Franz Hofer (Gauleiter)
Franz Hofer (born November 27, 1902 in Hofgastein , † February 18, 1975 in Mülheim an der Ruhr ) was NSDAP Gauleiter of Tyrol-Vorarlberg during the Nazi era .
Life
The son of a Hofgastein hotel owner attended primary and secondary school in Innsbruck between 1909 and 1919 and began his professional career as a self-employed businessman in 1922 . In September 1931 he joined the NSDAP .
He quickly made a career. In April 1932 he became district leader and in July 1932 deputy Gauleiter of Tyrol. On November 27, 1932 he was promoted to Gauleiter of Tyrol.
Hofer was arrested in June 1933 for working for the NSDAP , which was banned in Austria , and sentenced to two years in prison in a Tyrolean court. On August 30, 1933, four armed SA men violently broke into Hofer's prison cell and freed him. He was shot on the run. He escaped to Italy and a few weeks later gave a speech from his stretcher at the Nuremberg Rally in September 1933. In 1935 he took on German citizenship . In the Reichstag election on March 29, 1936, he ran unsuccessfully in Munich.
At the beginning of 1937 he became the head of the " Political Heads and Members' Meeting Point for Austrians in Germany" with a job in Berlin .
After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Reich , on May 24, 1938, he was again given the command of the Tyrol-Vorarlberg district . In the same year he received the function of Ministerialrat and the rank of NSKK -Obergruppenführer. On September 1, 1940, Hofer was also appointed Reich Governor of Tyrol-Vorarlberg.
After Italy fell off the axis , Hofer was appointed Supreme Commissioner in the " Operational Zone Alpine Foreland " (consisting of the Gau Tirol-Vorarlberg and the neighboring Italian provinces of Bolzano , Trient and Belluno ) on September 10, 1943 .
In November 1944, Hofer proposed in a memorandum to Adolf Hitler that a core area in the Alps should be developed into the last bastion of the Reich, the Alpine fortress , and that the "Bergland Tirol" should become the "Reichsfestung" and the "southern bulwark of the Germanic habitat" close. Among other things, it was planned to pull together a large number of English and American prisoners of war to prevent Allied bombing (in fact, on April 30, 1945, prominent concentration camp prisoners were imprisoned at Lake Braies in South Tyrol for this purpose). Presumably Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann did not present this letter to his “Führer” until the spring of 1945, so that Hofer was not invited to a lecture in the Berlin Führerbunker until April 12, 1945 . Hitler - still convinced of the final victory 18 days before his suicide - approved Hofer's proposal and appointed him Reich Defense Commissioner of the Alpine Fortress one day before his death on April 29, 1945 .
The alpine fortress remained a phantom. At the instigation of the captured American secret service agent Friedrich (Fred) Mayer , Hofer handed Innsbruck to the Americans as an open, undefended city. On May 6, 1945, Hofer was arrested by the US Army in Hall in Tirol and imprisoned in an internment camp . In 1948 he managed to escape to Germany . Here he continued his learned work as a businessman from 1949 in Mülheim an der Ruhr , initially under a false name, from 1954 under his real name. After his natural death, he was buried in the Mülheim main cemetery.
In Austria Hofer was sentenced to death in absentia in June 1949; In July 1953, a Munich Chamber of Appeal confirmed the verdict of 3 years and 5 months in a labor camp. In a press interview from this time, Hofer had identified himself as an unbroken National Socialist .
On June 6, 1950, as a people's court, the Innsbruck Regional Court declared all of Franz Hofer's assets to be forfeited in favor of the Republic of Austria. This was justified with the accusation of high treason , which was seen in the fact that Hofer, as a leading member of the NSDAP, had advocated and pursued the annexation of Austria to the German Reich.
A preliminary investigation into his involvement in the murder of the sick ( Action T4 ) was initiated, but closed in 1963.
In 1964 an Austrian court dismissed the action brought by Hofer's children to the return of the Lachhof near Hall . This was originally bought by the Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhand-Ges.mbH as replacement property for South Tyrol resettlers from Lanfranco Count Sforza and his wife Maria Antoinette; Hofer, for his part, bought it from Deutsche Umsiedlungs Ges.mbH in October 1943 and lived there with his family until the end of the war.
literature
- Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
- Erich Stockhorst: 5000 people. Who was what in the 3rd Reich . Arndt, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-116-1 (unchanged reprint of the first edition from 1967).
- Sarah Scheitnagel: Gauleiter Franz Hofer , in: Thomas Albrich (Ed.): The perpetrators of the 1938 Jewish pogrom in Innsbruck. Haymon, Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-7099-7242-7 (table of contents)
Web links
- Franz Hofer in the database of members of the Reichstag
- Newspaper article about Franz Hofer in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Baptismal Register - TFBXI | Bad Hofgastein | Salzburg, rk. Diocese | Austria | Matricula Online. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
- ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 264.
- ↑ So already in the Bozner Tagblatt , edition of September 13, 1944, p. 3 ( PDF ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hofer, Franz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian politician (NSDAP), MdR, Gauleiter of Tyrol and Vorarlberg |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 27, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hofgastein |
| DATE OF DEATH | 18th February 1975 |
| Place of death | Mülheim an der Ruhr |