsterdam . He then worked as a raw tobacco merchant in the Netherlands .

In 1925 Hoffmann joined the National Socialist Workers' Youth and was one of the founding members of the SA and NSDAP ( membership number 41.165) in Bremen.

Shortly after Adolf Hitler's " seizure of power " he gave up his profession and initially held positions in the NSDAP district leadership in Bremen until he was appointed political director for party affairs in 1934 by Rudolf Hess in the staff of the deputy leader (Dept. II A) and in Braunen Haus in Munich .

In 1936 Hoffmann joined the SS (SS No. 278.225). In 1938 he was appointed “ Standstill Commissioner ” for the Anschluss of Austria , later also in the Reichsgau Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , where he was primarily responsible for liquidating property rights. At the same time he was responsible for building up the NSDAP and bringing the associations into line in the areas mentioned. After the annexation of what is known as the rest of Czech Republic , Hoffmann worked as an “adviser” in Prague , at the same time he joined the security service of the Reichsführer SS , to which he belonged for four years.

After the start of the Second World War, Hoffmann took part in the attack on Poland from September to November 1939 as a sergeant and officer candidate . Then he worked again in the party office as head of office. In February 1941, while retaining his other functions, he was appointed deputy Gauleiter of Upper Silesia and official representative of Fritz Bracht and, as a successor, obtained a seat in the Reichstag in June 1941 . From May to September 1942, as a representative of Martin Bormann in the OKW staff in Unruh, he carried out personnel checks in the civil administration offices in the Generalgouvernement , Ostland and Ukraine . He also gained insights into the murders of the Einsatzgruppen and in the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhardt , about which he reported with "suggestions for improvement" from the party chancellery as well as Hitler and Joseph Goebbels .

On January 26, 1943 he was appointed Gauleiter deputy in the Westphalia-South Gau; in June 1943 he was promoted to the party rank of Gauleiter and in November 1943 to SS-Gruppenführer . In December of the same year Hoffmann von Goebbels was appointed to the management of his Reich Inspectorate for civil air warfare measures. After Paul Giesler took over the Gauleiter office in the Munich Gau , Hoffmann was officially introduced as Gauleiter in Westphalia-South in May 1944 and at the same time held the office of Reich Defense Commissioner West . On March 26, 1945, Hoffmann gave the commandant of the police force in Dortmund , Wilhelm Stöwe , by telephone that the approximately 30,000 forced laborers and prisoners of war, Russians, Ukrainians and Poles, who were staying in Dortmund, should be placed on the bottom of the pit at a depth of over 1000 meters Mines Gottessegen and Hansemann should be accommodated and destroyed there. According to later testimony, the foreign workers were supposed to be walled up there. The mass murder was prevented by the mine managers Heinrich Heimann and Werner Haack , who declared that the transport of foreign workers to the lowest levels was economically and technically impossible. Shortly before the end of the war in April 1945, Hoffmann dissolved the NSDAP and the Volkssturm in South Westphalia and went into hiding.

Hoffmann, who, because of his arrogance and opinionated manner, did not enjoy general popularity even among the NSDAP leaders, was considered a staunch National Socialist until the end of the war. He was a protégé of Goebbels.

After his arrest by British troops in May 1945, he was first questioned as a witness in the Nuremberg trials and later charged several times himself. However, no direct responsibility in the charges for the mistreatment / murder of Allied airmen and slave laborers could be proven, so that he was finally acquitted by a British military court in Arnsberg in September 1946 for lack of evidence. However, he remained in British internment .

A prison sentence of four years and nine months imposed by the verdict court in April 1949 was only partially served due to his internment period and received a pardon. After his release in 1950, Hoffmann acquired a considerable fortune as an entrepreneur in Bochum and Bremen.

Hoffmann was married. His son Bolko was an entrepreneur and the founder of the Pro DM party .

Sybille Steinbacher characterizes Albert Hoffmann as a “powerful member of the National Socialist functional elite” and Ralf Blank sees in him an “influential functionary at the interface between administration and politics”.

literature

  • Ralf Blank : Albert Hoffmann. In: Westfälische Lebensbilder [Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia XXVII A, Volume 17], Münster 2005, pp. 255–290.
  • Ralf Blank: Albert Hoffmann as Reich Defense Commissioner in Gau Westfalen-Süd, 1943–1945. A biographical sketch. In: Contributions to the history of National Socialism 17 (2001), pp. 189–210.
  • Ralf Blank: "... not to be withdrawn from popular indignation". Gauleiter Albert Hoffmann and the "Fliegerbefehl". In: Märkisches Jahrbuch 98 (1998), pp. 255–296.
  • Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-10-091052-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hermann Weiss (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-10-091052-4 . , P. 230.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 264.
  3. ↑ Zeche Gottessegen in Dortmund: When the Nazis wanted to murder 30,000 people in the deep , Dietmar Seher about the history reconstructed seven decades after the end of the war by the historian Stefan Klemp , t-online.de, Panorama, December 20, 2018, accessed December 21 2018
personal data
SURNAME Hoffmann, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman and politician (NSDAP), MdR, Gauleiter
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH August 26, 1972
Place of death Heiligenrode (Stuhr)