Erich Gritzbach

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Erich Gritzbach

Erich Gritzbach (born July 12, 1896 in Forst (Lausitz) , † March 29, 1968 in Erlangen ) was a German civil servant and SS leader . Gritzbach was best known as the "right hand" of the Nazi politician Hermann Göring .

Live and act

In his youth Gritzbach attended secondary school in Forst in Lusatia. On the occasion of the outbreak of the First World War , Gritzbach joined the Prussian Army on August 1, 1914, with which he fought on the Western Front until 1918. During the war he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve and was awarded the Iron Cross of both classes and the Austrian Medal of Bravery.

On April 19, 1919, Gritzbach passed the final examination at the Königstädtische Oberrealschule in Berlin. He then signed up as a volunteer for the Eastern Border Guard, with whom he took part in the border guard battles in Silesia until May 1920 as a company commander of a machine gun company in the 9th Reichswehr Rifle Regiment and later in the 93rd Reichswehr Rifle Regiment.

From 1920 to 1922 Gritzbach practically worked as a management assistant in the Association of German Machine Tool Builders. At the same time he studied law and political science at the University of Berlin and the University of Tübingen. In 1924 he submitted his dissertation for Dr sc. Pol. at the University of Tübingen (with a doctoral degree on February 16, 1924). In the early 1920s, Gritzbach was politically active in the German National People's Party (DNVP), which he left around 1924.

On April 17, 1924, Gritzbach joined the Reich Central Office for Homeland Service . There he was appointed to the government council on January 1, 1931 . On July 20, 1932, he was appointed to the Prussian State Ministry and promoted to Ministerialrat on October 1, 1932 .

time of the nationalsocialism

In February 1933, immediately after Hitler took office , Gritzbach was appointed head of the personal office of the new Reich Commissioner for Prussia (de facto Prussian Prime Minister) Franz von Papen . He retained this position when Papen had to hand over his post a few weeks later - in April 1933 - to Hermann Göring, who from then on served as Prussian Prime Minister. With the official appointment date of March 24, 1934, Gritzbach was appointed personal advisor to Göring as Prime Minister and - as successor to Martin Sommerfeldt - as press chief of the Prussian State Ministry.

From 1933 to 1945, Gritzbach, who joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 (membership number 3,473,289), practically acted as the “right hand” of Göring, whose special trust he enjoyed: As head of the ministerial office in the Prussian State Ministry (1933 to 1938) and "Chief of the Staff Office of the Prussian Prime Minister" or the "Staff Office of the Reichsmarschall des Deutschen Reiches" (1936 to 1945), Gritzbach was responsible for the organizational and secretarial administration of Göring's official business as Prussian Prime Minister. In addition, he acted as chief commissioner for the Olympic Games from 1933 to 1936 : In this capacity, he was responsible for the organizational preparation of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin .

At Göring's instigation, Gritzbach, who was promoted to ministerial director in 1936, had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 and of the Schutzstaffel (SS), in which in 1938 he reached the rank of SS Oberführer . From 1938 he was on the staff of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and also a member of the Prussian State Council .

Around 1937, Gritzbach wrote a biography ( Hermann Göring. Werk und Mensch ) about him on behalf of Göring . This work, published in 1938, is largely hagiographic in nature. In total, Gritzbach's book appeared in more than twenty editions and sold several hundred thousand copies, with Göring claiming the majority of the royalty for himself.

Since 1939 there have been signs of a hesitant inner distancing of Gritzbach from the Nazi state. However, this never went so far that Gritzbach, who ultimately served the regime to the end, actively positioned himself against it: So he left it with a few lax attempts to get Göring to get Hitler to do so in foreign policy steer risky course. In addition, since 1939 he intensified his contacts with conservative regime critics such as Erwin Planck . The background of Gritzbach's cautious (but not opposing) departure from the National Socialist system was primarily a skeptical assessment of the ability of the German Reich to successfully end a new war against the other major European powers - which was beginning to emerge at this time - and the endeavor to position or secure oneself for a conservative post-Hitler regime. Accordingly, according to the sources, Gritzbach - whom the Planck biographer Pufendorf considered "one of the more sensible people" in the government at the time - was by no means based on moral concerns about National Socialist ideology and politics or on the basis of fundamental rejection in his distancing from the Nazi system a policy of military aggression, but rather a realistic assessment of the situation and the possibilities of the German state determined him to do so. That is to say, Gritzbach's concerns about the foreign policy course of the German government were primarily determined by the insight that in the long term this course would ultimately culminate in a complete catastrophe in the form of a complete state collapse, whereby the decisive factor was the fear that the great catastrophe that is likely to occur would, if there was no change in government and / or its course, would probably also have fatal consequences for his personal fate (as a high-ranking personality within the existing system).

Accordingly, according to the diaries of the diplomat Ulrich von Hassel , Gritzbach declared to the Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz in November 1939 that he thought Hitler was “simply insane” and that he had to be “turned off”. According to the Goebbels diaries, the dictator himself also passed “the sharpest judgments” about Gritzbach.

Against this background, literature sees above all opportunism, specifically the ambition to make a "great" personal career, and not an inner penetration and identification of or with the Nazi ideology as the main motive from which Gritzbach made himself available to the National Socialists and worked in the Nazi state.

post war period

After the end of the Second World War , Gritzbach was briefly interned by the Americans . Around 1947 he got a job as office manager in the press secretariat of North German Iron and Steel Control in Düsseldorf, headed by Hugo Scholz . Scholz and Gritzbach already knew each other from 1932: At that time, Scholz, as head of a press office jointly managed by Otto Wolff and the Flick Group, worked closely with the Reich Commissioner in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Bracht, to whom Gritzbach was assigned as a speaker. A newspaper note from the 1950s also claimed that Gritzbach was employed by the International Coal and Steel Community at the time .

Later he lived in Gritzbach, who as a former senior civil servant received a pension of more than 1500 DM per month, for a few years in Martinsweiler in the Black Forest .

promotion

Promotions in government service :

  • January 1, 1931: Councilor
  • October 1, 1932: Ministerial Counselor
  • 1936: Ministerial Director

Promotions in the SS :

  • September 25, 1933: SS Untersturmführer
  • 4th July 1934: SS-Obersturmführer
  • January 1, 1935: SS-Hauptsturmführer
  • April 20, 1936: SS-Sturmbannführer
  • November 9, 1936: SS-Obersturmbannführer
  • November 9, 1937: SS Standartenführer
  • April 20, 1938: SS-Oberführer

Archival tradition

A ruling chamber file on Gritzbach is kept in the Berlin State Archives (B. Rep. 031-02-01 / 12.572). The Federal Archives contain another ruling chamber file (Z42 No. 4926) as well as various personal files in the holdings of the former Berlin Document Center (SS personal files, RS files, RK files).

Fonts

  • The pricing in the German machine tool industry , sl 1924. (Dissertation)
  • Hermann Goering. Werk und Mensch , Eher, Munich 1938.
  • Hermann Goering. Speeches and essays . Rather, Munich 1938.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reiner Orth: The official seat of the opposition. Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor, Cologne 2015, p. 668.
  2. ^ SS-Personalhauptamt: Seniority list of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel, status January 30, 1940, serial number 365
  3. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 201.
  4. ↑ Bernhard Gotto: Information and Communication - The leadership of the Flick Group 1933-1945. In Johannes Bähr , Axel Drecoll, Bernhard Gotto, Kim Christian Priemel, Harald Wixforth: The Flick Group in the Third Reich . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, published by the Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin on behalf of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation , Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58683-1 . P. 264.
  5. ↑ Astrid von Pufendorf: The Plancks: a family between patriotism and resistance , 2006, p. 385.
  6. ↑ Ulrich von Hassel: The Hassel diaries. 1938-1944. Notes from the other Germany , edited by Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertingen, Siedler, Berlin 1988, p. 136.
  7. ↑ Elke Fröhlich: Die Gobbels Tagebücher , Part II (Dictates), Vol. 14 (October to December 1944), p. 570.
  8. ↑ On the collaboration between Scholz and Bracht / Gritzbach 1932, cf. Rheinhard Neebe: The Republic of Weimar 1918–1933. Democracy without Democrats? , 1987, p. 111; Ulrike Hörster-Philipps: In the shadow of big money: Flick group and politics. Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Federal Republic , 1985, p. 101.
personal data
SURNAME Gritzbach, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Nazi functionary and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Forst (Lausitz)
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1968
Place of death gain