Albert Krebs (Gauleiter)

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Albert Krebs (born March 3, 1899 in Amorbach ; † June 26, 1974 in Hamburg ) was a German politician and in 1928 briefly Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Hamburg.

Life

education

Krebs, the son of a senior archive officer, graduated from high school in Aschaffenburg in 1917 and then volunteered for the military ; he was not used in the war .

In March 1919 he was released from military service. After that he began his study of German language and literature , history , economics and language English , he in Würzburg , Tübingen , Marburg and Frankfurt completed. He received his doctorate in 1922 and joined the NSDAP in the same year .

Before the war, Krebs was active in the youth movement ; in addition, during his studies he was in the German Guild and in the Freikorps Epp and Oberland .

Political career until 1940

From March 1925 he acted as a "consultant for political education and popular civil working groups" (Department 17) at the ethnic-anti-Semitic employees ' union of the German National Trade Aid Association (DHV) in Berlin-Spandau . After the re-establishment of the NSDAP, her cancer rejoined in May 1926 and was appointed head of the NSDAP on November 4, 1926 at a meeting of the Hamburg NSDAP, which had previously been downgraded from the Gau to the local group . With him, "a younger generation and a modern social class, the 'new middle class of employees and academics', moved forward in the NSDAP". Under his leadership, the NSDAP soon experienced an upswing. At the end of 1927, Krebs established a speaker's school, and from February 1928, the first National Socialist newspaper in Hamburg was the Hamburger Volksblatt. The number of party members rose from 130 in November 1926 to over 600 in 1928.

After the local group rose again to the Gau on February 26, 1928, Krebs became Gau leader of Hamburg. During his time as Gauleiter, together with Johannes Engel , Krebs campaigned for a nationwide expansion and consolidation of local National Socialist employee organizations as part of the Berlin factory cell movement . This was to prevent "if the party leadership does not act, wild employee committees will grow up that cannot be controlled at all."

This sparked internal party disputes, in which Krebs felt he was not supported by the party leadership in Munich , and as a consequence he resigned as Gauleiter in May 1928 - after only 3 months. His term of office was officially ended in September 1928. During a transitional phase, the Gau was provisionally headed from Schleswig-Holstein; in fact, the Gau managing director and member of the city council, Wilhelm Hüttmann, determined the direction.

In April 1930, Krebs took over the management of the company cell organization in Hamburg.

From 1931 he worked as honorary editor-in-chief of the Nazi daily newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt . Because of a critical article against Kurt von Schleicher published in it on May 18, 1932 , in which he claimed, among other things, that Schleicher “only wanted to play with the National Socialists as he previously played with other groups in order to sacrifice them afterwards to his icy ambition” Krebs personally reprimanded by Adolf Hitler and expelled from the party.

Professionally, he continued his work as a public education and culture consultant at the DHV until its dissolution in April 1934. In the following years he held various positions within the Hamburg cultural administration: in September 1934 he was appointed head of the Hamburg public library and four years later, in 1938, he was already employed in the "administration for art and culture". In 1940 he was promoted to Senate Director .

Reichskommissariat Ostland

After the attack on the Soviet Union , Krebs was assigned as a special leader of the Ostland propaganda department in the Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO) and took over the cultural sector in the cities of Riga and Reval . He was also a region Commissioner of the district Orsha in the main police station Vitebsk . Military and civil administration, police, SS and local associations in the RKO were demonstrably involved in measures against Jews and in the Holocaust . The example of Hans Gewecke shows that this also applied to the area commissioners there . In 1958, Gewecke confessed to a Lübeck court that he had also helped with the registration of Jews and their property and with the transfer of Jews to ghettos.

Through his acquaintance with Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg in 1942, Krebs knew of the plans for a coup and also of the impending assassination attempt on Hitler. After its failure, on July 20, 1944 , he went into hiding.

post war period

In the denazification process in 1947 he was classified as “exonerated”, with the condition that he should no longer be politically active. The ban was lifted in the appeal process that took place in October 1949.

He was politically active in the GB / BHE displaced party , for which he ran unsuccessfully on the Hamburg state list in the 1953 federal election.

Autobiography

In his autobiography , which was published in 1959, Krebs distinguished himself as a contemporary who was initially impressed by the political ideas and goals of National Socialism, but who, after personal experience with Hitler's dictatorial leadership style and the “incompetence in the Nazi leader state”, disappointed himself in political life withdrew.

Works

  • From Marxism to Socialism , 1932
  • Rebel by God's grace , novel about Baron von Stein , 1937
  • Tales of Brave Hearts , 1939
  • Trends and shapes of the NSDAP. DVA, Stuttgart 1959.
    • The infancy of Nazism. Memoirs of ex-Gauleiter Albert Krebs 1923–1933. Ed. And transl. William Sheridan Allen. Franklin Watts, New Viewpoints, NY 1976, ISBN 0-531-05376-8 .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Iris Hamel: Völkischer Verband and national trade union. The German National Trade Aid Association 1893–1933. (= Publications by the Research Center for the History of National Socialism in Hamburg. Volume IV). Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 239.
  2. ↑ Hamel, p. 239.
  3. ↑ Ursula Büttner : The rise of the NSDAP. In: Hamburg in the 'Third Reich'. Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-903-1 , p. 34.
  4. ↑ Ursula Büttner: The rise of the NSDAP. P. 34.
  5. ↑ Werner Jochmann : National Socialism and Revolution. Origin and history of the NSDAP in Hamburg 1922–1933 - documents. Frankfurt 1963, p. 292 ff. (No. 96)
  6. ^ Quotation from Albert Krebs in Gunther Mai: The National Socialist Company Cell Organization. On the relationship between workers and National Socialism. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Volume 31 (1983), Issue 4, pp. 573–613 ( ifz-muenchen.de PDF).
  7. ↑ Ursula Büttner: The rise of the NSDAP. P. 37.
  8. ↑ Jochmann, p. 386; Reprint of the article Schleicher Minister of Defense? Schleicher and Goerdeler at the Chancellor at Jochmann, pp. 399–400.
  9. ^ Letter from Hitler to Krebs of May 20, 1932, printed by Jochmann, pp. 397–398 ( online )
  10. ↑ Nike Lepel: "Acquisitions" 1933–1944. Book collections confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution in the library of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Thesis . Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, 2005, p. 38.
  11. ↑ Hans-Dieter Handrack : The Kingdom of Ostland. The cultural policy of the German administration between autonomy and conformity 1941–1944. Hanover Münden 1981, p. 232.
  12. ↑ Uwe Danker: The failed attempt to disenchant the legend of the “clean civil administration”. In: Robert Bohn: The German rule in the "Germanic countries" 1940-1945. Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-515-07099-0 , p. 173 and gegenwind.info Gewecke was Area Commissioner von Scholen in Lithuania and later stated the following in Lübeck: “Of course, my office had the proper (!) Seizure and registration of Jewish property to do. There were very specific orders from the top management [...] These items [...] then had to be properly recorded, listed in detail and delivered to the competent authorities in the direction of the Reich - I would like to say. "He also explained that" members of the The area commisariat [...] helped to transfer the Jews from their homes to the ghettos ”.
  13. ↑ Krebs, Albert, Dr. In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Kaaserer to Kynast] (=  KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 671 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 508 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).
  14. ↑ Review: Nazi history: Goebbels as a leader? In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1960 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Krebs, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Gauleiter of Hamburg in the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Amorbach
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1974
Place of death Hamburg