Franz Mueller-Darß

Franz Mueller-Darß (born April 29, 1890 in Lindau , Northeim district ; † June 18, 1976 in Lenggries , Upper Bavaria ; actually Franz Mueller ) was a German forester . He dealt with the use of dogs in the army and forestry, which is why he was also called "dog miller" in specialist circles. As a high-ranking SS member, he was part of the full-time SS-Standartenführer in Heinrich Himmler's staff. He was responsible for deploying concentration camp prisoners on the Darß . Within the Schutzstaffel he reached the rank of SS Brigadefinder and Major General of the Waffen SS .

Live and act

Franz Mueller was born on April 29, 1890 as the son of the future forester Hans Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller (1857-1924) in Lindau. In 1909 he passed his Abitur at a cadet institute in Berlin and did his military service with the local cadet corps . He then completed an apprenticeship in the Menz forestry department at Stechlinsee in the Mark Brandenburg region and then studied forestry in Eberswalde and Munich . He took part in the First World War as a war volunteer for four years. As a lieutenant, he founded the first war dog handler school (KHuS) in Hubertsville, Lorraine on September 1, 1916 and then headed the Central Office of War Dogs until 1918. At the front, instead of reporting dogs , he now used reporting dogs because they made faster progress.

After the end of the war, Mueller continued his forestry career and passed his state examination as a forest assessor in 1918 . In 1919 he was initially employed in Silesia as a district assistant in the Reinerz Forestry Office in the Glatzer Bergland and then applied to head the Kreuzburgerhütte Forestry Office .

In 1923 he was transferred to the Born auf dem Darß forestry office as head forester to support the sick forester Wendt , and in 1925 he took over its management. He moved into the same building in which his well-known predecessor Ferdinand von Raesfeld had already worked. Like him, Mueller also devoted himself to hunting topics, but especially the training of hunting dogs , for which he and Konrad Most published the standard work Instructions for Training and Driving Hunting Dogs in 1934 . In Born he also set up the "service dog training and research institute". He had his favorite dog set a stone with the inscription "As always, one step ahead of his master in life."

In jagdlicher respect Mueller led the Hege ideas of his predecessors Raesfeld and Wendt continued. In order to “start” the Darß deer population , he crossed Rominter blood. In 1931 he, his friend Bengt Berg and Dr. Lutz Heck opened a wildlife park on the Darß. These efforts can be seen in connection with Mueller's strong nature conservation efforts, which he propagated in a number of articles in the early 1930s . When Mueller, in one of these articles, which appeared in numerous newspapers, described Darß as a nature reserve and suggested the establishment of a large nature reserve , this aroused displeasure among his superiors, but also the interest of Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring , who on October 3, 1934 who Darß arrived and explored the peninsula under Mueller's guidance. The forester pursued his project further by buying up considerable areas and rounding off the Darß. Silvicultural he sought diversity and species richness and designed the forest enhanced by forestry aesthetic point of view in the sense Heinrich von Salischs . On June 11, 1941, the Born Forestry Office was declared a state hunting ground by decree and Mueller often led Göring and many other high-ranking guests on the hunt. On the instructions of the Reichsjägermeister, a bison displacer was also established on the Darß . During Mueller's tenure, the Biological Research Institute was set up in Born, and the zoologist Heinz Brüll took over the management.

For the forest workers , Mueller had the typical Darß reed -roof houses built, which were perfectly fitted into the landscape. The forest workers could also buy these buildings if they were interested. Mueller's own hunting lodge was later moved to Prerow . It is now privately owned.

Professional advancement in the SS

Mueller made many contacts with important personalities from politics, business and art. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he immediately began to get actively involved in their organizations. He joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 (membership number 2.225.286) and was accepted into the SS on September 18, 1936 (membership number 277.284). When more than 200 prisoners from the Neuengamme and Ravensbrück concentration camps had to work on the Darß and in Zingst from 1940 to 1945 , Mueller-Darß was responsible for their deployment. The “Borner Hof” restaurant acted as an external warehouse. As a result of such activities, the forester rose continuously to the position of SS officer and was called up full-time as SS-Standartenführer in Heinrich Himmler's personal staff in July 1942 and promoted to SS-Oberführer on April 20, 1944 . In Himmler's staff, Mueller was "agent for service dogs" and "agent for forestry and hunting". In addition to his job, Mueller took over the management of the main department DI / 6 "Protection and Search Dogs" in the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) of the SS, which was also responsible for the use of dogs in concentration camps . His representative in this function was August Harbaum . After all, the entire organization for the procurement and training of the entire war dog sector - including reporting dogs, medical dogs, dogs for the blind and partisan dogs - was in Mueller's hands. Even before his full-time work for the SS, Mueller had advised Himmler in March 1942 on how the police and the SS could increase their influence in the "Association of Dog Owners". For the decision to integrate the dog experimentation system into the SS, he was given the rank of SS Brigade Leader and Major General of the Waffen-SS at the end of 1944, and in the same year he was given the name Mueller-Darß by decree in order to avoid confusion with leaders of the same name. From the end of October 1944, Mueller-Darß also headed the newly established Office W IX (Forests) in the WVHA. Even in the last days of the war of the Second World War he was still present on the Darß and waited for the arrival of the Red Army for weeks in his forest hideout, a bunker of the Waffen SS , made until he succeeded, in a boat across the lagoon in To flee towards Hamburg .

After the Second World War

After his release from British captivity, Mueller-Darß could not return to the forest administration due to his past. In the following years he worked in a wide variety of fields, including for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The events in the grounds of the concentration camp on the Darß and Mueller-Darß 'role in it have never been legally dealt with.

He had recorded his experiences on the Darß, especially during the war years, in diaries, which he was initially only able to publish in a Swiss publishing house under the title No place to stay in 1949. A Dutch translation followed in 1952, and the writer Wolfgang Frank used it to create the novel-like biography Verklungen Horn und Geläut. The forest master chronicle. To compose A Life with Forests and Dogs (1959).

Mueller was married three times, first to Ilona (née Linde ), with whom he had a son, and then to Clara (née von Faber ) in his second marriage, and this connection resulted in another son and daughter. In 1954 he married Christa (née von Bodien ).

Forester Franz Mueller-Darß died at the age of 86 on June 18, 1976 in Lenggries, Upper Bavaria.

Fonts

• together with Konrad Most: Instructions for training and guiding the hunting dog . Kameradschaft, Berlin 1934 (2nd, completely revised edition under the title Training and Guiding the Hunting Dog . Kynos Verlag , Mürlenbach 1988, ISBN 3-924008-35-3 )
• The use of the hunting dog after the shot , (Journal for Dog Research: NF; 12.4), Leipzig 1938
• No place to stay. Diary , Zurich 1949 (current edition: No place to stay . Neumann-Neudamm, Melsungen 2006, ISBN 3-7888-1052-1 )

literature

• Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor and Extermination. The economic empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933-1945. Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-78245-2 .
• Manfred Wetzel: Franz-Mueller-Darß . In: Forest biographies from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Life and work for forestry (1566-1999) . Forest Association Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schwerin 1999, pp. 185–188
• Wolfgang Frank : Horn and peal fade away. The chronicle of forester Franz Mueller-Darß . 17th edition. BLV, Munich, Vienna and Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-405-13176-6 , 435 pages (novel-like biography)
• Andreas Gautschi : The Reichsjägermeister. Facts and legends about Hermann Göring (3rd edition). Nimrod, Hanstedt 2000, ISBN 3-927848-20-4 (also contains biographical details about Franz Mueller, especially pp. 79/80 and 181)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manfred Wetzel: Franz-Mueller-Darß . In: Forest biographies from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Life and work for forestry (1566-1999) . Forest Association Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schwerin 1999, pp. 185–188
2. ^ Friedrich Borkenhagen (compiler): Deutsche Förster-Chronik . Wirtschafts- und Forstverlag Euting, Strassenhaus 1977, pp. 152–153.
3. ^ ^{A b c} Manfred Wetzel: Franz-Mueller-Darß . In: Forest biographies from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . Schwerin 1999, p. 187.
4. ^ ^{A b c} Manfred Wetzel: Franz-Mueller-Darß . In: Forest biographies from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . Schwerin 1999, p. 186
5. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Der Reichsjägermeister , 3rd edition, Hanstedt 2000, pp. 79-80.
6. ↑ "Everyone knew about the camps". Wolfgang Benz in conversation with Evelyn Schaffernicht. Ostsee-Zeitung from June 30th / 1. July 2007 (pdf; 728 kB)
7. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Der Reichsjägermeister , 3rd edition, Hanstedt 2000, p. 79.
8. ↑ Bertrand Perz : “'(...) must be brought up to be raging beasts'. The Use of Dogs for Guarding in Concentration Camps ”, in: Dachauer Hefte , Volume 12 (1996), ISSN  0257-9472 , pp. 139–158, here p. 143.
9. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 162
10. ^ Friedrich Borkenhagen (compiler): Deutsche Förster-Chronik . Wirtschafts- und Forstverlag Euting, Strassenhaus 1977, p. 153.
11. ↑ Heinrich Himmler's service calendar: 1941/42. (edited, commented and introduced by Peter Witte on behalf of the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg). Christians, Hamburg 1999 ISBN 3-7672-1329-X , pp. 368, 704.
12. ^ Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor and Destruction: The Economic Empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS Economic Administration Main Office 1933-1945. Paderborn 2001, p. 485.
13. ↑ Waldemar Martens: Where eagles still hunt and storms ... Three decades of forester and hunter on the Darß . 5th edition. Neumann-Neudamm, Melsungen 2004, ISBN 3-7888-1012-2 , p. 104.
14. ↑ "Everyone knew about the camps" . Wolfgang Benz in conversation with Evelyn Schaffernicht. Ostsee-Zeitung from June 30th / 1. July 2007 (pdf; 728 kB)