Bernhard Ruberg

Bernhard Ruberg as SS-Hauptsturmführer (between 1934 and 1936)

Bernhard Ruberg (born August 12, 1897 in Wiesbaden ; † April 12, 1945 in Hemer ) was a full-time functionary of the NSDAP with a focus on colonial policy , MdR since 1936 and had higher SS ranks .

Life

Life until 1933

Ruberg attended elementary school (1903–1907) and then the municipal high school in Wiesbaden (1907–1914). After the beginning of World War I , he volunteered. Ruberg was assigned to the Pioneer Battalion 20, with which he was deployed on the Western Front from November 1914 to November 1918 . During this time he passed the secondary school diploma in early 1915 . On March 26, 1916, Ruberg was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve. In the same year he took part as the leader of the pioneers in the siege and storming of Fort Vaux near Verdun. Until the end of the war he received the Iron Cross of both classes and the Hohenzollern House Order .

After the end of the war, Ruberg switched to the Free Corps of the Iron Division , which was deployed in the Baltic States to suppress the revolution , whose units are counted among the most right-wing groups of counterrevolutionary troops and are held responsible for several massacres with thousands of deaths (" white terror "). From March to May 1919 he was an orderly officer of the Iron Division, then until December as an adjutant in the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Courland Infantry Regiment. This unit was involved in the politically motivated attempt to overthrow the Latvian government. The Free Corps of the Iron Division were "badly beaten" and later fled to East Prussia.

According to information in literature from the 1930s, Ruberg is said to have taken part in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 . The right-wing extremist French contemporary historian Dominique Venner assigned him to the "Eiserne Schar Berthold", a free corps that was involved in both the attempted coup in Latvia and, after the return, the Kapp Putsch, and which was wiped out in 1920 in the fighting in Hamburg against workers opposing Kapp and had to be resolved. Ruberg, it is said elsewhere, was released from military service in October 1920.

In the winter semester of 1920/21 Ruberg studied political science at the University of Münster , but dropped out after the first semester. In the same year he joined the Westphalian regional organization of the right-wing extremist secret organization Escherich ("Orgesch"), which was responsible for assassinations and had set up secret arsenals for the coup.

In 1921 he was a commercial clerk in Hamburg. In the same year, the police investigated him for pushing arms. He escaped arrest by fleeing abroad: until 1925 he lived on the island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Cameroon, where he also worked as a commercial clerk. He then worked from 1925 to 1927 as an administrator of plantings in Costa Rica and from 1927 to 1933 as a commercial clerk in Cameroon .

During this time he joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1931 ( membership number 879,405). In December 1931 he was a co-founder of a local branch of the NSDAP in Cameroon. From 1932 to 1933, as head of the Cameroon regional group in the party's foreign organization , he took on official duties for a party organization of the NSDAP for the first time.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the NSDAP and its allies came to power, Ruberg returned to Germany in 1933. In mid-1933 he became head of department in the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP in Berlin. With his official entry date of January 1, 1933, he also became a member of the General SS (No. 36.231), in which he had the rank of SS storm chief in January 1934.

From March to May 1934 Ruberg was the head of the Berlin branch of the Foreign Organization (AO) of the NSDAP. In June of the same year he was appointed Gaustabsamtsleiter of the foreign organization. This position, in which he was the second man in the hierarchy of this subdivision of the NSDAP after the head of the foreign organization, Ernst Wilhelm Bohle , he retained until his death. As part of his work for the AO, Ruberg also took over the management of the Association of German Associations Abroad on April 11, 1934 .

In October 1935 Ruberg was given the management of the foreign district of the German Labor Front (DAF), which had emerged from the smashing of the German trade unions and which he held until at least 1940. In this position, he was responsible for the DAF subdivisions responsible for looking after German members of the DAF abroad and for looking after seafarers - who belonged to the DAF Auslands Gau regardless of their place of residence. The DAF's environment also included the Foundation for Victims of Labor at Sea , founded in 1935, of which he was also a board member.

Since the Reichstag election of March 1936 - in which only candidates from the NSDAP were allowed - Ruberg was in the National Socialist Reichstag . He retained his seat in the parliament, which was stripped of any political power, which only served as a backdrop for propaganda for Nazi politics and as an organ of acclamation and whose membership rewarded Nazi merits, until his death.

In 1938, as part of the Anschluss of Austria, Ruberg made suggestions to Albert Hoffmann, the standstill commissioner for organizations, clubs and associations, for appropriating the assets of Austrian clubs. Among other things, the Concordia writers' association was affected .

As captain of the reserve (3rd Pioneer Battalion, since December 31, 1938) he took part in the attack on Poland at the beginning of the war. On March 15, 1940 he was appointed as a reserve officer to the Führerreserve of the deputy III. Army Corps (Berlin), which amounted to a UK exemption from the front line in favor of his official business in the National Socialist organization abroad. Ruberg was regional group leader of the AO of the party in the Netherlands from May 1940 to mid-October, but after a conflict of competencies between the AO Gauleiter Ernst Wilhelm Bohle , whose deputy was Ruberg, and the Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands Seyß-Inquart, he moved from there to colonial policy Office transferred. The national group was withdrawn from the foreign organization and renamed the “NSDAP's work area in the Netherlands” and thus belonged to the German NSDAP. In the same month Ruberg was promoted to SS Brigadführer.

The brief contributions by Ruberg to the classification of the Netherlands in the National Socialist area (“work that stands before us today”) and the formation of a “National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft der Reichsdeutsche” exaggerated the 1942 Netherlands book published by Walter Söchting on “outstanding achievement”.

As head of the NSDAP-AO, Ruberg was involved in the planning of a National Socialist colonial policy in the 1940s . He was responsible for the preparations for taking over the administration of the former German colony of Cameroon , which had been under a French-British mandate since 1919 and which the war prevented. Ruberg was planned as the future "governor" by the lead organization of the Banane Organization , which he headed.

After the Allies landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, an office of “civil commissioner” was introduced for German-occupied northern France, which was transferred to Ruberg at the end of August. This position, in which he was subordinate to the Reich Commissioner Josef Grohé , he soon lost due to the rapid advance of the Allies. According to literature, Ruberg was then appointed provincial commissioner in Liège, Belgium , on September 16, 1944 . By September 8th, however, most of Belgium had already been liberated, and Liège by September 6th. There are no indications of what activities Ruberg could have pursued in his new role.

Ruberg died on April 12, 1945 in Hemer near Iserlohn. Nothing is known about the circumstances and the exact location of Ruberg's death.

Up until this point in time, Hemer was the location of a large prisoner-of-war camp ( main camp VI A ), which leading SS and Gestapo officers who had escaped from the Ruhr basin in the final phase of the regime used as a protective place of escape that would not be bombed. On April 13, the camp was handed over to the front lines of the US Army.

family

Ruberg was married and had two children.

literature

• Rüdiger Hachtmann : A colossus on feet of clay: the report by the auditor Karl Eicke on the German Labor Front from July 31, 1936 , Oldenburg 2006, p. 322.
• Joachim Lilla (editor): extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. Düsseldorf 2004, p. 528.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A reference work claims from the front: Joachim Lilla (editor): extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. Düsseldorf 2004, p. 528; However, this is very unlikely, since the war emergency maturity test was also a school test. The student could be given leave of absence from the front to school.
2. ↑ Bruce Campbell: The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism , Lexington (USA) 2004, p. 60.
3. ↑ Johannes Hürter: Hitler's Heerführer: The German Supreme Commanders in the War against the Soviet Union 1941/42 , p. 90; Hans Masalskis: Little History of Lithuania , Oldenburg 2005, p. 128.
4. ↑ Bruno Thoß, Iron Schar Berthold, [1]
5. ↑ On the "Iron Group" and the battles in Hamburg see: Jörg Berlin, Das Andere Hamburg. Efforts for freedom in the Hanseatic city since the late Middle Ages, Cologne 1981, passim.
6. ↑ The archive; Reference work for politics, economy, culture , 1935, issues 16–18, p. 676; Le filet brun, Traduit de l'allemand par Henri Thies, Préface de Berthold Jacob , Paris n.d. (1935), p. 42.
7. ↑ Dominique Venner, Histoire d'un fascisme allemand: les corps-francs du Baltikum et la Révolution, Paris 1996, p. 359.
8. ↑ Bruno Thoss, Eiserne Schar Berthold, [2] .
9. ^ Donald M. McKale: The Swastika outside Germany , Kent (USA) 1977, p. 28.
10. ↑ Tammo Luther: Volkstumsppolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933–1938: The Germans Abroad in the Field of Tension Between Traditionalists and National Socialists, Stuttgart 2004, zugl. Diss. Univ. Kiel, 2002, here: p. 108.
11. ↑ Hansa. Deutsche Schiffahrtszeitschrift, 72 (1935), p. 1.802 right column, 2nd paragraph , Hansa. Deutsche Schiffahrtszeitschrift, 76 (1939), p. 957 , National Socialist Yearbook, Berlin 1940, p. 351.
12. ^ Journal: Hansa 1935, p. 2104
13. ↑ Verena Pawlowsky, Edith Leisch-Prost, Christian Klösch: Associations in National Socialism, Munich 2004, p. 425.
14. ^ Konrad Kwiet: Reichskommissariat Netherlands: Attempt and Failure of National Socialist Reorganization , Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1968, p. 87.
15. ↑ Konrad Kwiet: Reichskommissariat Netherlands: Attempt and Failure of National Socialist Reorganization , Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1968, plus Diss. Freie Univ. Berlin ud T .: Kwiet, Konrad: The establishment of the German civil administration in the Netherlands and the beginnings of their Nazification policy, 1967, p. 87ff.
16. ^ Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Ernst-Wilhelm Bohle. Gauleiter in the service of party and state, Berlin 2009, pp. 55, 105; here also references to Fernando-Póo's whereabouts.
17. ↑ Konrad Kwiet: Reichskommissariat Netherlands: Attempt and Failure of National Socialist Reorganization , Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1968, plus Diss. Freie Univ. Berlin ud T .: Kwiet, Konrad: The establishment of the German civil administration in the Netherlands and the beginnings of their Nazification policy, 1967, pp. 88–90.
18. ^ Walter Söchting: The Netherlands Book, Frankfurt / M.1942, p. 170.
19. ↑ Karsten Linne: Germany beyond the equator? The Nazi colonial planning for Africa. Berlin 2008, p. 145.
20. ↑ Martin Moll (arr.), "Führer-Erlasse" 1939–1945, Stuttgart 1997, p. 430ff.
21. ↑ Horst Matzerath, The Gate to the West. The role of Cologne in the expansion policy of the Third Reich, in: Barbara Becker-Jákli / Werner Jung / Martin Rüther (eds.): National Socialism and Regional History : Festschrift für Horst Matzerath , 2002, 247–269, here: p. 268.
22. ↑ Ulrich Sander, Murderous Finale. Nazi crimes at the end of the war, Cologne 2008, p. 80.
23. ↑ Peter Klagges, Hans-Hermann Stopsack, Eberhard Thomas, STALAG VIA, Hemer, Memorial and Information Center, see: [3] .

Web links

• Bernhard Ruberg in the database of members of the Reichstag