Eggert Shipowner

Eggert Reeder's grave in the Hochstrasse Reformed Cemetery in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.

Eggert Reeder (born July 22, 1894 in Poppenbüll ; † November 22, 1959 in Wuppertal ) was a German administrative lawyer, district president of several administrative districts and head of the military administration in occupied Belgium and northern France during World War II . In the SS he achieved the rank of SS group leader .

Life

After his school days, Reeder was initially employed as a soldier on the Eastern Front and the Western Front during the First World War . After the end of the war he began to study law and political science at the University of Halle in 1918 . He was there with the Corps Palaiomarchia active. He joined the Freikorps " Freiwilliges Landesjägerkorps " under Major General Georg Ludwig Rudolf Maercker and was involved in the brutal suppression of the strike riots in Halle in February 1919 , which resulted in many as a result of the November revolutions of 1918 and the abdication of the monarchy during the founding period of the Weimar Republic Cities in Germany.

After a further study visit at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel , Reeder was accepted as a court trainee in 1921 and from 1922 as a government trainee in the district government in Schleswig . There followed from 1924 to 1929 years as assessor at the district office of the Lennep district and with the Cologne district government . Here he was finally promoted to the government council on August 11, 1929 .

After the Nazi seizure of power , Reeder joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1.998.009) and the SS (SS number 340.776) on May 1, 1933 . As early as May 5, 1933, he was appointed District Administrator of Flensburg and only two months later, District President of the District of Aachen , where he made contact with the various circles of Western research at the time. After three years, on July 9, 1936, Reeder became the district president of the administrative district of Cologne and was also assigned the administrative district of Düsseldorf at the beginning of the Second World War . From the Belgian King Leopold III. he was honored on May 20, 1938 for his services to the Western contacts as " Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown " and was made an honorary SS member on July 1 of the same year.

Shipowner took part in the preparations for the occupation, was appointed head of the administrative staff in the military administration in Belgium and northern France under Colonel General Alexander von Falkenhausen at the beginning of the western campaign in May 1940 and was thus responsible for all economic and political questions. For the time being, he had to transfer his office in Düsseldorf to his Vice President Wilhelm Burandt , but kept his position in Cologne.

When Burandt was transferred to the management staff for the expansion of the west wall , from 1943 onwards, shipowners had to manage the government office in Düsseldorf on a provisional basis, alongside his other positions. In addition, from July to September 1944 he was the deputy of the new Reich Commissioner for the occupied Belgian and northern French territories, the former Cologne-Aachen Gauleiter Josef Grohé , who in turn succeeded Falkenhausen, who was deposed in July 1944.

On April 18, 1945, Reeder was arrested in Belgium and in the summer of 1947 was initially a prisoner of war and then in Belgian custody. In a trial on March 9, 1951 in Brussels, Reeder, defended by the lawyer Ernst Achenbach , was sentenced to eight years of forced labor for being responsible for the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews , but not for their murder in Auschwitz. After a hearing with Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on July 9, 1951 , he was pardoned and retired on July 30, 1951 at his own request. In the following time he took on high positions in the Association of Taxpayers Germany .

Head of Military Administration for Belgium and Northern France

As head of administration for Belgium and northern France, Reeder worked primarily with the Catholic North Flemings and the business elites within the framework of the Flemish policy of the German Empire , whereas his superior Falkenhausen sympathized more with the royal family and the nobility. Both pursued a rather moderate policy and, in accordance with the international legal provisions of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations of October 18, 1907, tried to reach consensus with the political and administrative structures already in place on the ground. In doing so, they relied on both a Belgian parallel administration, made up of a majority of collaborators , since the elected Belgian government was in exile in London, and a strengthened German labor front , since the critical Belgian Labor Party had been dissolved by Henri de Man in 1940 .

The head of administration of the shipowner was also subordinate to the foreign exchange protection command (DSK), which regulated the foreign exchange of goods, payments, foreign exchange and capital and often had difficulties with the shipowner. This authority was characterized by a radical anti-Semitic approach as well as provocative attempts at profiling and carried out, for example, in secret agreement with the SS security service (SD) without the knowledge of Reeder's raids on the diamond exchange in Antwerp , which led to a massive escape of the wealthy and predominantly led Jewish traders. For the first time, Reeder saw himself snubbed and undermined in his administration.

Falkenhausen and Reeder were still responsible for the gradual registration of the Jews, the Aryanization of their property ( de-Jewification ) and mass deportations to the extermination camps in the east, although Falkenhausen himself was initially an opponent of this persecution of Jews . As a result, the Jews were largely spared in the first year of the war and synagogues and schools were still open. Because of this hesitant attitude, Falkenhausen had to cede police powers in matters of "Jewish affairs" to Reinhard Heydrich's SD in 1940, which Reeder wanted to prevent but was also unable to enforce. After the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” was also to be implemented in Belgium . The meticulous shipowner, meanwhile promoted to SS brigade leader, was fully aware of the problem and tried to prevent the threatening conflict with the SS leadership by initially choosing a differentiated solution for the mass deportations .

Reeder decided, in agreement with Falkenhausen, that Jews of Belgian nationality (approx. 6% of approximately 70,000 to 80,000 of all Jews living in Belgium) should initially be spared and that immigrant, now stateless foreign Jews should be deported to Auschwitz instead . Since around 10,000 to 20,000 of these stateless Jews were able to flee Belgium at that time, Reeder and Falkenhausen were still responsible for the removal of around 30,000 Jews, although it must have been clear to him, based on his position, that these Jews were killed there should be. The various sources differ in the three-digit range in terms of the numbers, but the order of magnitude is approximately comparable. Shipowner, promoted to SS-Gruppenführer in November 1943 , was in lively exchange and in consultation with both the administrative director of France Werner Best and the relevant SS offices of the German Reich as well as the chief of the Waffen-SS Heinrich Himmler . The latter was Reeder, although he was not without controversy because of his constant struggle with Himmler for the domination of the police apparatus in Belgium, as a loyal and vigilant chief administrator, even after shipowner superior Falkenhausen because of its connections to the German resistance shortly before the attack on 20 July 1944 of its Commands was relieved.

Reeder's efforts to maintain existing administrative structures and business relationships with Belgium and northern France also during the German occupation, as well as his initial, albeit incomplete, efforts to postpone the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” in Belgium and, as described above, to have spared Belgian Jews, were He was credited with a milder judgment at his trial before the Brussels War Council in 1951. He was sentenced to 12 years of forced labor for his involvement in hostage shootings, the deportation of Jews and the forced labor program, and was pardoned a short time later.

literature

• Eggert Reeder / Walter Hailer: The military administration in Belgium and Northern France , in Reich, Volksordnung, Lebensraum Zeitschrift für Volkische Verfassungs und Verwaltung, No. 6, 1943, pp. 7–52
• Max Rehm: Eggert Reeder, July 22, 1894–22. November 1959, President of the Prussian government, head of the military administration, citizen , Nürtingen (self-published), 1976
• Albert De Jonghe, De strijd Himmler - Shipowner om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel , Brussel, 1978–1984
• Katrin-Isabel Krähling: The Foreign Exchange Protection Command, Belgium , 1940–1944; Master's thesis, Konstanz, 2005
• Andreas Nielen: The occupation of Belgium and France (1940–1944) and the archives of the German military administration : [1]
• Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: The Destruction of the Jews of Belgium (engl.)
• Herwig Jacquemyns: Belgie in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Deel 2, - Een bezet Land; Chapter 4: Een paradoxaal Driespan (von Falkenhausen / von Harbou / Reeder); 2008: [2] (ndl.)
• Insa Meinen: The Shoah in Belgium , WBG, Darmstadt 2009 ISBN 978-3-534-22158-5

Web links

• Short biography
• Robert Becker: The regional presidents in Cologne during the Nazi era , Chapter Eggert Reder, pp. 32–42 ( Memento from June 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gerd de Coster, Dirk Martin: The development and digitization of criminal prosecution files from the post-war period , Francia - Research on West European History, 2012, vol. 39, p. 387