Edmund Geilenberg

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Albert Speer (right) congratulates Geilenberg (left) on being awarded the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross (May 1944), photo from the Federal Archives
Geilenberg behind Albert Speer immediately after being awarded the Knight's Cross

Edmund Geilenberg (born January 13, 1902 in Buchholz ; † October 19, 1964 in Bassum ) learned the locksmith's trade and rose to become a representative of the German armaments industry in the National Socialist German Reich and military economic leader .

Personnel Geilenberg

Geilenberg was originally a locksmith and joined the NSDAP ( membership number 4,699,296) on May 1, 1937. He worked at Rheinmetall-Borsig as an assistant director before becoming director of Stahlwerke Braunschweig GmbH, Berlin, a subsidiary of Reichswerke Hermann Göring , in 1939 . Since he recommended himself for further tasks due to increased production of ammunition in the steelworks in Braunschweig, he was appointed to the industrial council of the High Command of the Army for the summer offensive of the Eastern Front in 1942. Furthermore, he was responsible for the so-called Ivan program of the High Command of the Army, which had the task of immediately restarting captured ammunition factories in Ukraine. This succeeded only with little success, as the Red Army recaptured the area.

In addition, he was "Head of the Main Munitions Committee" in the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production , for which he received the Knight's Cross for War Merit with Swords in mid-1943 for his services to building ammunition production . Of Adolf Hitler , he was in on the "General Commissioner for immediate measures" Albert Speer appointed guided Ministry. The appointment was made to remove the "air damage" mentioned in the Fuehrer's Decree of May 30, 1944, which had arisen during the Allied attacks on the fuel production plants. With his extensive competencies in the context of the reclassification of the fuel industry, he was able to shut down " work in the economy, including armaments and war production" , give instructions to the Wehrmacht formations in his immediate measures and he was able to enforce the " use of material and labor and with ruthless energy " and the speed with which his measures were carried out could not be " hindered either by formal or district inhibitions ".

After 1951 he was a member of the Bonn Pleiger Circle , a meeting of former executives of the Hermann Göring Works.

Geilenberg program and company desert

On behalf of Hitler, he developed the so-called Geilenberg program, which was later also known as the mineral oil safety plan. The aim was to relocate the hydrogenation plants for the production of synthetic gasoline , which were practically unprotected by the Allied air raids , underground ( U-relocation ). Furthermore, new technologies for the production of fuels should be developed and put into practice. The United States Army Air Forces , which from May 1944 onwards increasingly aimed at gasoline production facilities, massively attacked the Leunawerke , the hydrogenation works in Magdeburg- Rothensee and the oil field near Zistersdorf in Austria and reduced the available volume of fuel considerably. Furthermore, the Soviet occupation of Romania in August 1944 lost the oil fields near Ploiesti , which covered a large part of Germany's oil needs. As a result, the supply of fuel to the German armed forces threatened to weaken.

According to the Geilenberg Plan, a concentration camp prisoner camp of 500 people each was planned for each new plant to be created for the production of gasoline, for example from oil shale . The fact that Geilenberg also had personal responsibility for the circumstances in the concentration camps becomes clear in a record of July 27 and 28, 1944 by the “ Desert Working Team ”, which is referred to as the Geilenberg Bible. In it, the tasks and responsibilities of the desert program are made clear, so the assignment of prisoners for the construction project was directly initiated by Geilenberg.

According to the staff of the German Oil Shale Research Association, the responsibility for the deployment of prisoners and the catastrophic conditions in the camps, which in the winter of 1944/45 even prompted an inspection by Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl , lay exclusively with Geilenberg and the SS.

At Geilenberg's instructions, seven external concentration camps were set up to mine and extract the oil shale deposits from the Lias in Baden-Württemberg:

They were set up as a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace.

In Lower Saxony, the Schandelah subcamp for mining the oil shale deposits there is known as the subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp , which was built on Geilenberg's initiative.

Effect of the program

The desert program, which Michael Grandt described in his book as Hitler's last hope , failed. In the desert program in Baden-Württemberg, only 1,500 tons of fuel were produced within one year. No production figures are known from the Schandelah satellite camp.

In the above-mentioned camps in Baden-Württemberg, an estimated more than 4,000 people were killed as part of the desert program, which was given an alias , and around 200 in Schandelah. Geilenberg was never held accountable for the atrocities committed in his program.

literature

  • Henry Hatt: Code name Steinbock II Geilenberg U-relocation to Unterloquitz, BoD, Norderstedt 2014. ISBN 978-3-8423-7510-9
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? S. Fischer. Frankfurt am Main 2003. ISBN 3-596-16048-0
  • Tobias Bütow / Franka Bindernagel: Engineers as perpetrators, the "Geilenberg camp" and the delegation of power. In: Ralph Gabriel u. a. (Ed.): Camp system and representation. Interdisciplinary studies on the history of the concentration camps. Tübingen: edition diskord, 2004, pp. 46–70
  • Michael Grandt: Enterprise "Desert" Hitler's last hope. The Nazi oil shale program in the Swabian Alb. Silberburg-Verlag, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-87407-508-7

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://archiv.ivz-aktuell.de/IVZ/1964/19641021/245_IVZ_1964-10-21_013-t001.jpg
  2. ↑ Gerd Wysocki: Work for the War. Mechanisms of rule in the armaments industry of the “Third Reich”; Labor, social policy and state police repression at the Reichswerke "Hermann Göring" in the Salzgitter area 1937/38 to 1945. P. 35. Steinweg-Verlag. Braunschweig 1992. ISBN 3-925151-51-6
  3. ↑ Martin Moll (Ed.): Leader Decrees 1939–1945. P. 415, 1st edition 1997. Franz-Steiner-Verlag. Stuttgart 1997. ISBN 978-3-515-06873-4 . Available online: Leader's Decree p. 415.
  4. ↑ Franz-Josef Ziwes: oil for the final victory. The desert company in the tradition of the Ministry of Finance Württemberg-Hohenzollern . In: Archive News. Special issue September 2005. pp. 28-30. (PDF; 1.5 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Geilenberg, Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist, representative of the German armaments industry in the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Buchholz
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1964
Place of death Bassum