Franz Anton Basch

Franz Anton Basch, 1944

Franz Anton Basch

Franz Anton Basch , Hungarian Ferenc Antal Basch (born July 13, 1901 in Zurich ; † April 27, 1946 in Budapest ), National Socialist German politician and chairman of the People's League of Germans in Hungary and " ethnic group leader " of the Germans in Hungary .

life and work

Basch grew up in the Banat as the son of a Swabian and a Swiss woman. Between 1920 and 1924 he studied German with a scholarship at the Loránd Eötvös University . He was a student of Jakob Bleyer , the conservative Catholic chairman of the Hungarian German National Education Association . In 1925 he was appointed secretary of the German Cultural Society in Hungary. During this time he published much of his work. After he had adopted extreme National Socialist views from 1930, he resigned from the secretary position in 1934. After Bleyer's death in 1933, Basch became general secretary of the Volksbildungsverein under the chairmanship of the liberal-legitimist Gustav Gratz . Triggered by internal disputes, Basch founded and headed the National Socialist League of Germans in Hungary from 1938 .

In 1940 he was appointed "ethnic group leader" of the Germans in Hungary by Chancellor Adolf Hitler . As a result of the Vienna arbitration award in 1940 and the Yugoslavia campaign in 1941 , Hungary was able to enlarge its territory, whereby “ ethnic German ” groups already trained there fell under Basch's sovereignty.

At the end of 1944, Franz Anton Basch fled to Germany, but was extradited to Hungary in 1945 and sentenced to death by the National Council of the People's Courts in Budapest on March 27, 1946 for " crimes hostile to war and the people" and executed there on April 26 .

Publications

• On the people's and people's movement question in the Banat. Kultura, Munich 1936.
• Preyer Nepomuk János egy elfeledett Bánáti német író. Pfeiffer, Budapest 1927.
• The Germanness in Hungary. Dr. FA Pfeiffer, Munich 1926.
• The German in Hungary. J. Beltz, Langensalza 1934.

literature

• Ladislaus Buzás:  Basch, Franz Anton. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 617 ( digitized version ).
• Friedrich Spiegel-Schmidt: Basch, Franz Anton . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 1. Munich 1974, pp. 145 f.
• Friedrich Spiegel-Schmidt, Lóránt Tilkovszky, Gerhard Seewann , Norbert Spannenberger : files of the people's court trial against Franz A. Basch, ethnic group leader of the Germans in Hungary, Budapest 1945/46 (= book series of the Southeast German Historical Commission ; Volume 37). Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-486-56485-4 , 549 pp.

Web links

Commons : Franz Anton Basch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Franz Anton Basch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Franz Anton Basch in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• mek.oszk.hu Basch Ferenc Antal. In: Magyar Életrajzi Lexicon, in Hungarian