Franz May (politician, 1903)

Franz May

Franz May (born January 24, 1903 in Niedergrund , † November 28, 1969 in Wasserburg am Inn ) was a Sudeten German politician ( NSDAP ) and SA leader .

Live and act

After attending elementary school and community school in Niedergrund from 1908 to 1918, Franz May learned the gardening trade . In addition, he was trained from 1918 to 1921 at the higher horticultural school in Eisgrub . He then earned his living as a gardener in Thuringia . He later studied biology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg . He then founded his own nursery.

In the 1920s, May began to get involved in circles of the extreme political right. At first he belonged to the Bund der Deutschen, whose federal youth leader he was temporarily, and the DNSAP . In 1933 he finally joined the Sudeten German Home Front, the predecessor of the Sudeten German Party (SdP), in which he was appointed representative for Northern Bohemia . In February 1934 he was elected head of the Bohemian-Leipa constituency. From May 19, 1935 he was a member of the SdP in the Czech Parliament. In June 1936 he became a member of the main leadership of the SdP. On April 20, 1937, he was assassinated in Niedergrund, but he survived it unscathed. Until October 1938 May was a leader in the voluntary protection service of the SdP , a militia-like organization of the SdP based on the SA. From April 1938 until the end of the Nazi regime in spring 1945, May was a member of the National Socialist Reichstag for the Sudetenland .

On September 19, 1938, May was entrusted with the leadership of the Saxon group of the Sudeten German Freikorps during the Sudeten crisis , before he was proposed as leader of the Sudeten German SA by SA Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Schepmann on October 3, 1938 after the German annexation of the Sudeten areas was later commissioned with the preparatory work for the establishment of the Sudeten German SA. Finally, on October 15, 1938, May was entrusted with the leadership of the SA group Sudeten and appointed group leader . He officially joined the SA on October 10, 1938. On November 5, 1938, he was accepted into the NSDAP and appointed as the representative for the district structure of the NSDAP in the Rumburg district in the Sudetenland . May was an honorary judge at the People's Court in the following years and was at times during the Second World War as First Lieutenant d. R. in the war effort. On September 29, 1944 he was the representative of the Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner for the formation of the Volkssturm in the Gau Sudetenland. From October 1944 to 1945 May was Gaustabsführer of the Volkssturm in the Gau Sudetenland. In the SA he was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer.

After the end of National Socialist rule, May 1945 was arrested by the Czech authorities as a forester's assistant under the code name Franz Martin and transferred to a Czech internment camp. After his release from prison he was expelled to the Federal Republic of Germany , where he worked as a city gardener in Waldkraiburg for a while. There he was district chairman of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft in the last year of his life , after having been district chairman of the Association of Expellees there for a while.

literature

• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform. The members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the ethnic and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924. Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
• Joachim Lilla: The representation of the “Reichsgau Sudetenland” and the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in the Grossdeutsche Reichstag . In: Bohemia . Journal for the History and Culture of the Bohemian Lands , Volume 40, Issue 2, 1999, pp. 463f.

Web links

• Franz May in the database of members of the Reichstag